George Orwell in his book Animal Farm famously parodied the vicious use of language in communist states. 'All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others' was one of his memorable depictions of how the absurdities of language not only reflect but also predicate evil.
The demise of the Soviet Union is viewed as confirmation that capitalism is superior morally and economically. But materialist and illogical use of language is evident in capitalism, too. In communist states language became a tool of state oppression, in capitalism it is a tool of money. But there are many similarities in the language use, especially in the tendency towards dehumanisation.
This is most evident in the disciplines of economics and management. Consider, for instance, the use of the word 'capital'. Capital, whether it is in the form of shares, bonds, cash or bank debt, is the formalisation of a transaction. Transactions are agreements about value and obligation.
Can agreements 'flow'? One would think not. But economists routinely talk about 'capital flows'. A metaphor is slyly created whereby capital is depicted as some kind of fluid that oozes around the world. Then the pseudo-scientists in economics can analyse how that fluid will behave. Instead of capital being correctly seen as something created by people, it is turned into a sort of natural physical phenomena. People are shifted on to the margin in a way that is reminiscent of communism's use of the idea of historical determinism.
Such use of false metaphors about capital almost led to the destruction of the monetary system. By creating a metaphor of money as a kind of fluid, proponents of economic libertarianism were able, over a period of about two and a half decades, to mount an argument that there was a need to 'deregulate' the financial markets.
This is nonsense. Capital relies on rules to exist. If one buys shares, there are rules about how they are traded, valued, and so on. The same applies to any financial transaction. They are, by their nature, rule based, and heavily regulated. It is not possible to 'deregulate' regulations.
But because the free marketeers succeeded in creating a metaphor that capital is a kind of fluid, then it is possible to sound reasonable by saying that the fluid should be deregulated. An image is conjured up whereby barriers (regulations) are removed, allowing the fluid to flow to where it naturally should.
This is rubbish. In reality there was a shift from governments setting the rules of money to the traders setting the rules of money, and this almost brought down the entire monetary system of the world.
According to US Congressman Paul Kanjorski, in September 2008 some $500 billion went out of US money markets in one morning in what was an electronic run on the banks. Treasury threw money at the problem — the 'deregulation' solution. When it was realised this would not work, Treasury decided to aggressively regulate. It shut down every money market account temporarily and underwrote bank deposits up to $250,000.
That is, Treasury said: 'These are the rules now.' Had they not done so, according to Kanjorski, $6 trillion would have gone out of the US banking system by the end of the day (where to is not exactly clear). It would have spelt the end of the American banking system and destroyed the monetary system of the world.
That is what 'deregulation' of financial systems can bring. The false metaphor is not just a linguistic oddity, it is downright dangerous. Neither has the danger gone away, because the appalling metaphor has not gone away. Impoverished language use puts people in thrall to their own artefacts, much as communism did.
The same sort of barbarous language appears in management thinking. Take the phrase 'human resources'. Now, humans are not valuable as a 'resource' (they are mostly water, plus a few trace elements). Humans act, resources are acted upon. But the metaphor makes it easier to dehumanise staff. Instead of having to consider how self-aware people might behave, in all their complexity, employees can be seen as objects.
This type of dehumanisation is rampant in management language. When managers speak of 'outsourcing their core competencies across the full spectrum of capability offerings' they are not merely speaking nonsense. They are treating people as objects to be manipulated.
Orwell once commented that if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. It is worse than that. The corruption of thought and language leads to corrupt action. Writing in 1946, he said:
Writing at its worst does not consist in picking out words for the sake of their meaning and inventing images in order to make the meaning clearer. It consists in gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else, and making the results presentable by sheer humbug. The attraction of this way of writing is that it is easy. It is easier — even quicker, once you have the habit.
That is a good description of the habits in economics and management language. At least in 1946 most of Orwell's audience would have known what a metaphor is. In 2014, it is rare for people to have the ability to identify a metaphor in their own language.
Worse, the language of management and economics is infecting the education system. This was pointed out by Chris Fotinopolous in The Age, citing Labor's 'New Directions' paper for the education system, which identified 'productivity growth' and 'human capital investment' as 'the critical link' to 'long-term prosperity'.
What exactly is 'human capital'? Another bad metaphor designed to dehumanise, much like 'human resources'. It deliberately blurs the distinction between money and a person, implying that a person is just a store of value that can be financially measured.
What is 'productivity growth'? A measure of economic output whose relationship with education is speculative at best. Technical training is important, but the level of productivity mostly depends on the quality of management, little of which can be taught in school. It is mostly dependent on institutional structures and cultural habits.
Many factors affect productivity, including currency movements and investment trends. Australia's recent declining productivity is largely due to excessive investment in mining and over-investment in utilities, as the Reserve Bank pointed out. As the mining investment declines, Australia's productivity will rise. This will have nothing to do with the education in Australian schools.
As there is so little critique of the appalling language use in capitalism and the persistent misuse of metaphors, the situation is unlikely to improve. Perhaps we should all just turn ourselves into 'human resources leveraging our intellectual capital across a market based outcome with respect to capital flows' and be done with it.
David James has been a business journalist for 25 years and is the author of Managing for the Twenty First Century and The Business Devil's Dictionary. He has a PhD in English Literature from Monash University.