The Work Of Nations by Robert B Reich

The Work Of Nations by Robert B Reich was published in 1991, written, therefore, prior to that year. In the book, the author describes the role of the business enterprise, with specific reference to what we used to call companies or corporations, in what was already by then an established process we now call globalization. At the time, the significance of the term and its reality was only just dawning within the popular imagination. 

But this is a book that goes beyond mere description of the functions of the global economic system. Via its analysis of national economies, and how they interlink, The Work Of Nations also deals with concepts such as national identity, the potential for political action and, fundamentally, how economic classes are formed, how people identify with them and their inter-relationships.

It is worth pausing again to place Robert Reich’s book in context. In 1991 the world had just seen the end of the Soviet Union, but there was no real indication of what might emerge from the debris. The Internet did not emerge until a couple of years later. China’s emergence as a global economic power was underway, but Japan was still by far the biggest economy in Asia. Put simply, after thirty years of an emerging and wholly new world, The Work Of Nations ought to be thoroughly out of date. It isn’t. And the fact that it still has much to offer in the analysis of our contemporary societies is testament to the quality of the author’s vision, which is inspired as well as enduring.

At the heart of the book’s analysis are two fundamental concepts. One is that the old model of the corporation, which implies a vertically integrated organization that brings a product to market via a workforce employed directly by the company and in competition with other similar corporations, is long dead. Secondly, this changed economic structure of developed societies has resulted in a fundamental change to social class formation. Gone is any assumption that masses of nationally resident blue-collar workers are automatically created by pyramids of employment and inverted pyramids of earnings.

In 1991, The Work Of Nations was already describing corporations that cooperated across national borders, shared investment and risk, and moved production or even registration as circumstances provided opportunity. Crucially, Robert Reich was already describing the existence of an international class already formed, comprising professionals, problem solvers and solution identifiers whose status and earnings were determined by their education, their skills and their performance. Over forty years earlier, Michael Young’s The Rise Of The Meritocracy described a world where the benefits accruing to such a class would result in deep social divisions, to the extent that allegiances would become primarily determined by class rather than nationality.

In the 2020s we can see the results of this ideological realignment in the way groups of electors in democracies coalesce around certain types of policy, such as the overtly nationalistic, the anti-immigrant, and, on the other side, liberalism and internationalism.

Does, for instance, this passage remind anyone of more recent preoccupations in American politics? “In the life of a nation, few ideas are more dangerous than good solutions to the wrong problems. Proposals for improving the profitability of American corporations are now legion, as are more general panaceas for what ails American industry. Politicians and pundits talk loosely of ‘restoring’ or ‘restarting’ American business, as if it were a stalled, broken-down jalopy in need of a thorough tune-up. Others offer plans for regaining America’s competitive edge and revitalizing the American economy. Many of these ideas a sound. Some are silly. But all form vestigial thinking about exactly what it is that must be restored, restarted, regained, or revitalized. They assume as their subject in American economy centered upon core American corporations and comprising major American industries - in other words, the American economy of midcentury, which easily dominated what limited world commerce there was. But as we have seen, this image bears only the faintest resemblance to the global economy at the end of the century, in which money and information move almost effortlessly through global webs of enterprise. There is coming to be no such thing as an American corporation or an American industry. The American economy is but a region of the global economy - albeit still a relatively wealthy region. In this light, then, it becomes apparent that all of the entities one might wish revitalize are quickly ceasing to exist.”

And precisely who benefits from the neoliberal economics that rollback the state? “While average working Americans may just feel that they have been surrendering a larger percentage of their earnings in taxes … tax burdens on Americans overall have not increased since the mid-1960s. Total tax receipts amounted to 31.1 per cent of gross national product in 1969, 31.1 per cent in 1979, and 32 per cent in 1989. It is just that the burden has been shifted from relatively wealthy Americans to relatively poor Americans.”

More recently, Thomas Picketty has analyzed inequality as reflected in asset and income distribution. He has identified, even within traditionally entrenched ownership relations, an emerging class of people who, by virtue of their education and skills, command significant earnings. Even in 1991, Robert Reich saw them as an emerging social class.

Robert Reich’s The Work Of Nations is not only still worth reading: it ought to be an essential text. It still has much to say that still needs to be said about the disorganization of national economies in our own time.

ADDA Simfonica with Irene Theorin under Josep Vicent in Strauss and Shostakovich

 

Concerts seasons often parade a procession of “great works” calculated to promote ticket sales. Anything less well known is often regarded as risky because audiences, though they tend not to know what they like, always like what they know. Performances of great works often become mundane acknowledgments of the work’s existence, without getting to grips with its substance. Audiences go home happy, ticket sales are satisfactory, and the works of thousands of composers never see the light of day.

So would the program of the Four Last songs of Richard Strauss followed by Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony fall into this perfunctory category? It might. But in Alicante’s ADDA concert hall last night, it definitely did not. Indeed, this is never the case when it comes to the playing and interpretation of ADDA Simfònica under Josep Vicent. Last night, the audience was surely in the presence of living greatness, not just past achievement. During last week, I met a friend whom I knew would also be going to hear the music and expressed the opinion that Shostakovich’s Leningrad Symphony was a life-changer. I understated the reality. And you might be wondering why a concert review opens like this… I hope to make that clear later. First, the facts.

The hall was packed to hear Iréne Theorin sing the Four Last Songs of Richard Strauss and the ADDA Simfònica under artistic director Josep Vicent play the symphony. To say that this audience loves its resident orchestra would also be an understatement. Every player is applauded onto the stage and off it, every time. This adoration is individual recognition, communally expressed, of both the work the orchestra does in presenting taxing programmes and also the quality of the experience they regularly deliver. ADDA Simfònica is now a great orchestra, and their artistic director is the leading light.

We began last night with Richard Strauss’s songs, with Iréne Theorin as soloist. The opening phrases might have suggested that she might have a little too much vibrato for this work, but like many initial fears this proved groundless. This is a work that needs control and expression, rather than power or decoration, and Iréne Theorin not only delivered, she excelled. There was a slight surprise when at the end of the fourth song, when the valedictory trills on the flute were played rather softer than is often the case. In the context of the work, this low-key wave of goodbye fitted perfectly. It is not surprising, given the soloist’s experience in performing the music of Richard Strauss that Iréne Theorin’s interpretation proved nothing less than exceptional. We did have an encore. It was one of Strauss’s orchestral songs, which ultimately gave Iréne Theorin an opportunity to demonstrate a little of her power.

And then what more can be written about this symphony? Let’s take for granted that it was played wonderfully, was interpreted to perfection and was received in absolute silence with every note absorbed by its audience.

For me personally, the opening movement has a clear programme. The complexity and sophistication of ordinary life in Leningrad is portrayed in the opening section in music that regularly changes key and rhythm. The simple message of the opposing theme portrays the idea of fascism. Keep it simple and keep saying the same thing. People will believe you. It starts small, indeed it does. But with each new adherent, the ideology grows into something that creates a powerful need to impose itself on everything. Ideologically this is the fascism of the 1930s. Musically, it is the ideology of pop, being populism, not popularity. That comes later. Just try getting away from pop music… And, I might add, I don’t mean Indian pop, or Tanzanian pop. I mean an international pop, nearly always in sung in English, where the visuals trump the aurals. Here I return to the idea at the start of the piece, because it is a marketing necessity that the product should always be presented that way. Make sure there are no surprises, and then you will not offend. And you will sell more worthless product.

At the end of the first movement, after the idea of fascism has led to huge conflict, the sophisticated life of those who don’t want everything to be the same returns, but it is exhausted. Though the movement ends lyrically, the fascist tendency is still there, perhaps in the form of a dictator, perhaps acknowledging that this desire to impose the conformity of a group is part of us all. At the end of the symphony, when the triumphal but unconvincing fanfares ring out, proclaiming what is clearly a rather hollow victory, the memory of conflict, complete with its conformity-imposing mechanical rhythm is still there. But is it now at least the rhythm of the opening of Beethoven’s Fifth?

The symphony’s central movements are full of reflection, lyricism, nostalgia, desolation and nightmare. It is an acknowledgment of the excellent design of the ADDA hall to record that even pianissimo pizzicati can be heard anywhere. We assume, of course, as ever, that there is near total silence from the audience. There always is.

My introduction of the work to the work came from Leonard Bernstein’s CBS recording with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Throughout, he uses significantly slower tempi than we heard last night. It’s a different take on what is, after all, a personal experience. On this recording, there is a moment during the first movement, when the sophistication of the people returns after the war, after the exhaustion is expressed and the desolation is recorded, when the sophistication represented by the strings returns with renewed but exhausted energy. On the recording, just before this entry, Bernstein issues a long side of relief which was picked up by the microphones. Personally, I cannot listen to this music without hearing that unscored sigh. I heard the reissue of the same recording a few weeks ago, and the engineers have removed the sigh.

At the start of the symphony last night, Josep Vicent decided to project images of the siege of Leningrad on the backdrop, closing the sequence with a statement that there were currently fifty conflicts in the world and that collectively we wanted to be ambassadors of peace. I said earlier that the Leningrad Symphony is a life-changer, and it still is, no matter how many times it is heard. Let’s put the people back into music, no matter how much we crave standardized products. Experience is unique. And this one was no exception. And it will live a lifetime.

A dream of a concert: Tomas Brauner and Senja Rummukainen join ADDA Simfonica in Smetana, Prokofiev and Martinu

“Such stuff as dreams are made on, we are all spirits and are melted into air” are words that ought to remind us of the ephemeral, temporal nature of human life, that such good things must come to an end. Music lasts for the duration of the concert, but the memory lives on, especially the memory of this concert.

This idea of the dream of life must apply especially to one such as Bohuslav Martinu who suffered illness for much of his childhood. Infirmity found him viewing the world outside from the confines of a plain room at the top of a church tower. Such were the early years of the composer Martinu. Perhaps this is why his music seems continually seems to dream, seems to reach out for what might seem to be beyond reach, apparent, but just beyond experience.

Safranek in his biography of Martinu reminds us that the thematic germ of the first movement of his Fourth symphony, that theme which appears time and time again, is for the composer an expression of nature. Safranek also points out that this inspiration from the bucolic came to the composer in a dark apartment on 58th St. in New York City. The composer was in exile and had wandered for years. To wander is perhaps to wonder, to wonder what might have been, to dream.

Personally, I always find dreaming in the music of Martinu. I also always find surrealism, but not the nightmare vision of Dali or the riddles of Magritte. It’s more like Chagall mixed with Tanguy. Scenes appear at random, often unexpectedly juxtaposed for no particular reason, apparently randomly, or set against an infinite landscape that seems to disappear as soon as it is noticed. It is this dream-like world that seems to be a backdrop for Julietta and his other stage works and is created in abstraction throughout Martinu’s music. One of the strongest sensations of being taken to another world in music came for me personally during the sequence in act one of the opera when a driver falls asleep while in control of an express train. I even went to a second performance of the same production and the passage had the same effect, only more intensely.

The ADDA audience in Alicante was last night delivered such a dream. Martinu’s Fourth Symphony was played by ADDA’s resident orchestra under the baton of Tomas Brauner, the evening’s Czech guest. To say that Tomas Brauner understands Czech music would be an understatement, almost bordering on disrespect. Right from the tremolos at the start of the work, to the full tutti at the end, the ADDA audience was transported into a different world, a dream world as real as any reality, but rendered into an experience from which, frankly, it is hard to emerge. Not that one would want to wake from the bliss of such surely enduring memory. To say that this dream will live forever is no understatement, at least as far as this particular reviewer is concerned, until, of course, spirits melt into air. The complete and unashamedly joyous nature of this music surely seems to tell everyone to live the dream. It will cease soon enough, so enjoy it while you can, directly and without guilt.

Martinu brought many influences into his creative world. There is Czech folklore, popular culture, and jazz at least. Not to mention a touch of neo-classicism, whatever that might be. I hear Janacek as aural cubism, but not Martinu. His musical world is very much more joined up, more rational.  But the ecstatic is always within the composer’s reach, we feel, always within the composer’s thoughts. The music constantly grasps for a heaven on earth, but never quite grabs it. That seems to be the point. There is always that cadence that returns us to where we came from, but musically it rarely does. It always progresses, though it may sound like it returns to its starting place. Thus grounded, the next attempt to elevate is always there and always immediate.

Tomas Brauner’s reading of the score was quite simply perfect. The dynamics were stretched, the delivery was direct, despite the fact that the material was often ephemeral. This surely is Martinu’s style, his true voice, and Tomas Brauner communicated everything with remarkable energy, colour, imagination and flair.

And, for this particular fan of Czech music, how refreshing it was to have an all-Slav program. We started with Smetana’s Greatest Hit, The Moldau from Vltava. This is so well known it surely cannot surprise. But surprise it did: it surprises with every hearing because of the quality of the writing. Doubly surprising in this reading was the piece’s second section, when dance rhythms which I have previously hardly noticed were stressed and came to the fore. Here, they were pointed and sharp, where so often they are smoothed out, cut off from their roots.

Then we had a performance of Prokofiev’s Sinfonia Concertante, Op. 125. Finnish cellist, Senja Rummukainen was soloist in what in another life would have been called a cello concerto.

In the review of ADDA’s last concert in the Pasiones season, I said the performance by cellist Jean-Guihen Queyras was unlikely to be bettered in a lifetime. Well, last night, just a few days later, Senja Rummukainen played so utterly perfectly that I have to challenge the permanence of last week’s opinion. But how can one compare late Schumann with late Prokofiev? The musical worlds are so completely different, they might even communicate in a different language.

Senja Rummukainen's playing throughout was complete perfection. Not only did she accomplish the technical feats, but the wit, unpredictability, occasional brutishness and lyrical invention of Prokofiev also shone. So what might a reviewer write about the second movement of the piece, which drew warm and amazed applause from an audience that normally waits religiously until the end? The gesture was utterly spontaneous and born of a mixture of admiration and emotional response. She played the Theme and Variations of Sibelius as an encore, a piece of lyricism, understatement, and control, the perfect foil to the opposites of Prokofiev that we had just heard.

The whole evening was finished off with one of the Dvorak Slavonic Dances. This time it was an upbeat celebration played at breakneck speed. The audience was thus left to pursue its own dreams. Dream on. The reality was pure dream, but the experience will surely last.