Entrepreneurs: The New Social Activists

Over the past two decades, entrepreneurship has replaced social and political activism as the source of dynamic cultural and political change in the United States. More and more young Americans view starting their own businesses as the way to liberate themselves and improve the world.

While big money exerts a strong appeal, today’s twentysomethings neither reject the countercultural values of 1960s activists nor reassert the conservatism of Ronald Reagan. They have no desire to run bureaucratic companies or climb the corporate ladder. Instead, they pursue a revised but potent version of the politics of liberation, one focused on the marketplace rather than on the streets as the engine of social transformation.

In so doing, they appropriate and update a long-standing tradition in U.S. history. In prosperous times, America’s economic elites have trumpeted business enterprise not only as an engine of economic growth, but as a boon to the nation, a cure for social ills, even a balm for mankind. Gilded Age entrepreneurs like John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie believed the hurly-burly of the marketplace sorted out gifted, farseeing leaders, men who would “administer surplus wealth for the good of the people.” The millionaire, Carnegie insisted, acted as “a mere trustee and agent for his poorer brethren, bringing to their service his superior wisdom, experience and ability, doing for them better than they could or would do for themselves.”

During the 1920s, industry and government leaders proclaimed that innovative new businesses would bring opportunity, security and culture to the masses. President Calvin Coolidge defined this “new era” in religious terms. “The man who builds a factory builds a temple,” Coolidge intoned. “The man who works there worships there.”

The postwar boom stoked renewed visions of a corporate commonwealth. Defense Secretary Charles E. Wilson’s famous remark, “What was good for our country was good for General Motors, and vice versa,” was no gaffe. It betrayed the broad faith of the Eisenhower era that free enterprise produced not only cheap goods but a more just, open and pious nation.

During the 1980s and ‘90s, reform-minded Americans again concluded that capitalist accumulation was not the enemy of doing good but the vehicle for it. They did not reject countercultural ambitions of the 1960s and 1970s but redirected them, incorporating them within the old gospel of wealth. By providing the world with natural, caring, environmentally safe goods and services, they believed, entrepreneurs could change the world far more effectively than reformers and radicals. Ben & Jerry’s ice cream touted the “spiritual aspects” of business and the political impact of such products as Chocolate Fudge Brownie frozen yogurt, with brownie chunks baked by homeless people, and Rainforest Crunch, with ingredients supplied by small Brazilian nut producers. “Business,” Ben Cohen preached in the mid-1980s, “is the most powerful force in the world.”

The career of Monsanto Company CEO Robert B. Shapiro offers a vivid example. A onetime folk singer and antiwar protester, Shapiro taught law for many years; he even soldiered as a low-level bureaucrat in President Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty. But the disappointments of the ‘60s soured him on political reform and social protest.

Instead, Shapiro drifted to corporate life, mostly because it offered intricate, challenging puzzles. While running NutraSweet, Shapiro began getting letters from children, mostly diabetics, who had never before been able to enjoy Kool-Aid or Jell-O. “We were doing something important for people,” Shapiro told the New Yorker. New products and new technologies could not only make you wealthy, he learned; they gave you “a chance to make a difference in the world.”

The digital revolution of the 1990s only reinforced the conviction that technology and entrepreneurship empowered ordinary people and inspired cultural and political innovation. Ralph Nader and the opponents of globalization appear retrograde, nostalgic for an imaginary past rather than promoting progressive social change. The road ahead lay with the dot-coms. Web sites, not government programs or social movements, would bring power to the people. In his latest book, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates even suggests that the Internet economy would promote political reform, empowering “citizens to act for themselves without having to go through a bureaucracy.”

It is tempting to mock today’s visionary entrepreneurs as “sellouts” or latter-day robber barons. Certainly, a dismissive Yippie-to-yuppie myth retains a potent influence on the national imagination. Many Americans express contempt for “bleeding ponytails.” They share the prevailing sense that the baby boomers traded in their radical politics for a selfish, corporate culture, exchanging marijuana and VW vans for martinis and SUVs.

The usual suspects spring to mind immediately: Yippie Jerry Rubin, who disrupted the New York Stock Exchange in the 1960s and became a yuppie stock broker two decades later. Jane Fonda, the radical who traveled to Hanoi and married new-left hero Tom Hayden, hawked fitness videos and then married activist-entrepreneur Ted Turner in the 1990s. Cohen and Jerry Greenfield, inventors of Cherry Garcia, who literally sold out to a faceless multinational corporation.

But neither these icons of countercultural capitalism nor their children have abandoned the controlling ideas of ‘60s social activism and cultural experimentation. They have preserved the emphasis on authenticity and freedom, on political transformation through personal liberation. And the market--specifically, starting new businesses--became the means for personal liberation and cultural revolution. Today’s activists embrace the entrepreneurial model but certainly aren’t “workin’ for the man.” They do not accept hierarchy or wear corporate uniforms. They at once retain the central creed of ‘60s radicalism--faith in the free expression of liberated individuals as the path to a freer, more just society--and the Gilded Age boosterism of American captains of industry.

To be sure, something has been lost in this metamorphosis. Entrepreneurship, no matter how farsighted, could never become a perfect substitute for political activism. Social protest has always been a collective endeavor. However effective in advancing a particular agenda, the experiences of organization and civil disobedience are transformative in and of themselves. They create a distinctive “movement culture” that often effects broader change than the movement’s direct actions.

For example, feminism emerged out of the harsh experiences of young women activists in the Southern civil-rights movement. The feminist institutions of the 1970s--the rape-crisis centers, women’s clinics, battered-women’s shelters--evolved out of the daily needs of activists in the women’s liberation movement. They were not so much conscious objectives of social reform as unforeseen byproducts of an activist culture.

Moreover, entrepreneurship can never challenge the basic assumptions of capitalism. Certainly, new technologies can be agents of liberation and empowerment; they can even temper some of the market’s rougher edges. But the market cannot advance values openly hostile to the profit motive. For generations, American social activists have done just that, suggesting that other, nobler values must compete with efficiency, innovation and acquisition. A century ago, President Theodore Roosevelt insisted that democracy not merely accommodate the interests of business, but that business accommodate itself to democracy. That lesson applies as well to the era of Gates as to the days of Rockefeller.

Recent events suggest the clock will not turn back. Start-ups will continue to supply more social dynamism and attract more young idealists than political activism. But without an effective counterweight to the forces of capitalism, Americans enter the 21st century unmoored from the reform traditions of the past. In the age of the entrepreneur, we face a strange, uncertain new world. *