I remember back in the ’90s having a viscerally negative reaction to the word “entrepreneurship” because every time I heard it it was coming out of of the mouth of Newt Gingrich or Jack Kemp or somebody else peddling Toffler second-hand. My basket category for such rhetoric was “pop sociology, globaloney and cybercrap.” My reaction was a lot like Thomas Frank’s — a deep suspicion of anything networked or high-tech, as a Trojan horse for turning the entire society into Singapore (people sleeping stacked up in rental boxes and going to the organ harvesters when they could no longer work). “Entrepreneurship” meant a lifetime of no security, reinventing and selling yourself every two years as you hopped from one job to another. Unlike Frank, I got over it because I was exposed to the real thing.

It’s an understandable reaction. It’s a lot like someone thinking control of production by the “associated producers” must mean constant NKVD purges and liquidation of the kulaks, because every time you hear someone using such rhetoric it happens to be Stalin.

The thing is, every ideology out there is coopted by an authoritarian ruling class, but it’s also amenable to being recuperated and used against the masters. That’s the nature of ideology. Ruling classes always construct legitimizing ideologies from the rhetoric and symbolism that they find in the general culture, and that is appealing to the general population. The Federalists sold the Constitution in the state ratifying conventions largely in terms of antifederalist rhetoric. Stalin framed a Party oligarchy in terms of the language and symbolism of the barricades and the red flag. And the corporate ruling class frames its rule in the language of Adam Smith.

That doesn’t mean that either the workers on the barricades or Adam Smith, in themselves, were wrong.