Multilevel marketing companies promise that everyone can become a boss and get rich if they hustle hard enough. But they’re actually fraudulent pyramid schemes that, like capitalism writ large, require mass exploitation to enrich the few at the top.
In multilevel marketing companies (MLMs), the only relationships permitted are hierarchical ones. Participants can talk to their recruiters, who profit from their work, and to their own recruits, whom they profit from in turn. But they’re forbidden to talk to others in their same position in the chain of command, an infraction known as “cross-lining.” Why? Because nonexploitative relationships might lead to mutually honest conversations among equals — which could, in turn, lead to dawning awareness that the whole thing is a scam.
For this reason, among others, Bridget Read calls MLMs “the opposite of solidarity,” basically the antithesis of a union. Read, the author of the book Little Bosses Everywhere: How the Pyramid Scheme Shaped America, contends that MLMs hold a mirror up to capitalist labor relations writ large. Like the economic system they’re embedded in, MLMs promote individualism, incentivize exploitation, discourage collective self-advocacy, and run on the fantasy of limitless growth. The relationship is more than incidental: the story of MLMs is the story of postwar American capitalism itself, with the pyramid scheme distilling and repackaging its most seductive illusions.
In this interview with Jacobin’s Meagan Day, Read discusses the Cold War anti-communist origins of pyramid schemes, the economic reasons women emerged as their target demographic, what MLMs have to do with cults and self-help gurus, and how they laid the groundwork…
Auteur: Bridget Read
