The Lehman Trilogy: Political Economy on the Stage

Chris Saltmarsh - Doctoral Researcher, Department of Politics & International Relations, Univeristy of Sheffield

American capitalism

The setting for every scene, the spectre of 2008 haunts the firm throughout its history from Henry Lehman’s arrival to the US from Bavaria up to the 2008 crash. In between, the firm’s history is told through major political-economic events including the American Civil War, world wars, the 1929 crash and Great Depression, and post-war economic boom. In a sense, the firm is the obvious subject of the play but it is really as much a history of American capitalism. The final event is as inevitable as perpetual crisis is in the cyclical churn of capitalist development.

Throughout the play, the audience reckons with this interplay between biography of Lehman Brothers and this sweeping history of capitalist development. On the surface, this is a story of the precipitous rise and dramatic fall of elites. The American Dream is alive and kicking for the Lehmans, until it’s not.

A personalistic narrative focuses on exceptional individuals across successive generations of the same family using their innate skill and intellect to successfully identify the next big investment opportunity. By this reading, great individuals (and families) are the dynamic heart of modern capitalism.

Commodities

For sure, individual Lehmans are shown to be prophetic in this regard, but their genius is crucially in identifying the evolving material bases of capitalism that exist separate to any individual or family firm. Beyond the personalities, the Lehman Trilogy is substantively a story of the commodities that predominate at different times in capitalism’s history.

The Lehmans begin by trading suits and fabrics before soon pivoting to retailing cotton as a raw material. Their key innovation here is to act as middle-men between the slave plantations of the South and the industrial manufacturing of the North.

From here they were ahead of the game in investing in tobacco and coffee before these became omnipresent consumer commodities across the US. They invested in railways before any track had been laid. They were early investing in industrial oil production and took advantage of international wars to invest in weapons manufacturing. In each instance, the Lehmans are represented as effectively pre-empting shifts to the next big profitable commodity in American capitalism.

This culminated as the groundwork was laid for the 2008 crash with the final innovation of Lehman Brothers’ evolving strategy of accumulation. In Polanyian terms, it is the shift towards fictitious commodities that precipitates the bank’s eventual downfall. Why exchange actual goods when you can make money by trading money?

The move towards trading includes the creation of an investment bank as the family’s control of the firm declines (‘we have a Board now’). Any pretence of the entrepreneurial genius spanning familial generations is supplanted by subordination to the general directives of capital.

Tragedy

The play is structured as a tragedy and this is obviously how we are left to interpret the story of the Lehman family. The destructive endpoint of the firm is signalled at the very beginning (if we didn’t already know) and it looms throughout. Inevitably, that fall comes following an explosion of profiteering hubris.

This is represented figuratively in a bizarre and hilarious scene in which the third generation of Lehman leading the bank (‘Bobby’) literally dances himself to death in an arrestingly stark stylistic and tonal break from the rest of the production. The audience is left in no doubt: contemporary capitalism is an absurd system requiring a punishingly relentless drive towards exponentially greater accumulation no matter the cost.

In the play, culture and tradition are among the most explicit casualties (perhaps to the neglect of labour, environment etc) of this stereotypically American economic maximalism. The Lehmans arrive in nineteenth century America as proud and committed Jews, insistent in their practice.

They pray together every day before work, attend Synagogue when possible, and when a family member dies strictly observe mourning rituals like keriah and shiva regardless of economic cost. As the firm grows and capitalism develops, these cultural traditions fall away. The mourning period is at one point reduced to an insultingly tokenistic three minutes (down from one week), before being abandoned entirely.

Partial histories

If the Lehman Trilogy is a history of capitalism, it is a necessarily partial one. It is less clear whether we are supposed to draw the same tragic conclusions about capitalism in general as the Lehman family. The play ends with the 2008 crash which we now know was not the decisive blow to capitalism that some predicted and/or hoped it would be.

The subsequent decade and a half has been characterised by a consolidation and expansion of market relations rather than transformation towards anything new. Perhaps this implied epilogue is the real tragedy of the Lehman Trilogy.

Political economists are likely to learn more about the biography of the firm and its leaders than about capitalist history, although even the biographical detail has been criticised for emitting important details around the firm’s support for the Confederacy and slave ownership.

There is much to infer from the production, which is intellectually generative, but the audience is left with limited explicit explanation of the underlying causes of the 1930s and 2008 crashes. Although, of course, this is a piece of popular theatre and not an Introduction to Political Economy seminar. That said, the Lehman Trilogy may well do the best of all attempts (of which I’m sure there are very many) at bringing those two forms together.

SPERI Presents…’ upcoming podcast series Crisis Point seeks to redress this gap with a broadly accessible but theoretically and historically rigorous look at capitalist crisis from pre-industrial times to the present day.