Exchange City and the Social Conditioning of Dystopia

The state conditions us to be congenial capitalists the day we irrupt into this plane of existence. There’s no grace period. We burst from the womb, we’re swaddled in either the blues or pinks of the gender binary, and the American propaganda machine promptly begins its work structuring every aspect of our lives into either a nationalistic or entrepreneurial endeavor. Some of this ideological training is heavy handed: The barbaric chest-beating of a pre-game national anthem, a middle school history teacher’s bored revisionism, most everything that Disney produces. Other disciplining is less obvious. People don’t necessarily notice how social media marketizes our personality traits and turns us into neoliberal subjects, the ways we are instructed on how to properly and “ethically” consume, or the reality that acting bipartisan has historically meant that one should capitulate to capital.

And then there’s the in between, the corny brainwashing, the painful agitprop, embarrassingly explicit programs that have to be imposed on those too mindless to realize how cringeworthy they truly are, namely children.

I first heard about Exchange City when I was in the 4th grade at Colfax-Mingo elementary school, the heart of unassuming rural Iowa, a place where mentioning capitalism would be about as esoteric and foreign as listening to a John Cage composition or reading the Bhagavad Gita. My 5th grade superiors had been excitedly whispering about an upcoming field trip to the gilded cosmopolis of Des Moines for the past few weeks of the new school year, which when you’re that small, felt like a century of anxious static. It was a whole day field trip to the city. That in itself was compelling. Colfax-Mingo field trips, which rarely happened on Iowa’s austere academic budgets, usually were excursions to local nature reserves and parks. Those were, of course, appreciated and refreshing, but they lacked the urbane verve of Polk County’s heart. The enthusiastic 5th graders informed us they were learning “how to do Exchange City,” how to become citizens of this Hawkeye State Zürich.

Our curiosity only spiked higher when the day came and the fifth grade hall was empty. We desired to understand, to be apart of the annals of Exchange City, a birthright promised, but still a whole school year separated from us.

When the 5th graders returned, they confirmed our curiosities and validated our furor. They had all apparently loved it, or at least, the one’s vocal about it. In a small school, it only takes about 3 loud children out of 10 for common knowledge to form and be disseminated. In this case, however, a field trip was being hyped for once instead of kids spreading a rumor that a classmate had mange.

Despite their satisfaction, the older kids were mostly vague about what the trip actually entailed. Basically, my grade was told that you acted like an adult and went to work, but in a fun way. That was the extent of the detailing. You did a job you were assigned. Some were business related. There were police, a radio station, etc. In retrospect, this was an instructive moment on how pitifully gullible 10 year olds are. Imagine telling an adult they get a full day off of work totally paid for at a resort, but they have to repair the building’s roofing and repaint its sides.

Excitement inevitably smoldered. We still had a year before our initiation into the prosperous halls of Exchange City, so life took hold and the field trip became another bildungsroman milestone, something we were all anticipating with fervor tapered in the backs of our basal consciousness.

Capital doesn’t stop. It continually seeks to reproduce itself and the relations that produce it. The coming of Exchange City, a simulacrum inextricably intertwined into that base, did not pause. The days turned and with a jejune zeal the year had passed. It was our time to prepare for a day on the aureate streets of Exchange City.

The preparation was the first red flag, and I’m not even saying that with hindsight. Even at 10 it was clear, Exchange City’s curriculum was categorical drudgery. Most of it involved learning a simplified vocab list of personal finance terms and how to balance a rudimentary check book for tweens. Intrinsically soul-decimating work. The technocratic financiers of the American state simply couldn’t wait til we were in proximity to adulthood before exposing us to the tedium of daily middle class life. Still, we were 5th graders. Yes, learning what a deposit slip was at age 10 was utterly humdrum, but our recompense was a day of no class. You could get 5th graders to burn the playground down for a day off learning about colloids and multiplication. We were guaranteed a trip of utmost amusement, so we continued regurgitating the definitions of loans and sales taxes.

Before we even walked into Exchange City, the class disparities inherent to capitalism began to manifest in our prep work. As the day drew nearer, we were told to start thinking about what jobs we wanted. An immediate hierarchy appeared. Most of the jobs seemed to be grunt work. There was the food (mostly popcorn) makers, the various store cashiers, and other clerking posts, occupations that no 10 year old thinks is very exciting. But, there were a few outwardly glamorous, and more lucrative, positions: the radio dj’s, the sports shop manager, the Exchange City mayor. However, because these positions were so popular, there had to be interviews with the teachers to determine who deserved what. Just as in a society dominated by capital, the supposed meritocracy of the arrangement doesn’t stand up to any thorough class analysis.

The children in my grade who received the ideal, managerial, better paid bourgeois positions in Exchange City were coached by parents who could be there for them. The parents who were more financially secure, had less stressful schedules, and a stable home, could prepare their kids to ensure they got the better jobs. Children with well-educated professionals for guardians became the secretary of the Exchange City government or the owner of the bank. What about the other kids who were not so fortunate? The children of the single mothers? The children of barely functioning alcoholics? The children of parents who were worked so raw they didn’t have the drive to be more involved with their kids? They became the low wage backbone of the city, the service, retail, and utility workers.

Let me elaborate with an anecdote. I was able to acquire the position of radio station manager, following in the footsteps of my mother who worked for the central Iowa CBS affiliate KCCI as the station’s sports news director. She instructed me on how to present myself as confident and what broadcasting jargon I should use to prove I was the right candidate. It was very clear that I was going to get into the radio station.

The low wage positions were filled by the seemingly less ambitious, actually more disenfranchised kids. Mirroring the tragic class order of the adult job market, wealthier kids ascended to the ostensibly more fulfilling Exchange City jobs on skills imbued into them by parental privilege. Children born into a lower stratum served food or did other routine work, which of course are worthwhile and necessary assignments, but ones that the creators of Exchange City did not seem to value at the same level of manager positions.

So much inequality and we hadn’t even reached the day of the field trip yet. But it was coming, with a dysfunction too hegemonic for our young brains to fully grasp

When the day of our trip arrived, it was like Christmas, but for celebrating fiscal responsibility and citizenship rather than good will towards your fellow man. My class of 60 kids all frantically waddled into school buses that I refuse to believe were up to code and we embarked on the 31 mile trip from the Colfax-Mingo elementary school to the Junior Achievement building on the west side of Des Moines where the bastion of commerce and finance Exchange City was founded.

In Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man, he states “the cultural center is becoming a fitting part of the shopping center, or municipal center, or government center.” Exchange City was that exact trifecta miniaturized for grade schoolers, condensed simulations of retail, service industries, and local government. Much like America, a nation with just enough societal pleasantry to veil the dystopia, Exchange City was prevented from decomposing into a neoliberal Lord of the Flies ordeal by bread and circuses, or more accurately, doritos and silly putty, two products that happened to be stocked and sold by the city’s clerk positions.

I probably don’t need to tell you there were no unions in Exchange City, but there weren’t. Apparently learning how to open a checking account is more important than fostering mutual respect among the workforce. Exchange City’s system of wage labor was especially petty and disorganized. Without any form of worker solidarity, managers, myself included, could delegate all work to their underlings. Additionally, without any real workplace protections to discourage juvenile behavior, certain employees could bully their peers into doing jobs they personally did not want to do. Exchange City had adult supervisors, apt representations of impotent neoliberal regulations, but the teachers only had the capacity to intercede in particularly contentious and visible situations. When one of my dj’s decided they were the only one that got to pick music without doing any of the on-air contests or news announcements, the assigned tasks of their job, I had to call in Mrs. Hainer who personally addressed the disgruntled bully. It’s also important to note that said worker was not a Colfax-Mingo student. Because my rural school was too small to fill every position, we were joined by the even tinier Des Moines Catholic school St. Augustine’s. The arrival of kids we had never met before definitely did not bolster class consciousness, as evidenced by my discontented dj’s.

In that instance of conflict among laborers, I became an arbiter of the distanced, yet still authoritarian, Exchange City-State, executing the punishment of an unfamiliar worker that could have been redeemed and reeducated by the comradeship of a union and its protocols.

That was just one contained manifestation of Exchange City’s sociopolitical ills. The autarchy that stemmed from its ruthlessly capitalist base poisoned the experience further.

Exchange City’s police force was a completely corrupt mob of my grade’s recess bullies, dictatorial twerps who probably became actual cops once they lumbered out of Colfax-Mingo High School. They weren’t allowed to physically accost the city’s rulebreakers, which honestly surprises me considering the implicit cruelty of the program’s realism, but they were easily bribed. This became the commonplace expression of Exchange City’s clandestine, extrajudicial infliction of violence upon workers. With either the city’s currency or funyons, cops were hired to further 5th grade vendettas and antagonize classroom enemies with bogus fines, “you walked on the off-limits grass,” “you took so-and-so’s doodad.” In America, police are the major instigators of gun violence. While this rampant brutality was obviously not translated into this children’s field trip, the city’s police were still the most estranging organization that principally existed to alienate us, shrouded by the false value of lawful discipline.

The extraction policies of the city’s inimical police presence calls to mind another aspect of its capitalist authenticity, the paltry wages. In the few hours a child worked at Exchange City, there was only so many paychecks. These earnings were needed to pay the taxes, rent, and utility fees scheduled into the itinerary of the program, and also for whatever keepsake niceties they wanted after these necessities were paid for. In Exchange City, the quandary of whether rent is moral or not, or if one is obligated to pay for their right to water, is totally disregarded. The city was a capitalist’s privatized, mostly peaceable dream.

A fine was majorly burdensome, to the point it could ruin the whole experience if one had a lower wage job. Another personal example. I received a fine for accidentally stumbling onto an off-limits grass zone, which is totally ridiculous looking back. In Exchange City, some of the ground was painted as green and marked as grass. In this replica of urban life, denizens of the city were not allowed to enjoy the grass, albeit fake. We were there to produce like the good little proles we were being forced to become and that was absolutely it. “Nature” was there to convey the appearance of life and any attempt to actually engage with that was a punishable offense. I wanted to use my final paycheck to pay for some snacks, but the fine completely drained me. I left Exchange City with no souvenir, no luxury. I had paid my dues to landlords and the owners of infrastructure, got my wealth stolen by crooked deputies, and was left with nothing to find comfort in. Considering I had a fairly well paid manager position, others assuredly faced an ever worse immiseration than I.

Every socioeconomic ailment that infects American life was designed into the Exchange City facsimile in a manner that could be digested by children. According to the Exchange City founder’s website,

Students will:
Create job resumes and job applications
Have real job interviews
Become part of a business team
Develop a business plan

Develop a marketing plan
Make materials purchases
Produce real products
Price real products and services

Market real products and services
Calculate payroll expenses
Take on business accounting services
Use a personal checkbook
Make bank or credit union deposits
Make bank or credit union withdrawals

All the travail, pressure, and discomfort of postmodern American life’s adherence to capital rendered small and understandable for kids, future captives of wage labor.

Outwardly, Exchange City was a comical likeness of US political economy. But, in actuality, it was a deeply harrowing and contemptible capitalist project. As I reflected on my own personal experience with the field trip, I also inquired into the Exchange Cities of fellow central Iowans. Did other people have similarly awful trips? Did some enjoy their time? Answers varied. A lot of peers hated their school’s foray to the city. Some people had their aptitudes accurately predicted and had fun. This was reasonable. There are the fortunate few under capital that are able to achieve upward mobility. But, despite that, the successes of the professionally auspicious do not countervail the vast dehumanization imposed on countless more workers.

One incident described to me glared as illustrative of the whole sordid program. A friend relayed to me that they volunteered as a chaperon for their former elementary’s trip when they were in high school. At one point, they were stationed with kids tasked with mass producing popcorn for the day. One of the students morosely protested the work and declared their labor to be boring and harder than what other kids had to do. That gloomy student’s coworker responded with a reciprocally disheartening pronouncement, “Well, we have to do this. We’re the dumb ones that got this job.”

Exchange City was advertised to Iowa elementary and middle schools as an amusing module intended to teach children the importance of monetary enterprise and civic responsibility. But, when one pulls back the veil of superstructure and critically investigates the relations of the event, the capitalist habituation of Exchange City becomes obvious. The principles of entrepreneurship are deployed to instill in children the belief that it is natural and just that many are miserable while a few are content, that class hierarchy is innately human, and that those who find themselves in poverty deserve to be there. It is truly insidious that what was supposed to be a delightful field trip for children actually turn out to be thinly guised capitalist inculcation that would be surely be loved by the suits at the Heritage Foundation. But that being said, Exchange City was only a couple hours, and now at 22 years old, slightly memorable. Exchange City was a pageant of capital, but it was momentary, only an infinitesimal fraction of the methods American capitalism teaches a person how to hate their fellow kind.