Amway: The Cult of Free Enterprise

Amway Corporation, in alliance with the religious right, has spent twenty-five years building an authoritarian, pro-business movement in the American middle class. Amway preaches devotion and obedience to its leaders, hard work and sacrifice for the Company, contempt for the poor and worship of the rich. Steve Butterfield, an ex-Amway distributor, dramatically exposes how step-by-step one can get hooked into the Amway lifestyle, including its rallies, products, Cadillacs and cult doctrine, until one's critical intelligence is drowned in a cycle of fake love and plastic dreams. Amway is a frightening center of political reaction which uses the concept of “free enterprise” to spread the gospel of corporate power. Most distributors are induced to work for little or nothing by the ideology of „positive thought” which Butterfield dissects with an insiders insight. Steve Butterfield is the author of Black Autobiography in America (University of Massachusetts, 1974) and has had his fiction and poetry published in numerous literary journals. He is a professor of English at Castleton State College, Vermont.