Eyre Lines

I find on Partially Examined Life’s blog a link to this article, which criticises one aspect of consumerism through looking at Diderot’s essay on parting with his old dressing gown (click through – it’s quite short and not without humour!). It highlights one of the aspects of modern capitalist society which I like least, the need to create desire for unnecessary things in order to keep the immense surplus capacity created by mass-production and automation busy. (Mass production has a wonderful record of providing the necessities of life to more people than was possible before it, but largely operates to create a lot of things which people do not really need). Although it makes no direct mention of them, the article also highlights that the consumer society, which in Diderot’s time was hardly out of infancy, encourages greed (avarice), envy (covetousness) and gluttony (in the sense of consuming things you have no real need for, or in excess of your needs).

I am mostly immune to this. In conversation with another attender at the “Wake” festival last week (we were talking about Christianity and capitalism, which I sometimes characterise as the “System of Satan”; he is a self-identified capitalist), after I described my shopping habits, he suggested that I was a marketer’s nightmare. It’s a label which I will wear with pride!

I won’t take telephone calls which attempt to sell me something, I almost never watch commercial television live (because when I record it, I can fast-forward through the adverts), I’ve developed my focus when reading something surrounded by adverts to the point of not noticing most of them, and when I go shopping, I have a list and buy what is on the list and, for the most part, nothing else. I don’t window shop. As a general rule, I consider when thinking of buying something mainly whether I need it. Mostly, I don’t, and indeed I consider that the virtuous course of action is not to buy things for which I have no need. Things I don’t need, to me, represent a pointless waste of resources and of the time of some workers… and I don’t concern myself with what anyone else has (which is a major focus of this article). Marketing and advertising, to me, is a request for me to waste resources and time, and I can fairly easily resist that.

One of the events at “Wake” was a talk on Trump, and his methods of persuasion, and when a set of company symbols were presented and we were asked to think of the slogan associated with each, only one of them came immediately to my mind (in which I was very much in the minority). However, I was with the vast majority in being able to name Trump’s main catch-phrases (“build a wall” and “make America great again”) – not that that endeared Trump to me in the slightest, but I will readily concede that he was massively the better marketer when compared with Clinton.

The chap I was talking with, by the way, was of the “TINA” (“there is no alternative”) school of thought regarding capitalism. He might not have liked screwing his suppliers and inflating his prices wherever possible, but those were things he had to do, because “that’s how the system works”. And there is no alternative… (except that, in fact, there is – at least there is within entirely traditional Christianity). The thing is, the conceptual space in economics has been appropriated by those who want to push neoliberalism as the one and only economic system, and it has been largely successful. The talk on Trump’s persuasive techniques also made much of his tricks of controlling the language used. (Although I can’t find a link to Alex Kazam’s talk, this episode of the Political Philosophy podcast does deal with the issue at around the 50 minute mark – the podcast then goes on usefully to discuss ideology, and is worth listening to if only for the consideration of whether we should allow Starbucks to sell human organs…)

So, in relation to financialised free market capitalism, I note that in many, if not most, circles these days, it is regarded as gospel that only free market capitalism works to bring general benefits to humanity (and the “financialised” part is just glossed over, despite the fact that most of the profits of Western capitalists these days come not from making stuff but from manipulating markets). It is contrasted with communism, which it is claimed has been tried and doesn’t work (but see the link in my preceding paragraph, for at least one instance), equating communism with a command economy, like those of the former Soviet Union and China (or, at least, China before its recent foray into a mixture of command economy and capitalism). But, of course, communism is not equivalent to a command economy, and the greatest command economies in the world today are those of the big multinational corporations – and those are not criticised for their central control.

In the USA, and to a lesser extent in the UK, there is also a failure to distinguish between Socialism * and Communism, and particularly Democratic Socialism and Communism. This results in American commentators saying that Bernie Sanders is “far left”, which would be laughable were it not for the success of the ideology of neoliberalism in commanding the vocabulary and shifting the political centre to what would, 40 years ago, have been regarded as fairly far to the right even in the States. Similarly, in the UK, I know plenty of people who consider Jeremy Corbyn to be dangerously “far left”, despite the fact that in my teens and twenties he would have been looked at by very many friends of mine as being at best a moderate Socialist, with many many shades of left between him and the real far left, which was in those days fought over by Marxists, Trotskyites and Anarchists in the mould of Bakunin. Corbyn is, of course, rather further left than Sanders, but that isn’t saying very much!

This tendency is so far advanced in the USA that a right wing commentator a couple of years ago suggested that Obama was proposing communism – in the form of socialised medicine. Of course, Obamacare is not actually socialised medicine at all – it isn’t even single payer – what it is is a compulsory insurance scheme with some regulation of the insurers. Here in the UK we still have mostly socialised medicine; the government pays for the NHS from tax revenue and the service is free at the point of delivery (except that there are charges for dentistry, not as high as private patient rates, and we do pay a flat rate for prescriptions if we are not in an exempt category – which, being over 60, I actually am now). I am not certain that it will stay that way, however, as the NHS increasingly has to contract out certain areas to commercial, profit-taking firms; as long as we have Conservative governments, there is at least a tendency in the party to think that America does health better – at least, that’s what they say; a jaundiced observer might think that their objection is that their friends cannot make a huge profit from medicine…

The result is that those who are critics of the current state of capitalism feel they need to find other labels; they have effectively capitulated to the re-definition of what were a set of perfectly serviceable terms, and now look for labels like “progressive”. I anticipate that the neoliberals will come trying to redefine “progressive” as well, and in a few years it will just be, for the general populace, another term for socialism, “which is” communism, “which is” command economy. Let’s face it, in Christianity the fundamentalists of the beginning of the 20th century had colonised “evangelical” by the end of the century and are now trying to colonise “Christian” – and they are to some extent succeding, as witness several occasions when someone has said “I became a Christian”, I’ve asked what they were previously, and they’ve answered “Anglican”, or “Methodist”, or “Catholic”. All of those labels were, the last time I looked, just labels for slightly different kinds of Christian.

In “1984”, George Orwell wrote about a society in which words were routinely redefined – it was called “Newspeak”. When I originally read the book (significantly before 1984), I considered it mere fantasy – but I am now thinking that it was prophetic, and merely a few years out in its label. We are being forced by these redefinitions of language to think in certain ways – such as that Sanders is “far left”, because he is a Democratic Socialist, and that has now come to mean, for many people, exactly the same thing as Communist, and exactly the same thing as “the government will come and take all your stuff”.

But, at the moment, the equation Socialist = Communist = Command Economy is a lie. Well, actually, it’s more than one lie, as they are three entirely separate things.

I really hate marketing…

* Don’t be put off by the title of this link – it’s adequately argued for a general audience – and the writing of this post has been much delayed by a binge of listening to a lot of Prof. Woolff’s other lectures…