On Dec 14, 2008, at 4:06 PM, raghu wrote:
It is really tragic that anyone on the left (or is it the "Left"?) who
dares suggest a scaling back of consumption is savagely criticized and
even compared with the likes of Mellon. I fail to see anything at all
common between what van Gelder et al wrote and Andrew Mellon.
Ernest Mandel, Late Capitalism, pp. 394-396:
6. The genuine extension of the needs (living standards) of the wage-
earner, which represents a raising of his level of culture and
civilization. In the end this can be traced back virtually completely
to the conquest of longer time for recreation, both quantitatively (a
shorter working week, free weekends, paid holidays, earlier
pensionable age, and longer education) and qualitatively (the actual
extension of cultural needs, to the extent to which they are not
trivialized or deprived of their human content by capitalist
commercialization). This genuine extension of needs is a corollary of
the necessary civilizing function of capital. Any rejection of the so-
called 'consumer society' which moves beyond justified condemnation of
the commercialization and dehumanization of consumption by capitalism
to attack the historical extension of needs and consumption in general
(i.e., moves from social criticism to a critique of civilization),
turns back the clock from scientific to utopian socialism and from
historical materialism to idealism. Marx fully appreciated and
stressed the civilizing function of capital, which he saw as the
necessary preparation of the material basis for a 'rich
individuality'. The following passage from the Grundrisse makes this
view very clear: 'Capital's ceaseless striving towards the general
form of wealth drives labour beyond the limits of its natural
paltriness, and thus creates the material elements for the development
of the rich individuality which is as all-sided in its production as
in its consumption, and whose labour also therefore appears no longer
as labour, but as the full development of activity itself, in which
natural necessity in its direct form has disappeared; because a
historically created need has taken the place of the natural one.'
For socialists, rejection of capitalist 'consumer society' can
therefore never imply rejection of the extension and differentiation
of needs as a whole, or any return to the primitive natural state of
these needs; their aim is necessarily the development of a 'rich
individuality' for the whole of mankind. In this rational Marxist
sense, rejection of capitalist 'consumer society' can only mean:
rejection of all those forms of consumption and of production which
continue to restrict man's development, making it narrow and one-
sided. This rational rejection seeks to reverse the relationship
between the production of goods and human labour, which is determined
by the commodity form under capitalism, so that henceforth the main
goal of economic activity is not the maximum production of things and
the maximum private profit for each individual unit of production
(factory or company), but the optimum self-activity of the individual
person. The production of goods must be subordinated to this goal,
which means the elimination of forms of production and labour which
damage human health and man's natural environment, even if they are
'profitable' in isolation. At the same time, it must be remembered
that man as a material being with material needs cannot achieve the
full development of a 'rich individuality' through asceticism, self-
castigation and artificial self-limitation, but only through the
rational development of his consumption, consciously controlled and
consciously (i.e., democratically) subordinated to his collective
interests.
Marx himself deliberately pointed out the need to work out a system of
needs, which has nothing to do with the neo-asceticism peddled in some
circles as Marxist orthodoxy. In the Grundrisse Marx says: 'The
exploration of the earth in all directions, to discover new things of
use as well as new useful qualities of the old; such as new qualities
of them as raw materials; the development, hence, of the natural
sciences to their highest point; likewise the discovery, creation and
satisfaction of new needs arising from society itself; the cultivation
of all the qualities of the social human being, production of the same
in a form as rich as possible in needs, because rich in qualities and
relations - production of this being as the most total and universal
possible social product, for, in order to take gratification in a many-
sided way, he must be capable of many pleasures, hence cultured to a
high degree - is likewise a condition of production founded on
capital....
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