Henwood's two posts on this confuse me. Not sure what his position
is. Let me be clear about mine: The present financial crisis began
in 1947 with the passage of the Taft-Hartley Act, a crippling blow to
the labor movement. That fed into the current environmental crisis.
The purge of leftists in the unions that went on in the 1950s till it
succeeded resulted in a captive union movement, leading to the end of
rising incomes for the lower 60% of the population and the severe
warping of the income distribution extending until just now.
Several things followed from this. The century-long reduction in the
standard working week ended, basically with World War II. The
weakness of labor took the most effective champion of a relentless cut
in hours out of the discussion, hence, no discussion. Even on Pen-l
to this day. But if the US economy were to continue to expand,
consumption had to continue to rise, even though the incomes of the
workers was no longer rising. Hence the successive bubbles.
How were people induced to go on consuming without rising real
incomes? They were loaned the money == student loans, etc. -- and
then were able to learn what to buy from watching what higher income
people were able to and were buying. Consumption is learned. You
have to learn to want something -- martinis, cirgarettes, i-Pods,
etc. The biggest crime of the neo-classical economists is teaching
independent prererences and fully reversible preference functions. So
we learned what to want and then were loaned the money to buy it.
What was a different path that the economy could have taken, still
under capitalism, if labor had maintained some power? The work week
would have shrunk over the years, to perhaps four days by now, maybe
less. What people wanted would be rather different, very likely more
benign environmentally.
The trouble with the Van Gelder & Pibel article is that it is
utopian. Lots of that going around. Gus Speth, the Dean of Yale's
environmental school, among others, has also written about stopping
growth. But none, including Van Gelder & Pibel, advance a program
that can be organized and won. Mostly it is arm waving and appeals
for being nice. In Speth's case, nice people, nice corporations.
This seems to be what Henwood and Devine dismiss.
But dismissing arm-waving does NOT dismiss the problem.
There was a lot of denial of global warming, and now we have a lot of
denial of the need to deal with growth in consumption, as the word is
used in the vernacular. Is that what you are doing, Messrs Henwood
and Devine? If you are just against arm-waving you are trivializing
the discussion. Don't do it.
Gene Coyle
On Dec 14, 2008, at 1:17 PM, Doug Henwood wrote:
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....
_______________________________________________
pen-l mailing list
[email protected]
https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
_______________________________________________
pen-l mailing list
[email protected]
https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
