Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
If we go back to the early 20th century we find a critical crossroad
for industry.
Where the rapid technological advancement was beginning to challenge the
most basic foundation of traditional economics and hence, social operation.
You see at the core of our socioeconomic system is labor
and demand.
Without product demand of course there is no need for production or employment,
and without employment the working public draws no income, or purchasing
power, to buy the goods that keep the economy going.
Early in the 1900s a powerful expansion of productivity
through machine application
and mechanization brought about something industry really hadn't seen
before: a goods surplus.
A 1927 article in Nation's Business conducting an
interview with then Labor Secretary, James Davis, stated:
"It may be that the world needs ultimately will be produced by three
days' work a week." Years later engineer R. Buckminster Fuller described the
phenomenon as being able to accomplish more
with less
in that the energy, manpower and resources needed to accomplish
particular goals was actually decreasing, while the accomplishments themselves
were accelerating.
In other words, industry was becoming more technically efficient.
However pre-20th century America and western society in general
maintained an ethic of being frugal overall.
There was a conservative ethos where goods obtained for their utility.
A culture of needs, not excessive wants and most people really didn't see the need
to increase their consumption simply because they could.
So the ruling industrialists and social planners had a choice at this point.
Either the system was to be adapted to this new more with less productivity,
which could mean a rise in leisure time, a shortening of the work week and an adjustment of
pay scales and good values to reflect this new-found abundance as need be.
Or something more dramatic had to happen.
The very underlying values and affections of the culture would need to be altered,
where the very idea of consuming became a utility in and of itself.
To consume for the sake of consuming, in order to maintain the status quo.
The holiday shopping season got off to a violent start.
A temporary Walmart worker was trampled to death by shoppers eager for
post-Thanksgiving bargains.
A mad dash into a Walmart store knocked shoppers to the ground near Grand Rapids Michigan at five in the morning.
Despite several people falling down to the ground, shoppers charged ahead...
Shopper shouting expletives...
Shopper shouting threatening expletives... Crowd shouting...
Another incident here
a 28 year old pregnant woman
was knocked to the ground by that same crowd.
Witnesses here at the scene say that woman actually suffered a miscarriage.
And in southern California shots rang out inside a crowded toy store.
Police say that a woman sprayed fellow shoppers, this actually happened, with pepper spray.
Meanwhile those who knew Demur call his death senseless.
They act like animals.
Just to buy something for five dollars, save five dollars, and
they actually murdered this guy (scoffs).
Meet Eddie Bernays.
He is considered the father of modern advertising.
Most famous for turning the largely abhorred word "propaganda"
into the fluffy warm euphemism
"Public Relations".
Bernays haphazardly took popular ideas
from Freudian psychoanalysis and began to apply them to advertising campaigns.
The idea was simple:
link and exploit the very primitive social urges common to most humans,
such as sexuality and status, to a product.
Woman: It's so much longer than last year!
Salesman: It is. Nearly 4 inches longer in some models.
Woman: (satisfied moan)
Goods were to become less relevant in their utility and more of a symbol
representing one's identity or individualism.
Effectively turning mere wants
into emotional needs.
Bernays was a response to a growing call by industrial leaders to reprogram society
and create new consumer culture.
Charles Kettering, director of General Motors in 1929,
wrote of the need to
"Keep the Consumer Dissatisfied"
Wall street banker Paul Mazur said
"We must shift America from a needs to desires culture.
People must be trained to desire.
To want new things even before the old things have been entirely consumed.
We must shape a new mentality in America."
And it worked.
Technological innovation and radio and television help further this end
by a saturation campaign throughout American society which quickly spread across the
world. Advertising no longer was about describing say the function of a good
and its inherent integrity.
It was now about social manipulation.
Creating inferiority, shame, guilt
and false problems that could only
be resolved by submission to purchase.
This vanity, materialism and obsessive consumption neuroses, as powerful
as it is
was not quite enough to ensure the stability of the capitalist religion and
the ongoing benefits to the ownership class priests. The engineering of consent
through advertising aside, the technological age brought another nasty problem for
business: increased product efficiency. Not only was production moving faster
than traditional consumption, the actual quality of individual goods were
increasing as well due to scientific advancements in design, making needed
repeat purchases increasingly less common. Well this was no good.
Remember the core drivers labor profit consumption,
hence the core driver of our economy in general, is scarcity and inefficiency.
In fact the enemy of the market economy has always been competency and the better at
long lasting a good is
the worse it is for industry.
So the water broke
and planned obsolescence was born.
In 1932 industrialist Bernard London propagated a pamphlet
entitled "Ending the Depression Through Planned Obsolescence" where the
idea of universally making universally making poor goods to generate more labor demand and growth
seemed logical.
Some even wanted to make it mandatory for all industries legally.
Where life cycles were decided not by the natural state of technological
ability but by the mere ongoing need for labor and increased consumption.
In fact the most notable historical example of this period was the
Phoebus light bulb cartel of the 1930s where in a time where
lightbulbs were able to last to about up to about twenty five thousand hours, the cartel forced
each company to restrict light bulb life to a mere one thousand hours to assure
repeat purchases.
And in time this eventually became the strategic approach for all industries.
And if you were to sit down and compare the true efficiency possible
today
to what were actually doing to keep his waste and depravation machine going, you would
puke in your soup at the lost possibilities.
And the final component to note here relates to the problem of purchasing power
itself.
A failsafe was needed to ensure a monetary circulation and so-called growth.
Even if the purchasing parties didn't have it.
Well welcome to credit expansion.
Credit access has been,
in reality,
the core driver of economic growth in the west for a very long time.
And a quick glance at the private and public dept today globally
shows that it is not an anomaly for a person or country
to live far beyond its financial means.
It is indeed
the set fashion.
The amount of debt existing globally today far exceeds the entire global
money supply itself and it has been this borrowing from nowhere that has
compensated for the inherent limits of employment
and wages.