Less: Stop Buying So Much Rubbish: How Having Fewer, Better Things Can Make Us Happier. By Patrick Grant. William Collins £10.99.
In the August 2022 Socialist Standard, we reviewed Phillip Coggan’s More, which deals with the expansion in production over the centuries. Grant’s book is a kind of counterpart to that, advocating the making of fewer things. The author is a fashion designer, business owner and judge on a TV programme to do with sewing. Here we will focus on his general remarks, rather than his account of his own history in business (he is founder of the Blackburn-based Community Clothing, communityclothing.co.uk).
The development of capitalism meant that the interests of business took precedence over everyone else, including those who did the work and produced the goods. Only the rich benefited from this, and the emphasis switched to increasing output and consumption, rather than happiness. The fashion industry in particular grew via social manipulation, with seasonal fashions having a fixed shelf life. Many companies spend more on marketing and selling their products than on making them, and over thirty percent of all the clothing made is never sold, with fast fashion brands such as Shein and Temu leading the way here. Shein’s marketing strategy is simple: ‘make an unfathomable quantity of incredibly low-quality stuff, sell it cheaply, aggressively acquire customers, swamp the competition.’ A new product is launched every three seconds. A mention of Oscar Wilde’s remark that ‘fashion is merely a form of ugliness so absolutely unbearable that we have to alter it every six months’, would have been apposite here, except that it seems now to be a matter of days rather than months.
The quality of much of what is produced has declined over the last several decades (though cars may well be an exception). Cheaper products usually mean higher profits, of course. Fewer raw materials means clothes are often skinnier, shorter or thinner, and overcoats contain far less wool than they did fifty years ago. From the 60s and 70s, synthetic fibres such as nylon, polyester and acrylic became widely available and many manufacturers of natural-fibre fabrics went out of business, especially as offshoring became more common. The owners of companies that produce poor-quality goods are extremely rich (H&M, for instance). When you buy a garment online, you cannot judge its quality.
Moreover, few people nowadays love their jobs, even though work can contribute to personal happiness. These days far fewer people actually make things for a living, and there is a lack of workers in manual trades, which are not just ‘manual’ as they require a lot of knowledge and cognitive processing. One aim should be the creation of skilled fulfilling local jobs. Clothes, the author argues, can be produced in a way that will ensure that they age so as to provide pleasure to the wearer. Older second-hand goods can still be of high quality, and the better an object is, the more likely it is to be repaired.
There seems to be no mention here of degrowth, but a lot of what Grant advocates would imply a reduction in the amount produced and even an end to the continuous economic growth of capitalism. Much of what he says here could certainly be considered for adoption in a socialist world, but it is hard to see how it could be implemented under capitalism.
Paul Bennett
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