Entertainment and Profit (1962)

From the August 1962 issue of the Socialist Standard

Theatres, cinemas and football clubs have all recently felt the draught as their support and so their receipts fell. Pubs, Restaurants and Dance Halls have gone through the same agony. Where, they must have wondered, have all our supporters, patrons, clients, gone? Surely not all of them are televiewing?

One football club got so worked up about this recently that they took a census to find out the reason for their falling gates. They discovered some of their missing supporters in the strangest of places; in the local shopping centres, fetching and carrying for the wife. The wife, apparently, is at work all week and so she has to buy as much of the week’s food as she can in one go on Saturday afternoon. Who can blame her for cutting up rough if the old man wants to enjoy himself watching football while she has to push and shove her heavy laden way through the crowds? So no football, no dozing, no telly even for him.

Of course, there are any number of reasons offered for this. Some say that football, or the theatre, or what-have-you, are not what they used to be. Others say that they are not up to the standard of other countries (how unpatriotic!). And there are those who simply shrug and blame it all onto the telly.

These are at best the superficial reasons for changes in public tastes. To find the basic reason we must look at the motive for the birth and presentation of various types of entertainment. Today, we live in a Capitalist world in which all social endeavour in terms of research, invention, culture, service and work is carried on with the object of returning to the Capitalist more from his business than he puts into it. This is assured by the simple method of allowing the working class, who produce all the wealth, to receive only a part of it in their wages. But, sometimes, as we know, there is no profit in certain lines of business. One industry may be undermined by the development of a cheap substitute for its product. Another will fail because it cannot stand the pace of competition. So they decline, sometimes washed down with crocodile tears in the City columns.

The entertainment industry is no exception to this rule. It, too, must have, its profits—and it is often not too particular how it gets them. Jazz clubs, dance halls and coffee bars are not worried whether the working class teenagers who keep them going are missing their homework, or skipping evening classes, to do so. Publicans would rather see us drinking in their bars than attending a Political or Trade Union meeting, or a lecture on archaeology if it comes to that. And entertainment, with its various branches vying with each other for our custom, must keep producing the novel and alleged improvements to keep us interested.

Yet however interested we become, we can never avoid the fact that the biggest and best part of our day is spent in being exploited in the factory or the office to make huge fortunes for the lucky shareholders. This does not leave much time to enjoy our entertainment, however good or bad it may be.

Joe McGuinness

News in Review: Mr & Mrs Average (1961)

The News in Review column from the February 1961 issue of the Socialist Standard

Mr & Mrs Average

According to a new Stationery Office publication—Britain, 1961 Edition— “ Mr. and Mrs. Average " are described as having a TV set, vacuum cleaner and occasionally a washing machine and a 'fridge. The acquisition of these goods is equated by advertisements, films and magazines to true, lasting happiness. We all know the phrases “No more washday fatigue with Blank's wonderful washing machine", etc. The mere fact of possessing these goods, however, does not produce happiness as soon as the gadget is installed. On the contrary, they often produce problems, mainly financial, and occasionally their "happy" possessors are driven to desperation, as in the case of a young couple in Birmingham, who clearly were "Mr. and Mrs. Average". The husband was the envy of the neighbourhood. He had bought a five-piece living room suite, washing machine, bedroom suite and TV set on hire purchase, and had redecorated his 15/- a week house from top to bottom. On 28th December I960, with the Christmas decorations still hanging gaily, the husband, wife and their 2 year old daughter were found dead in their gleaming, gas-filled kitchen. The wife was expecting her second child the following week. A note said that they worried about their hire purchase debts.

Never had it so good . . .

Airways Strike

The maintenance staff of BOAC and BEA staged a four-hour stoppage on Wednesday, January 2nd, in support of a wage claim that has been going through the laborious negotiating machinery. This, of course, caused some dislocation of airline schedules. This undoubtedly caused a lot of hardship to some passengers, but the unfortunate fact is that for the aircraft workers one of the few ways in which the employers and their own union officials can be gingered up is by resort to a strike. This was bound to be unpopular: remember how the press and the Government castigated the railwaymen and the busmen in the past for their strike action that "inconvenienced the public"?

But what happened when the strikers at the airport reported for duty after the four-hour stoppage? BEA immediately suspended them for a further 24 hours, causing six times as much inconvenience to the public. 

One would have thought that this would have brought howls of protest from the press and Government. But the only newspaper comment was typified by the Daily Mail of January 6th, which said that BEA was determined to push home the lesson to the strikers. It seems that what is sauce for the goose is not sauce for the gander.

On the Brink

Both Russia and the United States waxed indignant about each other's interference in the Laos disturbances. Sheer hypocrisy of course, because they had both been dabbling their fingers in that particular pie.

The Russians have supplied arms to Captain Kong Lae's army. Since 1954, the United States has pumped between forty and fifty million dollars into Laos. Washington wants value for its money: in 1958, it played its part in the dismissal of Prince Souvanha Phouma's government, after the elections in May of that year had returned a lot of communist members.

China is probably interested in the strategic potential of Laos, as a buffer between her and SEATO member Thailand. The Americans, notoriously trigger-neurotic in the Far East, seem to want the country more firmly under their control, and not simply neutralist.

The Laos dispute may be small in itself, but it is a miniature of the clashing interests of two giant power blocs. It could be another Korea. Or even a Sarajevo or a Danzig.

This must be the fear which overhangs every minor upheaval in the world. We are as far away from peace as ever.

Yes to De Gaulle

General de Gaulle came to power to joyful motor horns tooting the rhythm of Algerie francaise in the streets of Paris. This was an exuberant indication of the hopes of the general's supporters, that he would ruthlessly crush the FLN and maintain French rule over Algeria.

In the event de Gaulle, by resolving to come to terms with Algerian nationalism, has shown the more realistic assessment of the interests of French capitalism. In this, like many other politicians, he has disappointed a lot of his former supporters.

Last month's affirmative vote for the general's proposals gave the go-ahead to the organisation of another referendum, to be held in Algeria alone. This could express a preference for an independent country.

The second referendum will be held if security conditions in Algeria allow. This could mean that there will soon be further talks between the French government and the FLN, and that the end of the present fighting in Algeria may be in sight.

Evidently de Gaulle was determined to get his way. The questions in the referendum were loaded, the government hogged most of the propaganda and left the French army in no doubt as to how it should vote.

If this is the beginning of the road to peace in Algeria, there is no cause for another joyful tooting of horns. We all know that there will be other Algerias, with their own bloodshed and misery.

Canadian Illusion

It was not so very long ago that some of the air and sea lines in this country were working hectic overtime to accommodate all the people who were clamouring to emigrate to Canada.

These people must have gone with great expectations of a country full of good things, where everybody was happy. How has it turned out?

It is now expected that this month, Canada’s unemployment will reach ten per cent, of its working population, which is the highest since the war, and several times higher than in Great Britain.

The solutions which have been recommended for Canada's slump are not new. Some economists favour higher import tariffs and a strong effort to replace imported goods with home products. Others advocate a freer economy, with fewer fiscal restrictions.

Perhaps these are the same economists who were telling us, only yesterday, that the days of boom and slump belonged to an old era of ignorance and were gone for ever.

The emigrants must know differently. But there is little hope that they will lose the illusions which they took west with them.

Some may return to this country, or travel on to other lands. Others will stay in Canada. But wherever they go capitalism, and its problems, will be waiting to greet them.

Battle of the Roads

Despite the reduction in road deaths over the recent Christmas period as compared with that of 1959, the Ministry of Transport and the various road safety organisations are still faced with the task of exhorting the restless tide of humanity, to walk and drive carefully. Each year hundreds of proposals for road safety are considered. One of the main difficulties is that of the separation of pedestrians and traffic, but since this can only be accomplished at enormous cost, it is not considered practical, and consequently palliatives and not remedies are preferred.

There is a mistaken belief among some people that these road problems are only a recent phenomenon, but as long ago as 1846 the daily newspapers were complaining of the inadequacies of the principal thoroughfares and of the fact that all that could be done was to patch up and mend. In today’s battle of the roads one can see all the contradictory nature of capitalist society. Whilst Mr. Marples is making his appeal, we are being told about the super-petrols which are supposed to make cars go faster, not to mention the prestige value of the bigger and faster car.

But big problems are often solved by simple remedies. The question of cost in relation to profit is at the root not only of the road problem, but of most of the major problems facing society today. The road problem is aggravated by the thousands of commercial and business vehicles which congest the highways and bye-ways, taking back and forth goods which have covered the same ground several times before. There are also thousands of small, medium, and large size shops selling identical goods to the people in the already overcrowded towns and cities. We can only wonder that the accident rate is not higher than the statistics show.

Appeals for less density of commerce and industry in the larger cities have failed. London, for instance, seems to be going the same way as New York and this fact alone should dispel any illusions the long suffering travelling public have of ever avoiding the “ peak hour ” chaos—a battle of the roads with no holds barred.

Just another day (2025)

A Short Story from the September 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘You know that’s bullshit, right?’ Kelly looked up from his coffee and gave me a hard stare across the kitchen table.

I closed my eyes. I wanted sympathy, not a political debate.

‘Actually, no. I don’t think that at all,’ I said. And damn! I sounded querulous.

Kelly and I had been mates from childhood, messing around together, and propping each other up through life’s inevitable traumas. He was funny and loyal and caring, always willing to lend a hand. He was the brother I never had. And yet, at times like this, I didn’t actually like him much. We had never been on the same page politically but in the last five years he’d become a convert to so called “libertarianism”, and turned starry-eyed by the so-called magic of the market. Whenever he got political these days, he showed a callous streak, and it always came as a shock when I saw it. People have more defensive layers than there are geological strata in the Grand Canyon – layers cemented together by the anxiety of living in an unnecessarily insecure and unsociable world. It seemed to me that Kelly had grown to be at odds with his own nature.

I hadn’t intended to call on him that morning. After breakfast I’d headed into town on foot on a mission to replace my old, and now defunct, washing machine. Did I say, ‘old’? I’d bought it eight years ago and I wasn’t happy that it had died already. My previous machine had lasted me 35 years with barely a hitch.

It was a drizzly Saturday in February, the sort of day that makes you feel bleak inside. Passing the corner shop at the entrance to Kel’s road, I remembered that his wife, Margaret was up in Aberdeen for the week helping her sister care for an elderly father with dementia. Kel would probably be at home on his own. I turned aside and headed downhill towards his house. When he opened the door he was looking tired. We went through into the kitchen where he’d been working. He swept aside a pile of paperwork on the table and closed his laptop. We sat down.

‘Tax returns?’

He pulled a face.

We drank coffee, and talked of personal issues, of music and motorcycles and eventually of washing machines. I tried to avoid the topic, but you know how it is. It was like suffering a state of general inflammation. The topic emerged as a moan, the moan hardened into a rant, and I was soon well into it. The machine had broken down at a bad time. Only a month earlier I’d forked out a lot of cash to replace my failed boiler. Now there was this.

When it broke down at first, I wasn’t too bothered. I called Frank. He came over later that afternoon wearing the same tool belt he’d had for decades. He pulled the machine out from under the counter, prodded inside for a bit, grunted and then gave me a sympathetic look.

‘It’s the…X’ He said,

‘What’s an X?’ I had no idea.

It turned out to be something small but vital. The crucial detail however was that it was sealed inside the drum. That meant the whole drum assembly would have to be replaced as a unit, and that was going to cost me an arm and a leg. It would be more economical just to replace the whole machine. I trusted Frank. He’d been doing jobs for me for decades. He leaned up against the counter with a cup of tea and launched into a well-rehearsed diatribe.

Thirty years ago, he told me, manufacturers of domestic appliances made available a full range of replacement parts through their own repair people and through independent businesses. These days, once a new model went on sale, replacement parts for the old one became rare as hen’s teeth. Not that it often made any difference. In washing machines, it was common practice, these days, to spot-weld the drums, sealing components inside them and making them inaccessible when they failed. Customers were forced to buy new machines while their existing ones were still largely in good working order. Frank looked me straight in the eyes and grimaced. I nodded. I’d heard a depressingly similar story from the Gas Safe engineer who had been unable to source parts for my boiler.

After I’d shown Frank out, I got online and checked out a number of consumer magazines and independent repair companies. I was soon scribbling away in a notebook. The average life of a washing machine these days is seven years. Seven! Apart from the expense to the customer this represented immense wastage of resources and employees’ labour when they could have been doing something more useful. ‘Criminal!’ Frank had called it. Independent maintenance companies were reporting components designed to break down after a certain number of washes (a remarkably small number in some cases).

Kel sat listening while I spilled all this out across the table. He looked increasingly sceptical. This was going to result in an argument, but I was too far gone to stop.

‘Planned obsolescence is everywhere these days’ I said.

My words worked on him like some kind of dark magic.

‘C’mon, that’s left-wing bullshit,’ he said. He was trying hard to keep his tone moderate but there was a snarl in his voice.

We had hit a familiar impasse. Kel wore Free-Market Economic Theory like a cloak of invulnerability. I often wondered in these moments how our friendship survived. I gave him a crooked look.

‘It makes no sense,’ he said, spreading his hands. ‘Why would a business do that? Companies aren’t stupid. If something ends up being a piece of junk, who’s going to buy it again?’ He stopped and stared at me. ‘We’ve been through this before…’

‘Yes we have.’ I sighed. ‘There’s no point pretending it doesn’t happen when it plainly does. What about the Phoebus Cartel.’

‘Not that again! Socialists always trot that one out.’

‘And that kinda means it didn’t happen?’

‘It only lasted a few years’.

‘That’s not true!’

The doings of the Phoebus Cartel are well recorded and it’s an often quoted example of ‘planned obsolescence’. In 1925 light bulb manufacturers across America, Europe and Japan got together and agreed to make bulbs that lasted a maximum of 1,000 hours, despite their having lasted up to 2,500 hours before that time. The cartel was intended to last 30 years, but was forced to break up in 1939 at the onset of war. For a long time after the war, however, manufacturers continued independently to produce bulbs designed to fail after 1,000 hours. Even without the discipline of the cartel, they realised it was both individually and collectively in their interests (and very much against the interests of their customers) to carry on doing this. An individual company might win more customers by doubling the life of its bulbs, but they would sell only half the number they had before, not just to new customers but to their existing ones as well. And if one company did it, capitalism being a competitive system, other companies would be forced to follow suit. Kel’s idealised formula for how perfectly the market works in the customer’s interest failed to represent reality.

He scowled at me. ‘Washing machines don’t last as long these days because customers want cheaper products, so that’s what they get. What do they expect?’

‘Well that’s true, but people have limited incomes,’ I said. ‘They have always wanted cheaper products. So why weren’t they being produced cheaper before? And besides, how does that explain the use of sealed units’.

Washing machines are cheaper today for a variety of reasons, all to do with the profit motive and market economics: technology has advanced and the costs of manufacture have fallen. The market for white goods has become hotly competitive in recent years, which is driving down prices. And many of the components used are now being outsourced to low-wage economies.

In Kel’s ideological world customers control the market. Companies, it is argued, only produce what customers want. It follows, in theory and in Kel’s mind, that if washing machines don’t last as long as they used to, then it must be the working-class consumer’s fault for demanding cheaper goods. What a surprise. It is extraordinary that no matter how free-market economics theorises a problem, by some magic it invariably turns out to be working people’s fault.

‘C’mon Kel. Major companies have even admitted introducing all kinds of ways to limit their product’s lifespan, or making them unrepairable. Apple and Samsung for instance.’

‘Apple and Samsung don’t make washing machines,’ he snapped.

I threw up my eyes. It was Kel now who was sounding querulous.

‘We’re not just talking about washing machines. Obsolescence is widespread. It’s a consequence of the capitalist market system. There have been lawsuits taken out against companies in the EU for it. Against Epson, for instance. You’re clinging to a theory that justifies your belief in capitalism but doesn’t represent reality. Competition is built into the system, which means that if one company introduces a degree of planned obsolescence, they all have to.’ He said nothing, just pulled a face to show how stupid I was to believe anything so irrational.

There are multiple ways manufacturers have of manipulating consumer purchases. Back in the day Henry Ford figured out that by bringing out new models of cars regularly, he could stimulate public desires for novelty and get them to dump their old machines before they needed to. Mobile phone companies do the same today, producing new models every year, often with only minor improvements, or with a ‘new’ look which gets marketed as the latest must-have item. Newness is sexy. At the same time as new models appear, companies flood the market with adverts extolling their virtues, and people start to notice their existing phones are running unaccountably slow. Owning glitzy new things indicates status. It fills the emotional hole left inside us by the loss of community and closeness.

Kel stood up abruptly and left the room. I stared at the rain running down the windowpane and sighed. No matter how hard we tried to avoid these confrontations, they kept occurring. It was a couple of minutes before he came back. He stood in the doorway. His frown deepened for a moment, but then he exploded into laughter. I smiled and shook my head.

‘Sounds tough. Do you need some cash,’ he asked? ‘I’m not badly placed at the moment.’

I looked down at his tax returns. Even if true, I knew it was a half-truth at best. His work was seasonal. This was not his best time of year.

‘I’ll get by. I’ll need to economise for a while. No extras. Right now, though, I need to go and buy this bloody machine or else I shall start to stink.’ I got up, and we walked to the front door.

‘Give my love to Margaret’ I said when we reached the hallway. ‘When is she due back?’

He sighed. ‘Depends how long she’s needed. Her sister is pretty exhausted looking after their dad. He wandered out of the house by himself last week and got lost. They had to call the police.’

‘Ouch!’ I knew that situation from personal experience.

He shrugged and then nodded. ‘It is what it is! We cope.’

I said goodbye, pulled up my hood and walked down his path into a February drizzle. For a while my head was full of messy thoughts and feelings. Money, property, competition: they screwed up all our relations. Capital value dominated our lives. Kel, though, was a good friend, whatever differences we might have. That was something of real value to hold on to. I pulled myself back to the here and now. The road on either side was lined with a jumble of small businesses, pubs and tiny Victorian terraces built originally for railway workers. They looked shabby now. I skirted a few gathering puddles, dodged some pedestrians hurrying towards the station, and prepared myself mentally to do battle with sales staff eager for a sales commission.

Hud.

What is 'post-scarcity'?

From the August 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

A post-capitalist society has to be, by its very nature, a ‘post-scarcity’ society. It has to be a society technologically capable of adequately meeting the needs of its people. This capacity constitutes the material foundations upon which the kind of social outlook and values indispensable to the very existence of such a society can arise and truly flourish. Without it, without an ample supply of the goods and services we all need to enjoy a reasonably decent standard of living, a debilitating and scarcity-driven competitive scramble will inevitably set in, undermining our willingness to cooperate with each other and sapping our desire to work for the common good.

But what exactly does an ‘ample supply of goods and services’ mean in practical terms? Obviously, what is ‘ample’ is dependent on how much we are able to produce in the first place, but it is also crucially contingent on what we ourselves consider to be ‘ample’ – our cultural values. That is to say, it is culturally conditioned.

Consumerism

In a capitalist society, your status correlates positively with how much you conspicuously consume in the form of material wealth. This is what makes consumerism such an integral aspect of our way of life under capitalism.

The point about consumerism is that there is technically no upper limit to the quantities, or money values, of goods and services you could strive to consume. Hence the emphasis on it ‘always’ being a desirable goal that one should consume more – a suggestion that conveniently chimes with the commercial interests of businesses wanting to increase their sales. More is always better. That there is no limit on how much you should consume stems from the fact that status competition itself is essentially a zero-sum game. I can only boost my social status within a status hierarchy at your expense (and vice versa).

According to the argument, it is not just that your sense of well-being and happiness is said to grow in line with your rising level of material consumption; crucially, it is also because this rising level of material consumption works to enhance your status in the eyes of others. The corollary of this is that those lower down this status hierarchy must therefore feel, to that extent, a little less satisfied and less happy with life — at least according to consumerist ideology. The only way in which they might mitigate this relative sense of dissatisfaction or deprivation is by striving to consume more – not just more but relatively more than others around them are consuming.

Our capacity to consume more is, however, dependent on us improving our economic circumstances and increasing our purchasing power, in comparison with others. But, of course, this cannot logically happen for most people in a capitalist society since the very mechanism of capitalist incentivisation itself depends on the systemic entrenchment, and even deepening, of economic inequality. Capitalism needs us to feel dissatisfied with our lot in life, by comparison with others, so we can all the more enthusiastically buy into, and embrace, what it is (literally) attempting to sell us. And, of course, work harder to achieve it.

This is an example of contrived or artificial scarcity. It is contrived because what the system is attempting to implant in us are what Marcuse called ‘false needs’.

Produce more stuff?

What can we do about it? It cannot be emphasised too much that ‘scarcity’ in this sense will not diminish and disappear simply by augmenting or adding to our capacity to produce yet more stuff – that is, by further expanding the already formidable forces of production at our disposal.

The problem is not that we lack the technological wherewithal to make a post-scarcity and post-capitalist society feasible. The problem is, rather, that we allow a system of profit-oriented and market-based production to continue to exist and to fundamentally get in the way of fully realising the productive potential we already possess.

A post-capitalist society, while it is not a recipe for a kind of stoical belt tightening is, on the other hand, not an excuse for some sort of turbocharged consumerism. The grounds for rejecting the latter are as compelling as the grounds for rejecting the former

Instead, there is a middle way, if you like. According to this approach the technological potential to meet humanity´s basic requirements for food, shelter and so on, to a reasonable level, should be looked upon as providing us with the means and the opportunity to better accommodate, or attend to, those other (and often neglected) needs we all have as human beings quite apart from our physical or material needs.

Lifestyle changes?

One thing is for certain: just privately reflecting upon the subject of consumerism and consciously seeking to adjust your own consumer behaviour, however much this might be welcomed, is not going to be enough. Not nearly enough. ‘Consumerism’ as it has been defined here is fundamentally a social phenomenon.

This is the problem with much of the currently burgeoning literature on the theme of a post-growth – and even, post-capitalist – society, awash, as it often is, with informative and penetrating insights into the negative social and environmental consequences of ‘consumerism’. The focus is too much on the particular lifestyles of particular individuals.

With some notable exceptions, there seems to be little in the way of a well-grounded analysis linking this phenomenon we call consumerism with the underlying socioeconomic relations that define our existing capitalist social order. The general tenor of the approach is essentially moralistic in tone and, ultimately, the solutions offered seem to hinge more on reforming or tinkering around with the system than getting rid of it.

Of course, changing values is undeniably important if we are to fundamentally change the nature of the society we live in. The point is simply that we cannot just rail against the ‘consumerist values’ of this society, as we see it, without understanding where they originate from, the material circumstances out of which they have arisen. Criticism has also to be coupled with a clear commitment to changing these circumstances.

Not just subjective

We need also to look at the supply side of the equation as well – not just the demand side. We no longer live in a hunter-gatherer society where we can just go out and kill an antelope or gather roots whenever the hunger pangs prompt us to do so. We depend instead on a highly developed system of food production linking the farmer and the consumer through a complex chain of intermediate stages.

In other words, ‘artificial scarcity’ has an ‘objective’ dimension, aside from being rooted in an ideology. It would be absurd, for instance, to accuse a starving person or a homeless person of ‘consumerism’ because they wanted food or shelter. The scarcity they experience is real enough, but the point is that the reason for it occurring is both contrived – artificial – and inexcusable. Quite simply, people should not have to go without in this day and age. Yet they do.

One very obvious reason why this happens is the enormous diversion of human and material resources away from socially useful production into socially useless forms of economic activities. The purpose of such activities is not to meet human needs but to keep the capitalist system ticking over on its own terms.

Keeping the capitalist money system ticking over involves quite literally reducing the human and material resources available for meeting human needs. These are the very real opportunity costs of propping up a system of capitalist production, which cannot be denied or just brushed under the carpet. There are other, more direct and visible, ways in which human needs are blatantly disregarded and ignored as well. Thus, while we talk of starving and homeless people, we surely cannot be unaware of the grotesque spectacle of millions of empty homes languishing in the face of a growing problem of homelessness or food being destroyed in the face of hunger for no better reason than to push up prices or keep them high.

Such scarcity is ‘artificial’ in the sense that there is no logical reason whatsoever why it should exist other than the fact that it arises from the nature of the society we happen to live in. It will not cease to exist until this society ceases to exist and replaced by one in which meeting human needs is the sole concern.

Robin Cox

Running Commentary: Profit interfering (1982)

The Running Commentary column from the August 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

Profit interfering

Sanofi, the pharmaceuticals division of the French Elf Aquitaine oil group, is suspending production of Interferon, the experimental drug used in cancer treatment. The reason they have given for this decision is that sales levels have been disappointing and there has been a steady build-up of stocks. Even the usefulness of trying to develop a treatment or even a cure for cancer cannot escape the law of all production under capitalism — that without the prospect of profit, production must cease.

Last year, the Imperial Cancer Research Fund collected about one million pounds in charity for further research into Interferon. In the same year, the governments of the world spent about the same amount every two minutes on the production of armaments.

Scientists investigating Interferon in different countries have not combined their research data, because the separate corporations who sponsor them each hope to monopolise the enormous profits which might become available if the formula were perfected.

Sales of food, electricity and many other goods and services have been "disappointing” lately, resulting in widespread cutbacks in production. In none of these cases is there a lack of demand, of real need. Last year, thirty million people starved to death. What is lacking is “effective” market demand, that is, needs backed up by money. As usual, the world profit system is failing to meet human needs.

Gay power

The gays of Britain should beware. They are about to be hounded and harassed with an intensity which will make the attention they receive from Chief Constable Anderton of Greater Manchester seem aloof and apathetic.

As W. H. Smith agree to a wholesale distribution of Gay News, an apparently startling — although actually obvious—fact emerges. Gay workers are more than a deviant, oppressed, discriminated-against minority. They are also a market. The new publisher of Gay News has been specific about this. Consulting a recent detailed survey (see what we mean about being hounded?) he puts “. . . the spending power of gay men and women conservatively at about £5,000 million. It's a virtually untapped market”.

Among the first to try to exploit this is a give-away newspaper, Capital Gay. which goes out through gay pubs, clubs and the like. In common with other free papers — which are usually local in their scope — Capital Gay is little more than advertisements garnished with a few news items. Of course, some gays may object to being treated as a separate market, with special appeals to their sexual preferences. They may prefer to be lumped in with all the other workers who trawl their depressed way through the sub-standard goods in their local supermarkets. But being a lucrative market may do more for gays than any amount of protest and propaganda. In a society which produces all its wealth as commodities, the market has the power to overwhelm the most maniacal police chief or other self-appointed guardian of public morals.

Perhaps this will be called progress. Anyone with an awareness of the structure of capitalist society, and of what this does to human beings, will know that discrimination against gays is another aspect of class-based humiliation. Sexual freedom, like all other freedoms, can be secure only in a social order based on common interests.

Asbestos awards

When considerations of human well-being, even of life and death, come directly into conflict with the needs of capital to accumulate profit, the latter generally wins. There are countless examples to demonstrate this. When such conflicts occur, the companies involved are curiously adept at evading the implications.

Two hundred and fifty insulation workers in Illinois are reported by doctors to have died or become seriously ill after working with brown asbestos, amosite, supplied by North American Asbestos. An American court found against the British parent company, Cape Industries, for having knowingly supplied an extremely dangerous substance without warning, and fined them for £32 million damages.

Cape will not pay this money, since the award is not enforceable in Britain, where they face many other such charges, having been named in 900 cases. In the American case, however, they took more elaborate precautions than ever to avoid having to pay money out of the profits made from those workers' deaths.

Cape’s parent company. Charter Consolidated, is the London associate of the Anglo-American Corporation of. South Africa, with mining interests in America. In January 1978, after paying out one million dollars in an asbestos case in Texas, Cape liquidated its North American Asbestos Corporation, which had also supplied the amosite used by the workers who died in Illinois.

But Cape continued to own shares in the Liechtenstein-based Associated Mineral Corporation, which supplied asbestos to Continental Products, who operated from the same Chicago address which had been used by the North American Asbestos Corporation. (Guardian, 6 July 1982; World in Action, Granada TV, 5 July 1982.)

Proper Gander: All over the shop (2025)

The Proper Gander TV column from the February 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

Netflix released Buy Now! The Shopping Conspiracy just before the Black Friday spending bonanza, since when we’ve also had the pre-Christmas push to shop and the post-Christmas sales aligning with retailers starting to stock up for Easter. While the documentary engagingly describes how capitalism turns us into hungry customers and consumers of short-lived commodities, predictably it’s not as subversive as it wants to appear.

As is the norm, the programme starts with a quick-fire round-up of what’s to come, which is largely interviews and clips of stock footage, archive news and content from vloggers. Between these are CGI scenes of panoramas of piles of rubbish (an idea recycled from the 2008 film Wall-E) and billboards displaying words like ‘buy’ and ‘consume’ (an idea recycled from the 1988 film They Live). AI is also invoked with the presenter being Sasha, apparently a disembodied expert on ‘how to succeed in business’. Sasha outlines ‘the five most important lessons in profit maximisation’, which provide a framework for the documentary, although ‘her’ presence quickly becomes annoying, perhaps deliberately.

The first of these lessons is ‘Sell More’, in which we’re introduced to the people interviewed throughout the programme, including ex-employees of corporations who became disillusioned after realising what the brands they were promoting really represent. Some particularly interesting contributions are made by Maren Costa, previously a ‘User Experience Designer’ with Amazon. She talks about her initial excitement at creating new ways to make products tempting (right down to the most effective font colour) and easier to buy (with ‘one click’), until she realised she was working within ‘an intentional, complex, highly refined science to get you to buy stuff’. Although the focus was on selling Amazon’s stock, Maren says ‘I don’t think we were ever thinking about where does all this stuff go?’ Buying tech or clothes tends to involve getting rid of whatever has been replaced, as described in the second section ‘Waste More’. Producers have known for a long time that shortening the lifespan of a commodity means that a new one will be bought sooner, increasing sales further. The most notorious example of this planned obsolescence was when the durability of incandescent lightbulbs was set by a cartel of companies in the 1920s. Another approach is to make it impossible to mend broken appliances, such as when the fixings on the cases of Apple iPhones changed so their backs couldn’t be unscrewed. Gadget manufacturers have even filed lawsuits against organisations such as iFixit to prevent their devices from being repaired. Items are often thrown away before they’re even used, as shown in footage of Amazon employees destroying serviceable goods because it’s cheaper to do this than redistribute them.

The third lesson ‘Lie More’ covers how we’re encouraged to believe that products are or can be recycled to distract us from their real environmental impact, not only how they end up adding to piles of waste, but also the CO2 emissions caused by their manufacture. If we have the impression that a brand has green credentials, we’re more likely to buy its merchandise. The practice of ‘greenwashing’ – pretending to be eco-friendly – is, according to Maren, a ‘double evil’ as companies are not only harming the environment, but also pacifying people. In the fourth section ‘Hide More’ we’re told about how the amount of waste generated by commodity production is disguised through the irresponsible ways it’s dealt with. Discarded items are moved across the planet to where it’s cheaper for them to be disposed of, such as countries without much legislation about handling hazardous scrap. Unfortunately, around this point the documentary loses momentum. The fifth section ‘Control More’ is very brief, despite it hinting at explaining the word ‘conspiracy’ in the show’s title. Maren says that staff at the highest level have to commit to ‘backing the company no matter what’, so after she spoke out about Amazon’s carbon emissions, she lost her job. ‘They don’t want anyone disrupting that story’ which presents a company as admirable even though it reinforces the damaging normality of pushing out more and more shoddy products which often end up littering beaches in Africa.

After over an hour of vividly highlighting problems, Buy Now! The Shopping Conspiracy doesn’t have much to say about solutions. It winds down with each of the interviewees giving glib optimistic lines which brush over the detail of what they previously described. The views of the writer and director Nic Stacey don’t seem to be any more thorough. When asked about how the problem of waste could be resolved, he said ‘companies need to creatively think about ways that they can extend the lives of the products they make. And we need policy change; governments can help put legislation in place to manage the end of life of a product’ (tinyurl.com/3fsuuenh). This hasn’t happened because it hasn’t been in the interests of the capitalist class which owns the companies, although their role isn’t explored in the documentary. There is little explanation of the overriding need for production to accumulate profit for those capitalists, which leads to practices such as manipulative advertising, planned obsolescence, greenwashing and making more refuse than can be handled. Nor is the wider economic context of the global commodity market sketched out, even though this underpins how companies have to operate. Two of those prominently criticised in the show are Apple and Amazon, and their Siri and Alexa virtual assistants sound similar to the dislikeable virtual presenter Sasha. Both companies are rivals of Netflix, who stream the documentary: Apple TV and Amazon’s Prime Video division compete with Netflix for subscribers, even though for many years, Netflix has relied on its data being hosted by the Amazon Web Services cloud. As Netflix is part of the same media market, it also has to follow ‘the five most important lessons in profit maximisation’ outlined by Sasha. So, it isn’t going to broadcast anything which delves too deeply into why.

Mike Foster

Christmas every day? (2024)

Viv and Keith.

From the December 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

In 1961 Viv Nicholson, whose husband had won the equivalent of over four million pounds on the football pools, became famous after declaring she would ‘spend, spend, spend’. Which she then proceeded to do. At this time of year, without that amount of geld available to you, do you feel pressured to follow that example? Do you wish you were like Viv and could win loads of lucre on the national lottery. That would solve all your problems, wouldn’t it? Or would it?

Festivity: ‘a joyous feast, holiday or celebration’. Do you buy into Christmas because it makes you temporarily forget how pitiful it is to be a wage slave? Not that you’re being pressured. Much. The retail outlets have been selling Christmas commodities since September. Poverty, or struggling with the rising cost of living or unaffordable energy bills is no excuse. Not believing in the Christmas fairytale doesn’t excuse you from participating. The UK now has more atheists than believers in a fairy tale. So what are you celebrating? It’s a British tradition, you say? Christmas trees, Charles Dickens, God bless us one and all, blah blah. The Queen’s, oops, King’s Speech telling you that no matter how bad your year has been the privileged ruling class have had it much worse.

Is it because the kids expect presents, expensive ones too? Do you want them to be embarrassed because their friends got much better ones? They’ll probably still be dissatisfied. Don’t you realise that the true meaning of Christmas is spend, spend, spend until it hurts? Is no one thinking of the poor capitalists and their profits? Oh, you are fighting your way through the Boxing Day sales where wage slaves in shops are forced to work the holiday to add to capital’s rapacious pursuit of even more profit. They don’t have a choice. This applies to many other workers in various industries. Selling your mental or physical labour power is necessary to live in a capitalist system.

The mainstream media will no doubt have faux anger stories about a single parent spending huge amounts of money on presents for their children. This will elicit gasps of horror in the comments section from the indignant who will be incensed that someone on benefits can afford to do that. ‘I work long and hard and I can’t afford to do that’, they will cry. ‘It’s my taxes that’s paying for that!’ Note that in order for the media to manufacture outrage the story has to be about someone being supported by the state.

Once there was a time when preparations for the winter festival did not begin until a week or two before… Home-made paper chains as decorations. Catching the bus with your mom to go shopping in the local town or village to buy all the necessary prerequisites. Salvation Army bands busking in the streets, guilt-tripping passers-by into putting money in their hat. It’s for charity! It should be noted that the lyrics of many carols would have made William McGonagall ashamed to have written them.

Charities love Christmas. An excellent time to prick people’s consciences and get the money rolling in. The homeless and dispossessed may enjoy a few days of respite at Christmas before once more disappearing out of sight and out of mind. Society won’t begrudge them a little warmth, some decent food and a warm bed, but will happily turn them back onto the streets and leave them to their fate.

Oh, how naive we were then. Pillowcases of presents to open when you awake. At that age there was no conception of how hard it might have been for your parents to provide the gifts. Your dad getting up early to build a fire in the grates to warm the rooms. Him making the first cup of tea of the day for everyone and adding a generous measure of whisky to it, even for the thirteen year old. Mothers and female relatives working as hard as they did every day, or even harder, with no labour-saving devices to help them.

This is not to romanticise the past, but to highlight that for many of us it would be many years before we learnt how exploitative the capitalist system is and discovered that there was and is a better alternative. Back then there was no knowledge of how one’s parents might have had to scrape and save to buy their children presents and provide the enjoyable, but ignorant, experience.

Season of goodwill to all men, women and children? Not to those who are still being killed and maimed because some capitalists within particular states are intent on fulfilling their desire for yet more profit irrespective of the cost to innocent lives. Is there likely to be a Christmas truce, like the one in the First World War, in the conflicts currently raging across the world? You wouldn’t bet on it, and in any case a cessation of hostilities for one day is hardly sufficient. Hostilities across the world need to be suppressed forever. What is the likelihood of that happening under capitalism? Zero.

When the ‘festivities’ have ended what is there to look forward to? The rich will get richer, the poor won’t, and the global working class will continue to be exploited. The world will continue to be a less safe place.

Greg Lake sang that the Christmas you get, you deserve. Don’t you think you deserve something better than capitalism? Don’t wait until another year has gone by. Make your new year’s resolution a Lennon one… ‘Imagine there’s no countries. It isn’t hard to do. Nothing to kill or die for. And no religion too. Imagine all the people living life in peace.’ There’s many more benefits to a system where goods and services are produced for use, not profit. No classes, no leaders either. Give yourself and everyone else a real present – socialism.

Dave Coggan

The myth of consumer sovereignty (2024)

From the July 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

In his seminal work, Stone Age Economics published in 1972, the anthropologist Marshall Sahlins controversially suggested that hunter gatherers, though conspicuously lacking in those sundry accoutrements of what we call ‘civilisation’ – like money, fast cars, an 80-inch flat- screen TV and a semi-detached terrace in the suburbs – may nevertheless have constituted what he called the ‘original affluent society’.

This was a startling claim, to say the least. It certainly challenged what we conventionally mean by the term ‘affluence’. As Sahlins noted:

‘By the common understanding, an affluent society is one in which all the people’s material wants are easily satisfied. To assert that the hunters are affluent is to deny then that the human condition is an ordained tragedy, with man the prisoner, at hard labor, of a perpetual disparity between his unlimited wants and his insufficient means. For there are two possible courses to affluence. Wants may be “easily satisfied” either by producing much or desiring little.’

‘Producing much’ is what Sahlins called the ‘Galbraithean way’ to affluence – named after the economist, J K Galbraith, who had written a book in the 1950s called The Affluent Society – although Galbraith himself was somewhat ambivalent about the whole subject of affluence.

As he saw it, the age-old problem of scarcity had been largely overcome. The emphasis on increasing productivity and output, he argued, may have been apposite in earlier times when large swathes of the population had little option but to endure grinding poverty. However, this was no longer the case in the post-war era of mass production and consumer plenty. Hence, society’s priorities needed to change – from delivering yet more affluence to dealing with the challenges that affluence threw up – such as glaring inequality and environmental destruction. Amongst other things, concluded Galbraith, this called for more Keynesian-style government regulation of the economy, more investment in the public sector and so on.

As a consumption theorist, Galbraith was very much influenced by earlier writers in that tradition – like Thorstein Veblen, author of The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), for instance. Galbraith argued that the conventional wisdom regarding the role of consumers had become outdated – that is, the idea that the ‘consumer is king’. According to this, whatever the consumer wants, businesses obligingly provide.

For Galbraith, the boot had since transferred to the other foot: it was now the producer who was king and the consumer, the subject. The consumer was, for instance, now more of a price-taker than a price-maker, a tendency that would have been reinforced by the increasing concentration and centralisation of capital in fewer hands. In short, the increasing domination of the economy by giant corporations.

Because of their large size, these corporations were not so much constrained by market competition when it came to setting prices. Nor for that matter, by the single-minded quest to maximise profits. That might well still be the primary goal of small businesses or, indeed, the shareholders of large corporations. However, suggested Galbraith in another book entitled The New Industrial State (1964), the former were in decline while the latter had largely lost control to a specialist planning and technical elite – dubbed the ‘technostructure’ – intent upon promoting technical efficiency and expanding the corporation out of undistributed profits.

In that sense profits still mattered; the corporation would prefer, for example, to finance itself rather than depend on bank loans and this obviously required that it be profitable. But the point that Galbraith was making was simply that the pursuit of profit was not of such overriding importance as it once was and that other objectives had entered into the frame alongside profit-making. With hindsight, however, things have not turned out quite like Galbraith imagined, with ‘shareholder capitalism’ now back firmly in the driving seat.

Dependence effect

For him, all these various developments also gave rise to something that he called the ‘dependence effect’. By this he meant consumer preferences had become more dependent on, or conditioned by, the corporate imperatives of big business. These latter were to increase sales and thereby make the fullest possible use of the large-scale productive capacity they had built up and so reap the benefits of scale economies. In other words, to some extent, these imperatives were technologically driven. While the resulting price reductions might, in the short run, seem to adversely affect the revenue stream of a business and hence its profits, in the long run it enabled the business to undercut its competitors and so capture a larger slice of the market.

However, what this also meant is that more demand for these products had to be created, or stimulated, in order to justify and maintain a high level of output. Price cutting would help in that respect but, in addition, boosting demand necessitated resorting to intensive advertising and ‘salesmanship’. In short, by generally promoting a culture of emulative and acquisitive consumerism.

Strictly speaking, the aim was not so much to satisfy the wants of the consumer as such. Rather, it was to ensure that the consumer remained perpetually unsatisfied and forever in a state of wanting more. In short, it was to promote the idea of ‘consumption for the sake of consumption’ (mirroring ‘production for the sake of production’).

Galbraith argued from what he called a commonsensical premise that the more amply a person´s wants are supplied the less urgent will those wants become. However:

‘If the individual’s wants are to be urgent they must be original with himself. They cannot be urgent if they must be contrived for him. And above all they must not be contrived by the process of production by which they are satisfied. For this means that the whole case for the urgency of production, based on the urgency of wants, falls to the ground. One cannot defend production as satisfying wants if that production creates the wants.’

In other words, the institutions of modern advertising and salesmanship ‘cannot be reconciled with the notion of independently determined desires, for their central function is to create desires—to bring into being wants that previously did not exist’.

Predictably enough, Galbraith´s arguments were excoriated by hostile critics like market libertarians for whom the concept of consumer sovereignty was something sacrosanct. It was key to their model of competitive market economy that works to maximise economic welfare in strict accordance with the wants of rational actors expressed through the market. Since these are essentially both rational and sovereign it was not for anyone else to question or frown upon such wants – whatever might be the social or environmental costs of satisfying them.

Any suggestion that consumer preferences might be moulded by institutional forces emanating from outside or beyond the individual themselves was regarded as anathema, an affront to the individualistic worldview of the market libertarians. If individuals were so easily manipulated, what is to prevent them making irrational choices, perhaps leading to some or other suboptimal outcome that might tarnish the good reputation of the free market?

Rejecting the very idea of a ‘dependence effect’ thus committed these market libertarians to the view that our wants (whether urgent or not) must necessarily always be ‘original’ to the individual themselves – or, to use Galbraith’s expression, will always spring from their own inner disposition alone. Suggesting they can be conditioned or shaped by some external force or factor had one further consequence. It could potentially call into question that most sacred of dogmas upon which much mainstream economic thinking hinges – namely, that our wants are insatiable. For if we can be persuaded to buy more we can also be persuaded to want less and therefore to buy less. Clearly, that would not be in the interests of the business community.

Manipulating wants

For Galbraith, that is precisely what this community was in the business of doing – persuading consumers. As he argued, if wants were genuinely original or innate to the consumer then what would be the point in advertising at all. The consumer would seek out and find the product that might satisfy their particular want of their own accord. The fact that the product is so relentlessly publicised strongly suggests that the purpose of the advertisers is to expand the consumer´s wants or even to supply them with completely novel wants that they did not even realise they had.

Naturally, this has prompted a counterargument from Galbraith´s critics that advertising can be justified on the grounds that it is merely alerting us to the existence of useful products we might otherwise have overlooked. However, this counterargument strikes one as being somewhat disingenuous.

To begin with, there is the sheer scale of advertising to consider. It seems absolutely disproportionate to what the market libertarians claim its purpose to be. It does not seem credible, to put it mildly, to suggest that businesses, ferociously competing against each other for a bigger slice of the market, would spend such vast sums of money merely to provide a public service, as it were – of informing the consumer of the availability of these products and thereby enabling them to better satisfy their wants.

Galbraith might have been naïve if he imagined that advertising could somehow be pruned back to a bare minimum in a competitive market economy. But his critics were no less, if not considerably more, naïve in their understanding of what advertising is about. Its purpose is, very clearly, more to persuade than inform. This is evident in the very of techniques of advertising itself. These involve repetition, reinforcement and the copious use of emotional associations, fantasy, irony and downright innuendo. Such techniques are demonstrably manipulative in style, often preying on people’s vulnerabilities and sense of self-esteem.

In the early days of advertising there was, arguably, rather more in the way of factual or informational content to adverts but those days have long gone. The dark arts of the advertisers have evolved way beyond that since then. Advertising today, suggests Andrew Simms, is about mind control. Like air pollution it seeps into every nook and cranny of our lives. Indeed, it is reckoned that the average American citizen is exposed to anywhere between 4,000 and 10,000 adverts every single day:

‘Advertising works by getting under your radar, introducing new ideas without bothering your conscious mind. Extensive scientific research shows that, when exposed to advertising, people “buy into” the materialistic values and goals it encourages. Consequently, they report lower levels of personal wellbeing, experience conflict in relationships, engage in fewer positive social behaviours, and experience detrimental effects on study and work. Critically, the more that people prioritise materialistic values and goals, the less they embrace positive attitudes towards the environment – and the more likely they are to behave in damaging ways.’

More ominously, Simms goes on to refer to the findings of neuroscience on the effects of advertising on the human brain: ‘advertising goes as far as lodging itself in the brain, rewiring it by forming physical structures and causing permanent change. Brands that have been made familiar through advertising have a strong influence on the choices people make. Under MRI scans, the logos of recognisable car brands are shown to activate a single particular region in the brain in the medial prefrontal cortex. Brands and logos have also been shown to generate strong preferences between virtually identical products, such as fizzy drinks – preferences that disappear in blind tests. Researchers looking to assess the power of advertised brands concluded that “there are visual images and marketing messages that have insinuated themselves into the nervous systems of humans”’ (Guardian, 11 October 2021).

If we accept that the purpose of advertising is more to persuade than to inform then this puts our market libertarians in an essentially untenable position. It means having to concede that our wants are not necessarily those that are original to ourselves and that, consequently, we are not at all like the sovereign individuals depicted in individualist mythology, driven by impulses that arise entirely within ourselves. It means having to acknowledge that we are, indeed, social animals capable of influencing and being influenced by others.

Given the manipulative nature of advertising it follows that weakening or removing its influence would result in a situation in which consumer wants would indeed more closely approximate those of our hypothetical sovereign individual. Therein lies a delicious irony – the fact that market libertarianism through its endorsement of the practice of advertising would appear to be in league with those very forces that threaten our individual sovereignty and our ability to rationally think for ourselves.

Untenable position

Faced with the incontrovertible evidence that advertising does indeed contrive to expand our wants or introduce new ones, some market libertarians have adopted a somewhat different tack than that of outright denial. This might be described as an exercise in damage limitation.

A case in point was the prominent free market supporter, Friedrich von Hayek. Hayek contended that it was a gross exaggeration to suggest corporations could determine consumer preferences through the power of advertising alone. That is undoubtedly true although it misses the larger point. The inculcation of consumerist values in the population is not something for which any one particular agency or institution can be held solely responsible. It is woven into the very fabric of life under capitalism.

It arises from the system´s competitive dynamic and its built-in disposition to grow without limit. The relentless accumulation of capital that competition compels finds its correlate in the no less relentless drive to boost market sales by means of which the economic surpluses to finance that accumulation can be realised.

Robin Cox

Proper Gander: Temu’s temerity (2024)

The Proper Gander column from the July 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

In the market of online marketplaces, Amazon and eBay’s dominance has recently been challenged by young upstart Temu. Like its competitors, Temu offers a dizzyingly wide range of commodities such as clothing, household items and jewellery which can be delivered to your door in just a few clicks. Since its launch in September 2022, Temu has rapidly expanded to having half a billion users worldwide. A quarter of the British population has downloaded its app, encouraged by social media advertising and influencer recommendations.

Temu’s business model is to be a platform for thousands of other companies to sell their products direct from China to customers worldwide. It doesn’t have enormous depots like Amazon does, and therefore avoids associated costs, allowing it to charge less for its wares. Of course, this cheapness has come at a price. Complaints about the quality and safety of Temu’s products attracted the attention of Channel 4’s Dispatches, whose documentary aimed to tell The Truth About Temu. Predictably, the programme was too brief to give more than an outline of each problem, nor explain the wider context of how such companies fit with capitalism.

Reporter Ellie Flynn buys some items through Temu to check how they compare with the way they’re advertised. Some products come with false claims that they have been certified as safe by recognised organisations, and a baby walker harness purchased for £2.68 snaps within seconds when tested with a bag of sand. Flynn looks at news reports of people who have lived through tragedies after ordering items from Temu: a woman whose house burnt down due to a faulty Tablet and a girl who suffered burns from glue when applying fake fingernails. Flynn arranges for toxicology tests on some items she has bought, including a ‘gold’ necklace priced at £2.97 which is revealed to have twice the legal amount of lead and 27 times more cadmium than permitted. She also orders saw blades and BB guns without the website checking her age. Temu replies to these concerns with corporate-speak statements that it has withdrawn some products pending checks and that it maintains ‘rigorous quality controls’, although insufficient safeguards appear to be in place.

Hoping that low prices are enough of a distraction from risks isn’t the only approach used by Temu to manipulate us into buying. Its app is designed to entice us into spending more time, and therefore more money on the site. Flash sales, mini games, prizes and deals are jazzed up with colourful, cartoonish graphics. Emerging technology consultant Nina Jane Patel says that the app is ‘gamifying the shopping experience, but on steroids’. The aim is to make buying entertaining in a way closer to playing games and gambling than just swiping through a catalogue. Flynn arranges for her brain activity to be measured while using Temu’s app, and compares these results with what’s recorded while shopping from Amazon and playing a casino app. When using Temu, there were spikes of pleasure-related stimulation recorded, presumably when a particularly alluring bargain was found, a pattern with similarities to when the gambling app was being played.

This experiment shows how the capitalist system conditions our attitude to our possessions. In a society of scarcity and rationing through money, we’re likely to react with a buzz of satisfaction, even if it’s near-subliminal, when we acquire something, whether by shopping or gambling. Temu has exploited this learned response with lucrative results, but in a way which pushes at the boundaries of what’s considered acceptable practice, at least in the UK. Iain Duncan Smith, in his role as Vice Chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Gambling Related Harm has been investigating the implications of Temu being based on a gambling-like system, such as how this can lead to addictive behaviour.

In the documentary, Smith says that the personal data gathered when people buy through Temu has to be shared with the Chinese government under its National Security Law. This data would then be passed on to the state’s intelligence service to sift through for anything nefariously useful. Temu denies sending information to the Chinese government and says that its data policy is on its website, which Flynn can’t find.

How much notice will the Chinese state take of the UK’s regulations about the use of data? Similarly, the UK’s health and safety laws are difficult to enforce when products are coming in from overseas. While this demonstrates how national barriers add a layer of complications to how goods are distributed in capitalism, the issue isn’t only in China’s awkward relationship with Western countries. Although all the vendors selling through Temu are based in China, Temu itself isn’t wholly a Chinese business. Its parent company, PDD Holdings has its headquarters in South Korea and its ‘legal domicile’ is in Ireland. Despite any links to the Chinese state, Temu is not rooted in only one country, reminding us that its owners in the capitalist class sit above national borders.

And it’s the profit-hungry motives of the capitalist class which really drive Temu’s approach. Its products are sold as cheaply as possible to maximise the potential number of customers, lured in by marketing and held onto using gambling’s techniques. A profit margin can be maintained if costs are kept low by cutting corners during manufacturing and distribution. The quality or suitability of the end product isn’t an important consideration, nor is the waste of resources in shipping goods across continents, nor is the wellbeing of the staff involved. Temu represents some of the worst aspects of capitalist society, but this is what has made it a success, in capitalist terms: PDD Holdings is worth an estimated £170 billion to its owners and shareholders. To the rest of us, it’s an example of how capitalism turns what we need and want into shoddy commodities made to enrich the elite.

Mike Foster

The Battle for Your Mind (2001)

From the February 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

Does happiness reside in a bottle of perfume? Is your only concern the sweat under your arms? We take a look at the world of advertising

In 1969 the American Association of Advertising Agencies estimated that approximately 1,600 advertisements were aimed at each individual every day. That may seem a ridiculous number at first but the individual is not aware of most of them. The average person is likely to take momentarily notice of about 60 to 80 commercials a day with only 10 to 13 making a conscious impression. The number of advertisements hitting each individual today is certainly higher. You can now find advertisements regularly covering taxis, buses, toilets, envelopes, phone boxes and golf balls. In order to maintain sanity amongst this constant bombardment each individual has to erect a sort of sensory screen that can detect the oncoming signal and reject it.

On rare occasions advertisements are clever, entertaining and creative. Advertisements of this variety are few and far between, but they do exist and it would be incorrect to say that all advertising is “bad”. However, success in advertising is dependent upon the ability to manipulate the emotions, thoughts, and intelligence of the target audience to achieve the desired reaction—to get them to buy your product or service over that of your competitors. Typically, ads concern themselves with fantasy; a constructed world usually beyond the reach of our everyday experiences. They offer a vision of a world where happiness resides in a bottle of perfume, where your only concern is the sweat under your arms, and where a a low calorie drink could change your life (as part of a well-balanced diet of course).

Advertising has conditioned generations to accept it as an inescapable part of the landscape, as ubiquitous as night and day. There was a time, however, when advertising was widely considered an unwanted distraction. For example, editors initially thought ads were an intrusion upon the reader and would segregate all the adverts to the back of their magazine where they were out of the way.

“Fluff”

The roots of mass advertising lie in magazines and took off over 100 years ago when industries began producing vast amounts of consumer goods. Since broadcasting didn’t exist and newspapers were largely local, magazines were the only national advertising medium. The fact that you could produce high quality colour graphics on heavy paper, unlike newspapers, meant that magazines were much favoured by advertisers.

As soon as advertising revenue became important, at around 1890, ad agencies insisted that ads be moved from the back of magazines to the front. Inevitably, it wasn’t long before major advertisers were demanding that their ads appear opposite the opening pages of major articles. But it didn’t end there. Editors were soon selecting articles based not only on the basis of their expected interest to its readers but for their influence of advertisements.

As mass advertising grew, “liberal” and “radical” ideas in editorials became a problem. So did serious articles. A reader in an analytical frame of mind was unlikely to be enthusiastic about an advertisement for a trivial product. An article about genuine social suffering would certainly interrupt the “buying mood”. What was the solution? Easy, change the content. Better still, just fill the publication with material that will attract the readership the advertisers want. Before television emerged in the 1950’s, successful magazines were 65 percent ads. By that time, most magazines were fundamentally designed for advertising rather than editorial matter (see Vogue, Talk, Here’s Health, etc). Pick any random magazine off the newsagent’s shelf today and you’ll have a tough time trying to spot the difference between an article and an advertisement. Compare the differences between the styles, content and ideas. Most of the material claiming to be an “article” is in fact product promotion. Some writers call this “fluff”, a term used to describe material which is not news in any real sense but is non-advertising material supporting advertisers (see promotion sections in Vogue, Marie Claire, Woman’s Own, Muscle and Fitness, etc). Advertsiers want “fluff”, to create a buying mood.

One of the best examples to demonstrate the level of influence major advertisers now have over the contents of magazines is Vogue magazine. The January 2001 issue totalled 186 pages. Of those 186 pages, 87 were full-page ads. (In the first 66 pages there are 50 full-page ads.) Another 21 pages could be described as “fluff”, product promotion. The first “article” comes in at page 33. 17 pages consist of travel, food and horoscope sections. That leaves 61 pages out of 186 for article space. Of those 61 pages, 43 are full-page photographs. The main article entitled “Stars In Their Own Eyes” totals 28 pages, 27 of which are full-page photographs with 1 page of text. Richard Shortway, editor of Vogue, has said, “The cold, hard, facts of magazine publishing mean that those who advertise get editorial coverage”.

Another good example is Talk magazine. In the first 48 pages of the premier issue there were 46 full-page adverts! Unlike a few decades ago where editors would segregate ads to the back of the magazine on the grounds that it was an infringement upon the reader, the of bulk of adverting now appears in the opening pages—just where the advertisers want them.

Garbage

Advertising’s greatest effect on the mind is not so much its detail, but the mass conditioning attempted by the same basic themes occurring over and over as we slouch in a chair and uncritically listen to the garbage emitting from the box everyday.

Advertising likes to tell us how to think and how not to think. Some of the criteria we are told to use include how one should judge what is credible and incredible, what is success and failure, and how we should judge ourselves against others. Even though the advertisers are at war with each other for viewers’ and readers’ attention, the same themes keep cropping up again and again. That is because all advertising is born out of the same system, capitalism. Advertising does not exist in a vacuum; it is part of a system. Forget the three R’s taught in the education system; it is the 3 C’s in advertising that count—consumerism, conformity and competition.

Some advertisers aren’t shy to declare their support for capitalist ideas:

• “Business is the engine of society. Without it there would be no jobs. No products. No competition. No advancements.” (A 1996 Microsoft ad)
• “Of all human powers operating on the affairs of mankind, none is greater than that of competition.” (Mead Coated Papers)
• “You don’t win silver, you lose gold”. (Nike)
• “Identify yourself”. (Mitsubishi)

There are many researchers who believe subliminal advertising is being employed by a number of major advertisers to influence the subconscious mind of its viewers and readers. (Subliminal advertising is defined as images and messages that are below the threshold of conscious perception, but which will nevertheless affect the viewer on a subconscious level). The use of subliminal advertising may or may not be a reality. That is not the important thing. What we have to look at the reason for the existence of advertising in the first place, not necessarily the techniques advertiser’s employ.

Hype

The Vice President of Proctor and Gamble made a statement over 20 years ago which is truer today than ever. He said, “We’re in programming first to assume a good environment for advertising“.

In 1965 the Federal Communications Commission held hearings to determine how much influence advertisers had on non-commercial content of television and radio. Albert N. Halverstadt, then general advertising manager of Procter and Gamble, was particularly interested in the image of business and business people. He gave the FCC formal requirements for television programs:

“There will be no material on any of our programs which could in any way further the concept of business as cold, ruthless, and lacking all sentiment or spiritual motivation. If a businessman is cast in the role of a villain, it must be made clear that he is not typical but is as much despised by his fellow businessmen as he is by other members of society”.

The manager of corporate communications for General Electric has said, “We insist on a program environment that reinforces our corporate image”.

Far from being content with dominating the pages of popular magazines, major advertisers—BP, Pepsi, Levi’s, Cadburys, Ford, Nike and the rest—have set to conquer the almighty task of controlling the messages that emit from the black box in the corner of our rooms. Without doubt TV is the most effective advertising medium. Viewers don’t have time to examine or judge the messages. You sit and listen as the TV talks at you. Far from taking a passing interest, advertisers want to know exactly what time of day and in-between what programmes their ads will be shown because that will define the audience population they are buying. And there is no shortage of time. A double episode of the highly popular American sitcom “Friends” airs about 18 minutes of ads in one hour, which is nearly a third of the programming time. But don’t be mistaken in thinking the scripts of programmes are devoid of advertising influence. The ad agencies aren’t going to let them off that easily. TV executives (like editors) have surrendered to the altar of profit and are forced into the competition for viewer’s attention. Michael L. Buchenbeth has said: “The scripts are written to build tension before the commercials to hold the viewers attention during the commercials“. The basic strategy in programming is not merely geared towards satisfying the audience’s tastes but what is perceived as the most likely to attract advertisers. Like magazines, the difference between ads and programming becomes blurred. Flick the TV on . . . is it soap, a documentary, the news, an ad . . . who knows?

The motion picture has obvious advantages in immediacy, sound, colour over the still image. There is no end to the image and sound creation and manipulation possibilities; the ads with Steve McQueen in are a good example. However, the problem as far as the admen are concerned is the fact that you can only broadcast one message on one programme at a time. If an audience finds an ad boring, too long or too offensive they’re likely to commit the ultimate sin that haunts every ad agency and TV executive—they’ll switch the TV off.

The correct atmosphere is essential for advertising; which is a buying atmosphere. Short, half-hour programmes that are trivial, non-political and humorous are much favoured by advertisers. Coronation St, Star’s in their eyes, GMTV, Neighbours, She’s got to have it, Friends, TOTP, Blind Date (etc, etc) fit the bill well. Richard Lesser, then Vice President of the Grey Advertising Agency, in an article in Advertising Age (12 December 1957) wrote, “Advertisers for years have been studying the integration of the show and the commercials to see how the two can be married to each other“. It is no coincidence, for example, that Rachael and Monica from the American sitcom “Friends” have never appeared on air with anything less than perfect and immaculate hair since they have advertised L’Oreal hair products. Which ads most frequently appear in-between each episode? That’s right, L’Oreal shampoo ads that feature both Rachael and Monica.

What about the News? The fact that the Newsreaders’ scripts are interwoven with the advertisers’ interests is deliberately ignored. We are supposed to think that the ideas are the independent work of professional journalists detached from commercial bias. If the audiences were told that the ideas represented explicit demands of advertisers, the message would lose its impact. Sure, they can say what they want; as long they don’t conflict with the advertisers’ interests. The major advertisers can actually demand they report along certain lines by threatening to pull out their advertising.

Politics too

Advertising has also been used as a tool in the struggle for political ideas. Politicians, leaders and political parties alike have for some time exploited this effective medium. Political campaigns are increasingly looking and sounding more like advertising campaigns with each successive election. Sound-bites, slogans and style are very important considerations in any campaign now. The fact that a political party needs to spend thousands and thousands on advertising campaigns to improve its image just shows how shallow their message is, or the lack of one. Capitalist parties have long since ran out of anything intelligent to say and their only hope is to either re-hash old ideas or change the packaging they sell them in (see “New” Labour). Of course, the problem does not lie in the fact that they promote their political agenda but rather that they have nothing useful to say. Take away all the style and sloganeering and all you are left with is a bunch people who say very average things about very average politics; not worth voting for (see New Labour, again).

Would advertising still exist in with a society based upon common ownership? No. The inhabitants of a socialist society may well decide to have images and messages in the cities and outer environment but instead of being under the control of a profit seeking minority, they would be under the democratic control of the society, and will therefore benefit society instead of retarding it. When everyone has an equal say in what is produced and free access to it, there is no need to seduce people to choose one product or service over other. Of course, there may be a range of products which serve the same function but people will make choices free from the distortion and manipulation of advertising. The need for advertising only exists when different companies are competing over the same market for a bigger cut of the profit. A socialist society won’t require cities, towns, magazines and newspapers to be plastered with images and messages that serve no useful social function but contribute only to pollute the mental environment. There will be no profit to accumulate, no companies to exploit the workforce and no leaders to follow. Creativity, free from the constraints of profit making, can flourish and can be used to benefit society, and not be wasted on the anti-social aims of advertising agencies. Ideas, concepts and solutions will not be judged by their ability to realise a profit but by their value to its people.

T. M. Jones