Production Values: the best a Man can Get? (2011)

The Production Values Column from the March 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard

A sideways glance at capitalism through some of its products. This month: the razor.

It was a nostalgia web-site which first coined the phrase “jumping the shark”. This referred to the decline in the quality of the 1970s TV show “Happy Days” which ran out of ideas and ended up with a desperate episode where the show’s star water-skied over a shark.

The phrase has now entered general usage to refer to the point at which anything gets taken just too far and becomes absurd. Socialists argue over just when capitalism “jumped the shark”: when its dynamic and revolutionary nature was overtaken by its wastefulness and unhumanitarian priorities. It has been after all a useful society in terms of enabling – at least to some extent – society’s productive powers to increase massively over the last 200 years.

It would be churlish to criticise all product developments inside capitalism. Just most of them. A good example of this is the razor blade, the earliest example of which was a long open sharp metal blade. Unlikely to pass product safety regulations nowadays, it nonetheless – in skilled hands – did the job. The development of the safety razor seems to this writer to be a useful advance. Encasing the blade in plastic to minimise the depth of any inadvertent cut, the safety razor was a big hit when first developed.

The market leader Gillette held the patent for stainless steel blades which did not rust so readily, but had not acted on it. Why not pass this benefit onto the consumer? Because they made more profit from selling lots of the inferior carbon steel blades which blunted easily. Perhaps not the best “a man can get”, then.

Similarly the move by Bic and then all manufacturers into disposable shavers meant lower up-front cost for the consumer but larger long-term revenue. In particular the adoption of the cartridge system (separate blade unit from the handle) meant that the manufacturer “locked in” the customer to their brand which – unsurprisingly – wouldn’t fit any competitors’.

The wholly disposable razor came next, followed by adjustable heads (the razer that is, not the user). One sharp cookie came up with the idea of having two blades side-by-side, on the dubious grounds that this somehow made for a closer shave. It wasn’t long before the main competitor responded with a three-blade system.

Whatever would they think up next? Crack teams of researchers worked night and day in labs to keep ahead of the competition. They finally came up with “Quatro” – yes, you guessed it, four blades. The careful reader will have detected a trend here, and you’d be right: a fifth blade soon followed.

This is a brief history of just one product. Your own local supermarket will betray a thousand similar stories of artificial restrictions, artificial needs and wasted human ingenuity. Without splitting hairs, while you deliberate as to exactly when you think capitalism jumped this particular smooth-skinned shark, the steel mills of China are ratcheting up production again as news comes in (January 2011 ) of the Dutch supermarket chain Albert Heijn announcing the launch of … yes, you guessed it… a six-blade device. Happy days!

Production Values: bottled water (2011)

The Production Values Column from the February 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard

   A sideways glance at capitalism through some of its products.  This month: bottled water 

It may come as a surprise to younger readers to learn that water hasn’t always come from the supermarket in plastic bottles. There was apparently a time when you could drink it pretty much for free, straight out of the tap. Just as if it fell out of the sky!

But that was in the bad old days. Before consumers wised up and demanded that all those empty spaces waiting on supermarket shelves were filled with rows of different brands of bottled water. Petitions, campaigns and protests demanding new beverage “experiences” finally forced manufacturers and retailers in the 1980s to relent and meet consumer demands for water filtered through Corsican volcanic rock, carved from ancient arctic glaciers or condensed from mountain clouds in Fiji. (These high-end products are of course in the minority. Most products, despite the iceberg or mountain stream on the label come via a tap in an industrial estate, across from an abattoir, just off the M6).

To think that there was a time when we used to think there was just water! H2O our science teachers used to call it, which does scant justice to the range of minerals, fizz and flavourings that can now be pumped into this “pure” product. None of which appears to make much real difference, it has to be said. According to the Observer, one blind tasting panel praised a particular water’s ‘fresh, sweet, lemony aroma’ only to inform them it came from a tap in a Birmingham public toilet. Taking the piss surely.

Under capitalism there is nothing new under the sun. Not even rain. The market wasn’t of course responding to a real demand so much as completely creating that demand. Perrier and Evian are hardly even an example of capitalism’s supposed dynamic inventiveness, more a case of “old wine in new bottles”.

Humans need water. But capitalism doesn’t need humans – unless they can be employed or sold to. So because they are too poor, 3,000 children die each day from diseases caught through drinking tainted supplies. Their mistake? – to be born not as capitalists, nor even as consumers under the market system. In some regions wars are fought over which capitalist controls the water. Every time a borehole is dug a common resource is sucked up, enclosed and sold back to us. Does capitalism think we will swallow anything? Clear as.

Next month: We look at “the best a man can get”. A cure for cancer?! Of course not, we’re just looking at the razor blade.

Production Values: the Dyson Cyclone vacuum cleaner (2011)

The Production Values Column from the January 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard

A sideways glance at capitalism through some of its products.  This month: the Dyson Cyclone vacuum cleaner

Far from being a revolutionary invention, the inventor of the Dyson Cyclone vacuum cleaner (James Dyson) made no attempt to hide that the idea behind the invention he patented was nicked from seeing dust extraction equipment in a sawmill, a technology that has been around for the best part of a century.

The product however almost never got made due to the enormous costs of licencing and patenting.  This forced Dyson to look for investment from major manufacturers. The market-leader – Hoover – was one company that was offered the option of investing.  They declined as the product (which doesn’t need filter bags) kind of challenged their basic business model (which relies on the ongoing sale of replacement filter bags worth 100s of millions of dollars each year).  Hoover’s vice-president regretted in hindsight that “Hoover as a company did not take the product technology off Dyson”.  And what would they have done with it ? – “it would have lain on the shelf and not been used.”

Needless to say, now that it has established itself, the Dyson company is hardly acting like a “new broom” (for want of a better phrase) – instead they have been particularly quick to use patent law to protect against anyone coming close to copying their supposedly “original” design .

Portrayed endlessly as a society which incentivises invention and rewards risk, capitalism arguably often does the very opposite. Despite the rags to riches storylines, the best way of getting very rich is usually to make sure you are pretty rich to start with.

Rather than a testament to the creativity of the individual, let alone the magic of the market system, next time you hoover (or perhaps, “Dyson”) the carpet, think of all the useful products that never made it because of the artificial hurdle that is the patenting system that capitalism requires.  All the talk of the lifeblood of capitalism being the plucky little entrepreneur with a great new idea is nonsense: the last thing capitalists want is another capitalist joining them to share out the spoils of the class war – even if it means a great invention for gathering dust just has to (apologies) gather dust.

NEXT MONTH: we take a look at that modern must-have accessory, bottled water.

Production Values: the laptop (2011)

The Production Values Column from the May 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard

A sideways glance at capitalism through some of its products.  This month: the laptop. 

One of the more vociferous cheerleaders for capitalism and the wonders of the market system (though he seems to have been a bit quieter on that score in recent years) is Thomas L Friedman. Most famously he is the author of the spurious Golden Arches Theory of Conflict Prevention. This is the theory that no countries which both have a branch of McDonalds have been at war. (That this unlikely theory has – on numerous occasions – in fact been found to be false does not seem to have caused him to review the theory).

In his book The Lexus and the Olive Tree, Friedman exalted in the very piece of equipment he was typing his book on. His laptop then, was held up as the epitome of all that is wonderful about capitalism. After all, it comprised hundreds of different parts and sub-components – themselves the product of highly complex production processes and resources from five continents – all magically transported around the world and assembled together in a dozen countries before finally pitching up at his local store when he went to buy it to write his latest masterpiece.

The laptop I am writing on however is no less amazing. While opposed to capitalism, we socialists shouldn’t be afraid of acknowledging how massively complex, sophisticated and impressive is global production and distribution inside capitalism. Indeed it is thanks to the increase in the productive forces of capitalism that we can even consider socialism and production for use to be a practicable next step is human social organisation.

Many ideological defenders of capitalism (and not just Friedman) extol the wonders of the market system as it (apparently) enables all the right bits and pieces to be brought together with just the right timing, to be assembled and placed onto the store shelves. Indeed many members of the working class – who otherwise may have no real enthusiasm for capitalism itself – can feel daunted by the argument of socialists that we should do away with the market system as a means for matching supply with demand.

Of course this fear is to a large part a consequence of the great big convenient untruth that has underpinned debates about capitalism and socialism for almost a century now: specifically that the centralised planning of the Soviet Union is the only alternative to the market system, and somehow has something to do with socialism.

In fact, World Socialists have no time for central committees or 5-year plans. We are opposed to the market system whether it is supposedly “free” or restricted, and whether it is regulated or not. In many ways socialism will be far more responsive to real human needs and genuine preferences. Production decision-making inside socialism – both qualitative (ie how will this be produced?) and quantitative (how much?) – will be far less centralised than the soviet version of capitalism and arguably even “western” capitalism.

We would argue that we can retain much of the (apparently) chaotic, networked decentralised production decisions that are present within capitalism. We should not be daunted by the complexities of industrial production. We can do away with the overarching profit logic of the market, and at the same time have confidence that individual human beings will still express their self-defined needs by going to the local store and taking what they want without the rationing system of money and price. And thereby they – not some planning committee – will enable the dauntingly complex production arrangements that end up in the laptop I am writing this on. Rather than a tribute to the mysterious work of some “invisible hand”, the laptop – like so many products – is a testament to the ingenuity of real, co-operative human hands.

Next month: we shine a light on the crazy world of diamonds