Voice From the Back: The benefits of globalisation (2001)

The Voice From the Back column from the November 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

The benefits of globalisation

“With a “catastrophe” in the world’s trade and many growers facing starvation, a leading coffee buyer appealed to the International Coffee Organisation in London yesterday for a tax of $1 on a 50kg bag to save farmers . . . “It is a huge and wealthy industry, yet the beans are grown almost entirely by very poor people who receive hardly anything for their labours.” . . . Prices have halved to $75 a bag this year, mainly because of a World Bank-financed drive to plant coffee in Vietnam. Production has risen from 4m bags to 16m. Big firms, including Nestle, Procter & Gamble and Sara Lee, which owns Douwe Egberts, have kept prices up to benefit shareholders while the price to growers has halved.” Guardian (27 September). The rich get richer and the impoverished producers get poorer. Sound familiar? The answer isn’t a $1 tax but the complete transformation of society from one based on production for profit to one based on production solely for use.

Futile reforms

“The recovery of the ozone layer could be delayed significantly because the chemicals produced to replace those banned in the Montreal Protocol are proving equally damaging and are not controlled by international law, the UN Environment Programme reported.” Times (17 October). Another example of how reforms often don’t solve the problems of capitalism and another reason to get rid of it.

Save the children

During October the charity organisation Save The Children mounted a massive publicity drive to raise funds. According to their appeal “Around the world today, one in four children live in poverty – poverty serious enough to blight their lives just as they are beginning. Poverty can leave children without enough food to eat, rob them of the chance to go to school and force them into poorly paid work – vulnerable to adult abuse and exploitation.” How abusive can be gauged by the experience of a nine year old who worked for two years as a sari embroiderer, fell sick, was sent home and was paid nothing for 2 years work. The charity’s solution – send £3 a month! If only these well-meaning people would look beyond the effects of poverty to its cause we might really be able to save the children.

Same old Tories

Anyone who thought that two crushing electoral defeats would change the core policies of the Conservative Party can rest assured that the old Tory Party is sticking by its principles – support the rich against the poor. The columnist Matthew Parris writing in the Times (10 October) on their annual conference illustrated that very well when he observed: “The Shadow Chancellor, Michael Howard, railed yesterday against a Government he accused of leaving people to die in the queue for heart treatment – and was met with stony silence. Then he scolded the Government for cheating the shareholders of Railtrack – and was greeted by applause.”

Land of the free?

It reads like an Orwell-inspired dystopia, a nightmarish piece of fiction, but it is a recent letter to the editor of a mass circulation magazine. It reveals the frightening mind-set of some workers scared by the World Trade Towers disaster. Capitalism breeds paranoia and xenophobia, but even by capitalism’s standards the following is pretty scary stuff. “Our people must take an active part in the vigilant protection of our country. Civilians must assume roles in our civil defense as block watchers, neighborhood police, campus observers and providers of information to authorities about those who act suspiciously or who voice anti-American opinions.” Patrick Grant, New York City. Time Magazine (15 October).

More waste makers

Many years ago in his book The Waste Makers, Vance Packard wrote about “planned obsolescence”; the artful dodge of manufacturing products that needed to be replaced all the time. Some 40 years later we have the perfect example of this in the music business. Concerned about the misuse and selling on of the latest singles released to music executives for compiling play lists, the ingenious boffins of the music business have come up with a cunning ploy. “Tornado, the distributor of digital media products, has found a way of making Mission Impossible come to life. It has designed a voice recording that self-destructs after it has been played.” Sunday Times (7 October). There is no limit to the ingenuity of capitalism when it comes to protecting profits. Inside socialism, human inventiveness will be used for something more important than Mission Impossible recordings.

Classless society?

In his recent book Almost Like A Whale the geneticist Steve Jones comes up with some figures on land ownership that would seem to contradict those who argue that we live in a classless society where the barriers of ownership have been broken down. “Half the private land in Scotland is owned by three hundred and fifty people (in a country where half the population has no landed property at all); and the greatest proprietor of all, at a quarter of a million acres, is the Duke of Buccleuch. The Duke’s lesser titles include a couple of Earldoms, a Barony or two – and the Lordship of Eskdale”

What class are you? (1974)

From the Special 300th issue of The Western Socialist

Do you believe that America is a free society, one in which each citizen has the same rights as all citizens, where hard and fast socio-economic class divisions do not really exist? There are not many today who believe that old wives’ tale although the time was, in the memory of many of us, when it was a widely accepted myth.

We do not mean to imply that most Americans, today, are any clearer on the question of class. In fact, sociologists in these times have done a remarkable job in confusing the issue. In America, they inform us. there are a number of distinct classes. The writer Vance Packard, in “The Status Seekers," sets down a total of five divisions, two of them in what he calls "the Diploma Elite" and three in “The Supporting Classes." On top of the heap are the members of “The Real Upper Class" and “The Semi-Upper Class." On the lower levels running from top to bottom are “The Limited Success Class," “The Working Class,” and “The Real Lower Class." Note well that Mr. Packard does recognize that there is a working class but it is but one among three distinct "supporting'’ classes. The working class, in Mr. Packard's scheme of things, seems to be sandwiched between a top slice of white-collar and higher income blue-collar workers, and a bottom slice of the lower I.Q. workers, the slum dwellers.

There are, no doubt, other class designations, that are better known, designations such as upper upper, lower upper, upper middle, lower middle, upper lower, and lower lower. If you were not confused before now you should be by now. And yet, such terms are used by professionals who are supposed to know what they are talking about because their field is sociology.

Well, let’s take a closer look at the confusion. How does one go about determining one’s class? By education? By Income? Or perhaps it should be based on one’s parents' education or income, or on one’s children’s education or income? Where do the operators of a mamma and pappa grocery store that keeps open on a 12-hour-per-day, seven-day week basis fit? Suppose they wind up with $10,000 a year but have no better than high school education, or perhaps not even that much? Are they lower middle? But supposing they have a doctor or lawyer son and own a house in a better-type neighborhood? Then they might be upper middle. Or perhaps even lower upper If their son’s income is away up there.

Or how about the college graduate with an income of $12,000 per year. Is his class determined by his education or his income or both? And is he in a higher or lower class than a construction worker who dropped out of high school but who earns $15,000 per year and owns a split level home next to his? But, you might protest, the construction worker is not secure because were the building boom to slow he would suffer in income. Ah yes! But the college graduate is in the same boat or have you forgotten the engineers, doctors, and lawyers who adorned the WPA rolls In the 30s? Professionals with degrees also sell the commodity labor-power, their particular skills, and are subject to the vicissitudes of the labor market, too.

Socialists have a far simpler and far more scientific method of determining class. Do you work because you must work in order to live, be you doctor, lawyer, engineer, bricklayer, hod carrier, grocery clerk, or casual odd job laborer? Then you belong to the working class and there’s no use trying to kid yourself into thinking otherwise. Certainly some workers earn more than others, live better, but the size of one’s salary is not pertinent to the question of class. If your income is not based upon wages or salaries but upon rent, interest and/or profit you are a member of the capitalist class, one of some 10% of the population. You may be a big capitalist or you may be a small capitalist but this is not the point. Socialists divide society into two basic classes based upon ownership or lack of ownership of the means for producing and distributing wealth. And socialists aim for a world in which classes, real or imaginary, will cease to exist, where people will no longer be classified as capitalist or worker but simply as people.

Letter: A pretty kettle of fish (2023)

Letter to the Editors from the July 2023 issue of the Socialist Standard

This letter of complaint written by a very disgruntled electric kettle customer was sent to a consumer affairs television programme.

Dear Editors,

Four years ago I bought a Russell Hobbs electric kettle. I chose this one because this is a popular brand and I thought that it would be reliable and give me years of good service. It came with a 2-year guarantee, so now that it is 4 years old the company that manufactured it is not under any obligation to replace it for me.

The fault is quite trivial. It still boils the water but it has developed a leak. I looked inside the kettle and saw that there is a small nut that needs to be tightened, but it is behind the element so I can’t get at it to fix it. I took it to the registered appliance agent who told me that it cannot be fixed because the element cannot be removed. He advised me to throw it away and buy a new one. The kettle is made of stainless steel, a durable material which should last forever. If I bought a stainless steel cooking pot and boiled water in that, it would last forever, but of course, we all want a kettle because it uses less electricity to heat the water than having to put a pan on the cooker. I remember when electric kettles and electric jugs were made with parts that could be replaced, for example, elements could be replaced when they wore out.

My issue is not just, in this instance, with Russell Hobbs, but with the capitalist system which forces manufacturers of all appliances to make their goods so that they have a very short lifespan and have to be replaced every few years.

What a terrible waste of the Earth’s resources!

Shall we continue to fill up our rubbish tips with appliances that have been designed to break down after just a few years?

In a capitalist society manufacturers have to be seen to be making a profit. The only way they can do this is to make sure that we have to keep on buying their goods and replacing them on a regular basis. And to hell with using up all the Earth’s valuable resources and filling the rubbish tips with stuff that is non-biodegradable!

Until humankind changes the current exploitative system, of both workers and consumers, with one where goods are produced for use, not profit, I think that it should be illegal to manufacture anything that cannot be repaired.

Yours Faithfully,

Moggie Grayson

Reply:

We have dealt comprehensively over the years with the deliberate act on the part of manufacturers to ensure that their particular commodities are made not to usefully last for a long time but to wear out in a relatively short space of time. Why are things not built or made to last? Because longevity is the enemy of profit – which is the raison d’être of capitalism.

‘In 1960 Vance Packard (certainly no socialist) wrote a book called The Waste Makers which caused a minor disturbance at its publication because it dealt with what he termed “planned obsolescence”. Packard showed how firms made shoddy goods, designed to wear out quickly so there would be a market for new ones. He wrote of radios, car parts and television sets which their designers and manufacturers knew could easily be made to last longer. There have even been instances of workers being fired because they took the time to do an excellent job, and so were not profitable’ (‘Waste and want — the insane logic of capitalism.’ World Socialist, April 1984).

Add computers, mobile phones, white goods, microwaves and electric kettles to the items that Vance Packard described.

‘There is no technical reason why solid and reliable electric and electronic appliances with easily changeable and compatible parts and able to incorporate innovations could not be produced. Industrial designers would surely love to do this but under capitalism it is the marketing department that calls the shots, as what is being produced are not simply products to be used, but commodities to be sold on a market with a view to profit’ (‘Organised Waste’, Socialist Standard, May 2011).

An update on Packard’s The Waste Makers was published in 2006: Made to break. Technology and Obsolescence in America by Giles Slade (reviewed in the Socialist Standard, October 2009). Slade wrote:

‘Our whole economy is based on planned obsolescence and everybody who can read without moving his lips should know it by now. We make good products, we induce people to buy them, and then next year we deliberately introduce something that will make those products old fashioned, out of date, obsolete. We do that for the soundest reason: to make money’ (p. 153).

Think of the regular introduction into the market of smartphones. Older models work just as well but are eventually made unusable because the operating system becomes unable to support newer applications and support for the older models is discontinued. The same can be said of computers.

The reviewer made the point that the workers, who design and produce these items – and run capitalism on behalf of the elite class – are perfectly capable of making better quality goods and that:

‘This provoked a conflict with engineers, who knew they could make solid products that could last for years, but in the end their reluctance was overcome (they, too, are in the end only hired employees who have to do their employer’s bidding). It is also enormously wasteful as still useable products, and the material resources that went into making them, are simply thrown away’.

The solution to the problem of built-in obsolescence (and to many others) is straightforward. It’s the removal of the cost-saving, corner-cutting, ‘must keep profits as high as possible’ pressures which, by the economic laws of capitalism, all producers are subject too.

The only way to stop it? The replacement of capitalism by socialism where quality will extend to all areas of life. Why, with production directly for use, would we want to turn out stuff made not to last?

Dave Coggan

World of buying and selling (1999)

Book Review from the July 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Manipulators by Jeffrey Robinson. Simon and Schuster, 1998, £17.99.

More than 40 years ago an American journalist, Vance Packard, wrote The Hidden Persuaders. In it he revealed how the advertising industry was mass producing customers the same way manufacturers were mass producing goods for the market. Now along comes Jeffrey Robinson to update us on the same theme. Short sentences. Racy style. The blurb is a fair summary of what buyers get for their money. Robinson unveils:

    * The new sciences that are being developed to turn the ads we see into magic bullets which can penetrate our defences.

    * How modern retailers are following hot on the advertisers’ heels with their own sleight-of-hand to snap off any lingering resistance to buy.

    * How we unwillingly contribute to our own commercial seduction.

    * How the worst is yet to come, as the internet and television combine to create a monster whose sole function will be to pick us off, one by one, and make us buy.

A truly scary scenario. One, you might think, that would provoke a call to oppose such a bleak future for homosapiens. Not a bit of it. Robinson’s tone and lack of critical comment amount to saying “Don’t worry about it—it’s the real world—just accept it”.

Most of the book is a series of sound bytes (or sound gnaws, as someone recently called them) about the tragi-comic world of advertising. They range from the disturbing to the tacky. Apparently people are employed to put tiny cameras inside frozen-food compartments in supermarkets to chart the eye movements of shoppers in the hope of determining better placement for high-margin items. My favourite quote is “In the ad biz, sincerity is a commodity bought and paid for like everything else”.

American authors are quite good at writing books about how badly the mass of people are treated and treat each other. Over the years Galbraith has excelled at being a “friendly” critic of capitalism. Don’t expect even that much from Robinson. He doesn’t mention capitalism, let alone say anything against it. The closest he comes to questioning the status quo is his sub-heading “It’s them against us, and the thems are winning”. Enigmatically, the last two sentences of his book are:

“It is not that Big Brother will have won. It is, rather, that we will have become Big Brother.”

To which socialists can only reply “Speak for yourself, brother!”

Stan Parker

The Hidden Persuaders (1960)

Book Review from the December 1960 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Hidden Persuaders, by Vance Packard. (Penguin Books. 2/6d.)

This interesting, and in part entertaining, critique of a now not so new approach to advertising has recently been added to the Penguin catalogue. Although this one short book obviously cannot, and indeed does not attempt to, deal more than very superficially with the subject (as well as revealing Mr. Packard's obvious bias) it contains much useful information and some pertinent comments.

Motivation research invented and pioneered by people like Dr. Ernest Dichter (President of Motivation Research Inc.) and Louis Cheskin (Director of the Colour Research Institute of America) as early as the 1930's, has been developed since the second World War, and really became established in the early I950‘s. Even today those who are most enthusiastic admit that “M.R.” is only in its early stages.

What is M.R., and how does it help in advertising? Briefly, it could be explained as “selling to the subconscious that is, finding people’s hidden weaknesses, wishes and frustrations, and exploiting these in order that, to meet expanding production, they can be persuaded to buy more.

Different experts favour different methods of M.R., the best known of these is the “depth interview." For this individuals or groups of people taken from a cross section of the population are led in discussion by experts, having first been put in a relaxed state of mind either by hypnosis or the administration of a special drug. It is claimed by advocates of this method that. "when their defences are down,” people reveal secrets to which they would not admit under normal circumstances.

M.R. is used not only in persuading the consumer to buy more. Public relations experts can be found advising churchmen on how they can become more effective manipulators of their congregation, business concerns of their employees and politicians of their voters.

By the mid-fifties both major United States Parties had become deeply involved in the use of professional persuaders. In early 1956 “Nation's Business,” published by the Chamber of Commerce of the United States, proclaimed: “Both parties will merchandise their candidates and issues by the same methods that business has developed to sell goods. These include scientific selection of appeals, planned repetition. . . . Candidates need, in addition to rich voices and good diction, to be able to look ‘sincerely' at the TV camera." This method of ‘selling’ was used to such an extent at the last but one Presidential Election that Mr. Adlai Stevenson said: “The idea that you can merchandise candidates for high office like breakfast cereal . . . is the ultimate indignity to the democratic process."

As Socialists are not surprised that those in control under the present system are constantly trying to think of new ways to persuade us (quoting Christianity and Crisis, an American Protestant publication) ‘‘to consume, consume and consume, whether we need or even desire the product almost forced upon us . . . to consume to meet the needs of the productive process,” to accept their ideas, religion and leaders.

Although at present the use of M.R. in the United Kingdom is negligible, it will certainly increase. The Observer may have had this in mind when featuring Dr. Dichter in their “Profile" a few weeks ago.

Mr. Packard in his final chapter quotes Clyde Miller in his book The Process of Persuasion: “When we learn to recognise the devices of the persuaders, we build a ‘recognition reflex.' Such a recognition reflex can protect us, not only against the petty trickery of small time persuaders operating in the commonplace affairs of everyday life, but also against the mistaken or false persuasions of powerful leaders. . . That, surely, is a good thing for all of us to bear in mind when listening to the utterances of those who “lead" us today.

E. C.

The Supermarkets (1958)

From the July 1958 issue of the Socialist Standard

“Take a basket, please,” said a smartly overalled young lady assistant as Writer walked into a supermarket for the first (and last) time in his life. How well lit the place was and what a marvellous display of colour! Could the magician’s cave of jewels seem more desirable to Aladdin than this wonderland of good things did to the Writer? Innumerable packets of powdered soup (just add boiling water); tins of ham (no bones with it, just slice it with the knife); meat gravy (just ready to be poured out of the bottle). Even the tinned carrots looked nearly as luscious as ripe peaches, or so the picture indicated. Rich, creamy custard powder and scrumptious cake-mixes (just add tap-water). Savoury cheese wrapped in cellophane already sliced (just remove the wrapper). Food in glass pots simply pleading to be eaten without even water being required, food in transparent bags and in beautiful packets. Could heaven itself be more beckoning? One of these and one of those—into the basket with them. And certainly some of these other ones and some of those, too. Quick, those over there are good, and these simply can’t be left behind. What bliss! And then, finally* the cashier. How much? £3 10s.? Phew! The Writer staggered out with his purchases, although he went in only intending to look around.

Food for thought

But the supermarket also provides food for thought and the question arises as to why the housewife prefers to shop mere rather than in the local stores nearer her own home. In shopping at the local store, when her turn to be served comes and she is confronted by a shop-assistant, she has to have her order ready. This means spending time considering what is needed, and if she is likely to be flustered or to forget some of the items when it is her turn to be served, she will have to write out a list. With more married women going out to work, with the increasing complexity of life, and the rising tempo of commercialised distractions as the present system of society develops, it is no wonder that the shopper prefers a supermarket—just walking around choosing at will. According to expert reports this impulse buying has grown every year for the past two decades and has coincided with the growth of self-service shopping. But perhaps the term “choosing at will” is not quite correct, in view of the deep trickery which is commonly practised. On May 18th, 1956, The New York Times printed a remarkable interview with Gerald Stahl, executive vice- president of the Package Design Council. He stated: "Psychiatrists say that people have so much to choose from that they want help—they will like the package that hypnotizes them into picking it” He urged food packers to put more hypnosis into their package designing, so that the housewife will stick out her hand for it rather than one of many rivals.

Mr. Stahl has found that it takes the average woman exactly twenty seconds to cover an aisle in a supermarket if she doesn't tarry; so a good package design should hypnotize the woman like a flashlight waved in front of her eyes. Some colours, such as red and yellow, are helpful in creating hypnotic effects. To get the woman to reach and get the package in her hands, designers, he explained, are now using “symbols that have a dreamlike quality.” To cite examples of dreamlike quality, he mentioned the mouth-watering frosted cakes that decorate the packages of cake mixes, sizzling steaks, mushrooms frying in butter. The idea is to sell the sizzle rather than the meat. Such illustrations make the woman’s imagination leap ahead to the end product.

The Colour Research Institute, which specialises in designing deep-impact packages, won’t even send a package out into the field for testing until it has been given ocular or eye-movement tests to show how the consumer’s eye will travel over the package on the shelf. This is a gauge of the attention-holding power of the design.

According to Vance Packard in The Hidden Persuaders, the Coca-Cola Company made an interesting psychological discovery that customers who paused to refresh themselves at a soft drink counter ended by spending substantially more. In a test where they offered customers free drinks, about 80 per cent, accepted the Cokes, and spent about a £1 more than the average customer. After coming out from work, the prospective shopper needs to relax and in this mood is fair game to any firm with all the know-how of tricks suggested by the psychologist. One can well understand that the working-class housewife with a background of forced economy and trying to make both ends meet can be “caught” by a little extravagance. An American supermarket found that putting a pat of butter on top of each of its better steaks caused sales to soar 15 per cent.

In a trance until pay time

A psychological researcher in America, James Vicary, became curious to know why there had been such a rise in supermarket sales. His suspicion was that perhaps the housewives underwent an increase in tension when confronted with so many possibilities that they were forced into making quick purchases. He set out to find if this was true. He hid a motion-picture camera to record the eye-blink rate of women as they shopped. How fast a person blinks their eyes is supposed to be a good index of the state of his inner tension. The average person, according to Mr. Vicary, normally blinks his eyes about thirty-two times a minute. If he is tense he blinks them more frequently, under extreme tension up to fifty or sixty times a minute. If he is notably relaxed on the other hand his eye-blink rate may drop to a subnormal twenty or less.

Mr. Vicary set up his cameras and started following the ladies as they entered the store. The results were startling, even to him. Their eye-blink rate, instead of going up to indicate mounting tension, went down and down, to a very subnormal fourteen blinks a minute. The ladies fell into what Mr. Vicary calls a hypnoidal trance, a light kind of trance that, he explains, is the first stage of hypnosis. Mr. Vicary has decided that the main cause of the trance is that the supermarket is packed with products that in former years would have been items that only kings and queens could afford, and here in this fairyland they were available.

These havens of plate-glass and chrome, hygiene and bright lights, the brilliant presentation of merchandise involving the most up-to-date tricks of salesmanship, these things, which together add up to the supermarket—the refuge of the working-class housewife. The very epitome of capitalist society itself seems expressed in the jungle of the supermarket.

Frank Offord

Ad Nauseam (2018)

A 1956 7-Up ad,

From the November 2018 issue of the Socialist Standard

We look at the world of advertising, how it has changed over time, and what it shows about how capitalism operates.

In 1957 the American journalist Vance Packard published The Hidden Persuaders, an examination of the US advertising industry. One aspect he emphasised was the role of psychology in determining what the advertising message would be, with motivation research aiming to discover what drove people to make particular choices, whether it was packaging, image, celebrity endorsement, or whatever. For consumers are often ‘loyal’ to a product, even when they cannot tell it apart from its competitors. In a 1981 epilogue to a later edition, he looked at social developments that had influenced the way advertisers worked, with a reduction in family size, more single people and a growth in sexual permissiveness among the factors affecting consumption and hence advertising. But it was still a matter of working out people’s motivations for purchases and tapping into those. Most beer ads, for instance, sold companionship rather than beer.

Since Packard was writing, there have of course been massive changes in how advertising operates, with ads now being almost everywhere, rather than just found in newspapers, TV and street posters. In particular, the proliferation of online ads has had a major impact, not just on the advertising industry, but on how all of us as consumers are targeted. Technology and supercomputers have taken over much of the role of psychology in efforts to study and predict how people will behave. One of the crucial considerations is that of the dwell time, the time a user spends looking at an ad, especially one online. Clicking on a link and then almost immediately going on to another page means the dwell time, and presumably the impact of the content, of the first link are minimal.

There are even claims for the efficacy of advertising in public toilets and those in shopping centres, restaurants, pubs and so on. Dwell times are impressive: on average a man spends 55 seconds looking at an ad above a urinal, and ads can be targeted to the desired gender (washroomadvertising.co.uk).

The UK is the largest advertising market in Europe, with expenditure of over £21bn in 2016. The US is of course globally the largest market, with $197bn spent in 2017. Advertising supposedly ‘adds £120bn to UK GDP by raising the level of economic activity and boosting productivity’ (thecreativeindustries.co.uk). Many workers in industries such as music and animation are employed in advertising, which means they are forced to contribute to selling things rather than doing anything truly creative.

The Advertising Association brings together agencies and brands to, among other things, show the value of advertising to politicians and others. It runs a campaign Front Foot, designed to ‘advocate advertising’s beneficial and responsible contribution to the economy, to society and to people’ (adassoc.org.uk). It is not clear if this alleged contribution includes the visits of arms companies to schools, where they promote their brands and may get children to play with a missile simulator (Observer 1 September).

On the ‘other’ side, the Advertising Standards Authority and the Committee of Advertising Practice are there to keep UK advertising ‘legal, decent, honest and truthful’. For instance, a recent Tui ad for a summer holiday that could only be taken in September or October was banned, despite the company claiming that their summer holiday period ran until the end of October.

In September there was an almighty fuss when a Nike ad featured Colin Kaepernick, the American footballer who had caused controversy and lost playing contracts after he knelt rather than stood during the playing of the US national anthem, in a protest about racial injustice. Trump said that Nike were sending ‘a terrible message’, but it seems to have benefited their sales rather than harmed them.

It is often said that the best ad is the one that doesn’t look like an ad. Thus Instagram influencers, as they are known, can push products such as teeth whiteners, without declaring that they are paid to endorse them. More generally, social media are awash with product placement and more subtle ways of influencing people’s behaviour, and the line between advertising and publicity is often extremely blurred. The use of ad-blockers on the internet can reduce or even eliminate the annoying ads that appear on many web pages. Newspapers such as the Guardian have got round this by offering pages of ‘paid content’ that still bring in revenue.

In many cases TV ads are repeated over and over in fairly short proximity: this appears particularly to be the case with cosmetic products such as perfume, shampoo and toothpaste, where what is being sold is essentially an image rather than a product. In fact what is marketed, in this and other cases, is a brand, the kind of development described in Naomi Klein’s No Logo. Packard noted that in 1950s America some cosmetics companies were spending a quarter of their income on advertising and promotion, and he quoted one tycoon as saying, ‘We don’t sell lipstick, we buy customers’ (he described this person as ‘probably mythical’, but it does not seem at all an unlikely thing to say).

In socialism there would presumably be what might be termed public-service announcements, such as reminding people to have a flu jab; giving warnings of strong winds or heavy rain; and informing people of new books, films and other products. But the onslaught of ways of getting us to buy, with its total waste of resources and human ingenuity, will be a thing of the past.

Paul Bennett

Capitalism – Waste – Want (1970)

From the August 1970 issue of the Socialist Standard

Misusing world resources

One speech for which Enoch Powell is not quite so famous is the one in which he gives vent to his fervent faith in the basic virtue and inexorable efficiency of the capitalist system. It seems, when Powell is talking in this vein, that he has a dream about what he thinks of as pure capitalism, in which the profit motive and the whole business of buying and selling are left to work their ways undisturbed by such things as state intervention, union bargaining power and so on. He thinks that the system of commodity production has such eternal sanity that, left to itself, it will solve all problems — housing, health, economic crises and the like.

Powell is an extreme case but he uses a logic which, although it seems macabre, is consistent enough to anyone who accepts the basis of capitalism. What of these, the less extreme? Every supporter of capitalism must to some degree argue that the system is basically efficient. Even the problems they admit to must have a solution which is never more ambitious than a juggling with, or a deflection of, the profit motive; they can never actually question that motive. Hence the policies, typical of such as the Labour Party, of subsidies for houses, food, transport and so on. These subsidies are of course supposed to stimulate the production of goods; there are others, also inspired by the profit motive, aimed at promoting the non-production of goods. Both, apparently, are examples of the efficiency of capitalism.

What we are concerned with here is the notion that capitalism works, in terms of the efficient production and distribution of wealth and of the satisfaction and happiness of its people. There are two ways of approaching this. The first is to look at examples of inefficiency so blatant that even supporters of capitalism consider them fit subjects for protest. By examining the background reasons for these we can broaden our view, taking in examples of inefficiency and wastefulness which probably only socialists would regard as scandalous.

Every so often the communication media become fascinated by some spectacular revelations of especially obvious waste. It is about ten years since Vance Packard’s The Waste Makers burst upon us, crammed with details of what was succinctly called planned obsolescence. Packard showed how firms make inferior goods, goods designed to wear out relatively quickly so that there might be a market for new ones. He told of portable radios, car silencers, television sets which their designers knew could easily be made to last a lot longer. He also gave evidence of manufacturers regularly changing styles, once more to stimulate the market by persuading buyers that their present model was no good because it was out of fashion. Who wanted to be seen driving last year’s car? Looking at an old-look telly? Better buy a new one, keep up with the times.

Perhaps many of the readers of The Waste Makers hoped that it would have the effect of raising production standards. They were wrong. As anyone who buys a car or a TV set or something similar knows, waste is still being busily made in the factories. Any reader of the consumer reports can testify to the fact that obsolescence is still on the factories’ planning schedules. One small example of this came to light last September. It concerned a skilled joiner, an old man who had been sacked—not because he was a bad worker or a poor time keeper or anything like that. He was sacked because his work was too good to be profitable. A director of the firm concerned said:

  There were no complaints about Mr. Welch’s work. He was a first class joiner, but he was not prepared to use modern methods of work. His unnecessarily high standard meant that the company could not make his work pay. (Daily Telegraph, 16 September 1969)

It is easy to imagine the frustration of a skilled worker in this situation. Then what about the similar feelings of, say, farm workers who watch fertile land being taken out of production in the knowledge that starvation, even famine, is one of the world’s serious problems? It will surprise some of those who are starving, to learn that there is a “glut” of wheat in the world, that leading wheat exporting countries are trying to reduce their “surpluses”, that in America the government has just imposed the third successive cut back in production and has once more increased the financial inducement to take wheat acreage out of cultivation. All the cloudy jargon used to justify this policy can be reduced to one single sentence. Capitalism is here deliberately wasting human and natural resources.

If famine is a touchy, well-publicised problem, so is housing. We are all familiar with the apparently insurmountable obstacles which are in the way of providing decent homes for everyone; we have all heard the politicians and the businessmen telling us about the chronic shortage of materials and resources. This might sound more convincing were it not for the fact that, when there is money to be made by doing so, building materials and labour — even completed buildings — are left unused.

Consider the case of Harry Hyams, one of London’s great property “developers” who, according to the Daily Telegraph (27 June) “controls enough empty offices to house 10,000 workers—11 million sq. ft.” Among the empty Hyams properties are: Centre Point (32 stories, 300,000 sq. ft., empty since 1964); Space House (237,000 sq. ft.); London Bridge House (155,000 sq. ft.). It is no accident, that these buildings are unused. In the past year Central London rents have more than doubled — and as long as rents keep rising faster than interests rates it is actually profitable in the long run to let such buildings stand without tenants. Three years ago Hyams’ fortune was assessed at £27 million; since then, says the Telegraph, it has “inflated like a gas balloon”. Let us be clear that this vast fortune has been amassed partly as the result of a deliberate, planned, organised waste of resources and materials and of human abilities—at the same time as there are millions of people whose housing conditions give them a desperate need for those resources and abilities.

It would be possible, as Vance Packard and others have done, to write a book about such waste. The vital point here is that it is all caused by the simple fact that capitalism produces its wealth not for use but for profit. If Harry Hyams could make another £27 million by building houses and giving them away he would do so. But he, like the wheat farmers of America, like the car and TV makers, like the joinery firm, can actually make more profit by waste. And after all making profit is all that capitalism demands.

This is the thread connecting us to the second part of our case—the part where no breath of popular indignation is ever felt. It is not enough to say that capitalism makes money from waste. The fact is that, unless it wastes a tremendous amount of energy and material, the system simply would not function.

Let us take a look at the way capitalism has to organise its manpower. In this country there is a working population of about 25 million. Some of these are engaged in productive work, some of which is even essential and non-wasteful. But others are doing wasteful unproductive work which is necessary only to capitalism, only needed in a society where goods are made to be bought and sold, in a society with money, with a privileged class and laws to protect those privileges. Here are some figures for those engaged in certain occupations, all of which come under the above descriptions:

• Insurance, banking, finance and business services: 892,700
• Armed Forces                                                           377,000
• Police                                                                          99,135
• Wholesale Distribution                                             545,000
• Retail Distribution                                                  2,008,000
• Clergy, Ministers, Members of Religious Orders        39,520
• Judges, Barristers, Advocates, Solicitors                     35,490

Most of Capitalism’s supporters (which means most people) although they may kick against the waste built into a shoddy car, or into an empty building, think that bank clerks, soldiers, clergymen are necessary. The same way of thinking leads them to approve of the way capitalism tries to solve some of its economic problems. We have already seen how governments will stop wealth being produced, in the interests of profit. They also sometimes try to stop it being distributed.

Currently the American government is raising a storm by its intention of imposing a series of import restrictions, designed to keep some foreign produce out of the country. At present this is confined to some textile goods but other commodities—the rest of textiles and shoes, for example—may be included later. It is not especially relevant to this article that this policy is a direct reversal of the American advocacy of freer trade of not so long ago. The point at the moment is that the goods America is trying to keep out might well be better and cheaper than her home produce. But capitalism cannot apply such standards of judgement; the idea of protectionism, like all the measures which governments take, is to protect—protect profits. In that quest capitalism will actually bolster and protect inefficiency; at one time it will stimulate the movement of wealth, at another stifle that movement.

The patent laws are another way in which the profit motive stifles production. Patents are themselves restrictive, confining the production rights of something which might be better and more efficiently produced elsewhere. In some cases patent rights actually work to stop production. The original patent for stereo recording was taken out in 1931. It was soon acquired by some American companies who, seeing stereo as a threat to their established products, use the rights to prevent production. By the late fifties a glut of hi-fi was threatening the market with stagnation. It was then that stereo was released—almost thirty years after its invention—in an effort to stimulate the market anew and so revive some ailing balance sheets. Needless to say, when it was released the event was heralded as a great step forward in human progress. What other ingenuities, one wonders, are mouldering in pigeon holes, market “Not to be Opened until More Profitable.”?

Socialists are hardened by now to meeting the opinion that the system of production for profit is essentially sane and efficient. The opposite is true; in this article we have looked at only the tiniest fraction of the evidence which says that capitalism wastes its wealth and its abilities. The profit motive cannot work efficiently. Capitalism cannot cater for the needs of its people. It produces waste and it produces want and both are profitable only to the minority who hold positions of privilege.

Ivan

Waste Making (1961)

Book Review from the June 1961 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Waste Makers by Vance Packard (Longmans, 21s.)

Capitalism has solved the problem of production. The system of capitalism, which already exists over much of the world and is rapidly capturing the rest, has given birth to sufficient productive potential to satisfy all the reasonable demands of mankind. All that now remains to be done is to bring in a system in which these potentialities can be realised to the full. For this is where capitalism has failed. 

Mr. Vance Packard’s new book The Waste Makers (Longmans, 21s.) throws lots of useful light on this failure and shows how some American capitalists try to create new markets and increase their profits. Of course, like racegoers betting on the Tote, they can't all win: but they all try. Sometimes an arms race will provide them with markets, and the American upper class realises how important the cold war is in staving off a slump. As Mr. Packard says:

  Financial columnist Sylvia Porter noted that every time there has been a suggestion of a major cut in Pentagon spending “the stock market has gone into a tail spin.” On the other hand, in May, 1960, when the Russian capture of the U-2 plane was followed by the collapse of the summit meeting, Wall Street stock-market prices advanced during seven successive days.

But even the unprecedented spending on arms cannot solve their problems. Mr. Packard says that “during the postwar years, the amount of goods and services that one man can turn out in an hour has increased by about 3 per cent, every year." What effect this had upon human fortunes? One is that consumer goods are deliberately made worse, so that they will wear out sooner, and therefore have to be replaced. Marketing Consultant Victor Lebow made a plea for “forced consumption” in the Journal of Retailing in the mid-fifties: “We need things consumed, burned up, worn out, replaced and discarded at an ever increasing late." Packard quotes General Electric decisions to “change" (without publicity!) the life of a 200-watt bulb lamp from 1,000 hours to 750 hours, and the life of the 2,330 lamp from 300 to 200 hours. The Vice-President of the Chrysler car company is quoted as saying the quality of cars “is not as good as 10 years ago.” A guided-missile expert is quoted as pointing out that there was no technological reason why television sets could not be built to last for eight years without repair; while (according to Packard’s carefully-marshalled evidence) the quality of TV sets was in fact deteriorating.

Another waste-making device is regular changes of style, so that with enormous advertising campaigns plugging the new style, everyone with an older car or refrigerator or set of china is made to feel out of date, and has to buy the newer style to keep up with the Joneses. In this connection the board chairman of the powerful Whirlpool Corporation told engineers at a washing-machine technical conference that “an engineer’s principal purpose as an engineer is to create obsolescence.”

Yet a further means of pushing goods is the never-never. Consume now, pay later. The result is that many American families now have a load of unpaid debts. A survey by insurance companies, says Packard, showed that the average American family was about three months from bankruptcy and for millions of families the disaster was much closer than that. One “solution” is for the wife—including wives with young children—to go out to work as well as the husband. Investigators for U.S. News & World Report found that Americans’ biggest worry was “money,” and “making ends meet.”

  A minister in Cedar Rapids. Iowa, reported that “in 75 per cent of the cases where people come to me with marital problems, money enters in." And a doctor in the same city said many of his patients’ aches and pains were caused by money problems. “You can buy a car on time and stretch the payments over thirty months, and you’ve got a chronic pain. You really have.”

And all this feverish drive takes place at a time when, according to an estimate by ACTION, the American national organization for civic improvement, it would cost about one hundred billion dollars to wipe out United States slums, and when, as Packard says, there are millions of families "unquestionably ill-fed. ill-clothed, ill-housed.”

This is a book which you should get hold of and read. You may disagree with the author's conclusions, hut the whole book is thought-provoking.

Alwyn Edgar

Money Screws You Up (1991)

From the July 1991 issue of the Socialist Standard

In the sphere of ideas one of the more fruitful results of May 1968 was the spread, in France and elsewhere, of the criticism of the commodity as representing the reduction of useful things to objects of commerce and of social and personal relationships to commercial ones. With commodity production, work ceases to be the creative activity of people producing needed useful things and becomes mere labour turning out articles of commerce for sale on a market. People cease to be related to each other as members of a community, whether democratic or hierarchical, and become mere economic units related to each other only through money as buyers and sellers of some object or other of commerce.

This criticism of the extreme commercialisation of society that capitalism involves goes back to the beginning of the 19th century and to the Romantic tradition that then came into being as a reaction to the ravages of emerging industrial capitalism. Already in 1840 Thomas Carlyle was denouncing the situation where “cash payment has become the sole nexus of man to man”. In France in the 1960s and 1970s this sort of criticism of capitalism was expressed in particular by the Situationists who gave a prominent place to the passive consumption of commodities as a feature of the “spectacular society” they were denouncing. The commodity was considered as something undesirable that ought to be done away with.

But what exactly is a commodity? A commodity is, basically, a product of labour and nature that has been produced with a view to being sold. It is, in other words, an object of commerce, an item of wealth that is bought and sold. A commodity is not simply a useful thing, some part of nature transformed so as to be capable of satisfying some human need. It is this, but this is not its essential characteristic.

The essential characteristic of a commodity is that it is a part of nature that has been transformed primarily with a view to being exchanged for some other product. An item of wealth produced for this purpose acquires, in addition to what might be called its natural usefulness, or use-value, an exchange value which is the amount of other commodities that it can exchange for. Commodity-production gives rise to money, prices and buying and selling, and achieves its highest form in capitalism where literally everything can, and generally does, become an object of commerce.

Consumer society

Ironically, or at least it may appear so to some, this criticism of capitalism was provoked, not by capitalist conditions of primary poverty and destitution but by the prolonged period of capitalist prosperity that eventually followed the last world war.

Post-war reconstruction and the expansion of world markets led to full employment and, as a consequence, to rising living standards for wage and salary workers. That workers became materially better off over this period is a fact that cannot be denied. A majority did acquire a whole range of consumer durables that are now taken for granted but which before the war were luxuries enjoyed only by the rich, such things as fridges, washing machines, televisions and of course cars. People were also able to build up savings, go on holidays abroad, and more and more of them to acquire their own house. All this would have been unthinkable before the war and no doubt goes a long way towards explaining why people have accepted capitalism over the last forty years, particularly as the “socialist” alternative appeared to be represented by the Russian state capitalist empire where it was evident that ordinary workers were much worse off.

Defenders of capitalism were able to present their system as a “consumer society” geared to providing an ever-rising standard of living for ordinary people. Critics, however, began to point to the social costs of such a growth-oriented, market society. These criticisms are neatly summed up in the titles of three books written by Vance Packard, an American journalist, in the late 1950s: The Hidden Persuaders (1957), The Status Seekers (1959) and The Waste Makers (1960).

The first was a description of the methods employed by advertisers to try and manipulate people into buying things by using brainwashing techniques derived from psychology. The second, perhaps the weakest, described how people strove to acquire consumer goods as much as a status symbol as for their usefulness, while the third exposed how manufacturers employed techniques such as planned obsolescence to maintain the market for their goods.

Packard was an investigative journalist rather than a social philosopher but in his books are to be found all the themes that have been developed at a more philosophical and theoretical level by others, particularly in continental Europe and those in its tradition like Herbert Marcuse and Erich Fromm. For example, the theme that in capitalism the needs which the market is supposed to be geared to meeting are not our real needs but artificial ones created by capitalist manipulation of our psychology, and the theme that a growth-oriented society involves a waste of resources and an unbalanced relationship with the rest of nature.

Such a theory of the commodity provided the basis for a modern criticism of capitalist society. The needs which a commodity is supposed to satisfy are denounced as false needs. The advertising required to create these false needs is denounced for commercialising society and turning it into one huge marketplace. And the consumption of materials and energy to produce the goods to satisfy these false needs is denounced as waste placing an intolerable burden on nature.

This theory does have some attraction, even some substance, but when the question of what sort of society should replace capitalism arises, as it has to, weaknesses appear. Nearly all of the exponents of the theory, while certainly critical of the market-motivated, growth-oriented society that is capitalism, and indeed providing some trenchant criticisms of it, turn out to be in favour of retaining some degree of commodity production and exchange.

Truly human society

One example is Jeremy Seabrook. In The Myth of the Market, published last year, he powerfully criticises the spread of market values for “leading to social disintegration in the West, and in the Third World to the destruction of indigenous cultures that are the only surviving examples of how people can truly live in harmony with their environment”. Only he then ends lamely by denying that the way-out is to get rid of the market and the production of useful things as commodities:

“The issue is not so much one of going ‘beyond’ the market economy, but rather of reducing it to a minimal, functional level in our lives, putting it in its (necessary) place” (page 33).

Another example is the Canadian writer William Leiss in his book The Limits to Satisfaction, subtitled “On Needs and Commodities”, that was first published in 1976. After criticising capitalism for inciting insatiable needs, he speaks only about the “limitation of the sphere of commodity exchange” (British edition, page 116) and of the need to “lessen the importance of commodities as factors in the satisfaction of human needs” (page 122):

“There is nothing inherently evil in commodities and market exchanges as such, and there is no reason to believe that it would be desirable to extirpate them completely. There is cause for concern only when commodity exchange tends to become the exclusive mode for the satisfaction of needs” (page 117).

Such observations show Leiss to be a superficial critic of the commodity. Clearly, his objection is not to the exchange-value aspect of the commodity as a product of labour and nature that has become an object of commerce, but merely to the fact that, in his view, most commodities have now ceased to be real use-values since they are being produced to satisfy manipulated needs. Abolish this aspect of the modern commodity and, for him, commodity production and exchange become acceptable.

What critics like Leiss of the commodity as an expression of false needs have overlooked is that there is another reason for doing away with commodity production and exchange: that this will end the domination of production by blindly-operating economic laws which impose the accumulation of exchange-value as the primary objective of production.

Wherever wealth is produced for sale on a market – wherever, that is, there is commodity-production – economic forces are unleashed which come to dominate production and orient it away from satisfying people’s needs. The operation of these laws means that production is not subject to human control, with the result that it is not human values that are paramount in society, but market values, commercial values, the cash nexus.

If a truly human society is to be created where we can relate to each other as members of a real community instead of as isolated atoms colliding on the market place, then the commodity-form must disappear completely. This is not a question, as Leiss suggests, of the “extirpation” of commodity-production, money and buying and selling as things that are “inherently evil”, of using coercive means to prevent commodity exchange from taking place; what is involved is creating the conditions (common ownership of productive resources by the whole community) in which it has no sense. The death of the commodity will be the beginning of a truly human society existing in harmony with the rest of nature.

Adam Buick

Socialism—A Sane Society (1975)

From the June 1975 issue of the Socialist Standard

Long before pollution became a popular cause, and ecology a fashionable term, the Socialist indictment of capitalism included the waste that is inseparable from market production. A minority in society own the means for production, that is the land, raw materials, factories, communications etc. Through this ownership they are able to buy from the majority, the working class, their working ability.

It is members of the working class who run the transport system, who run industry from the gate to the board room, who research, design and make every kind of commodity etc. In other words it is the men and women of the working class who co-operate to perform all of the work necessary to the running of capitalism. But it is not done on their own behalf. All of this work is geared to the profit of the owning class.

Every kind of product, including food, has sale at a profit as the first motive for its existence. It may be thought that it is because commodities are useful that their sale will realize a profit. The fact is that goods are not produced to fulfil human need, on the contrary needs are stimulated so that the results of enormous productive capacity can be sold. A whole industry is devoted to sales promotion; to persuading consumers — hideous term — that their possessions are outdated, outworn or that two of everything might be better!

A marketing expert counselled the home-furnishing industry: "Make people discover for themselves that there’s fun and pleasure in changing their décor. Establish a standard based on changeability and not on permanence.” All this helped provide a philosophical base for the throwaway spirit . . .

(p. 164 The Waste Makers, Vance Packard)

Competition between manufacturers of similar items is not necessarily of benefit to their customers for costs must be kept to a minimum.

Manufacturers themselves have improved anti-corrosion techniques considerably in recent years, but a really thorough job would be unacceptably expensive in an industry increasingly dominated by cost accountants.

(Observer Magazine, 6 April 1975)

Not only are goods produced in the knowledge that they are not the best that modern technology is capable of but some commodities are actually designed to have a limited life. “An engineer’s principal purpose as an engineer is to create obsolescence” — board chairman as quoted in The Waste Makers.

Small wonder that even those workers who are supposed to be enjoying the good life have in reality succumbed to the adman’s dream world. Accumulating material possessions to assuage the frustration associated with work in which they can take no pride and the problems of everyday living.

Society does not have to be organized this way. Capitalism is not the natural order of things and it has outlived its usefulness. The quest for profit which provided the impetus to develop large scale, social production, now prevents that production being used to the advantage of society as a whole. A revolutionary change to Socialism will resolve this contradiction.

When an immense majority of working class men and women become aware of their position in capitalism they will join with us in consciously organizing to elect for Socialism. Thus to carry out the legal formality of abolishing private property. Then the means for production will be owned and democratically controlled by the whole, worldwide, community. This vital fact of common ownership and control will mean production at last geared to human needs. The one reason for making any articles and supplying any service will be that they are of use to human beings. Only the best quality need be made and with due regard to the careful use of raw materials.

All of the wasteful elements of capitalist production will disappear. With all that is on and around the earth owned in common by all of its inhabitants there will be no possible use for armed forces and other instruments of war.

Try listing the pursuits which will not be necessary when money no longer has any role to play in production. Included in the list will be duplication of effort when, for instance, airlines compete for passengers over the same route, banking, insurance, nor will we ‘‘carry coals to Newcastle” . . . but you can continue. Some occupations will be adapted to the needs of the new social order. Perhaps marketing research could be redirected to monitoring the actual needs of the community.

Workers co-operate now to run capitalism. How much more will the spirit of co-operation prevail between the free individuals who contribute to the well-being of Socialist society. Each will give to the best of their ability satisfied that the work in hand is socially useful. Each secure in the knowledge that they have free access to the goods and services which they require. Socialism will do more than resolve the problems of poverty, waste etc. It will be a harmonious, caring social system where human beings are at last free to realize their full potential.

We have given only an outline of some aspects of the Socialist future. To fill in the detail we need your help. What are you waiting for?

Pat Deutz

Cooking the Books: Organised waste (2011)

The Cooking the Books Column from the May 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard

Last September the French Friends of the Earth published a study of “L’obsolescence programmée”. In his 1960 book The Waste Makers Vance Packard mentioned Brooks Stevens, a well-known industrial designer of the time, as one of those favouring the practice. In the February 1960 issue of The Rotarian Stevens quoted from the Weekly People, the paper of the SLP of America:

“But there is another form of waste that is deliberately planned by the capitalists, and which the outspoken among them openly admit is essential to their prosperity. It is called planned obsolescence, or forced obsolescence. This consists of a deliberate scheme, carried out by means of advertising and product design, to persuade people to become dissatisfied with what they have purchased a year or two ago, and to throw it away before it is worn out.”

He replied that obsolete items such as cars were not in fact thrown away but were bought by people who couldn’t afford to buy a new car. His other argument was that it provided jobs. As he had already claimed in 1958: “Our whole economy is based on planned obsolescence, and everybody who can read without moving his lips should know it by now. We make good products, we induce people to buy them, and then next year we deliberately introduce something that will make these products old fashioned, out of date, obsolete.”

Stevens had a point about cars and to some extent about some other goods such as fridges, washing machines and TV sets, but that some people are so poor as to have to rely for basic appliances on second-hand, shoddy stuff is itself a criticism of capitalism. According to the French study, some new goods are not much better:

“The search for a low price takes place to the detriment of the solidity and quality of appliances. This is flagrant for other current consumer goods such as textiles, but also affects household electrical appliances: some drums in washing machines are not made of metal today but of plastic, which increases their fragility.”

This provides a clue about why capitalism has recourse to “planned obsolescence”. It’s to provide cheap goods for wage and salary workers so as to keep wages down. To argue that “our whole economy is based on planned obsolescence” is wrong. The organised waste that planned obsolescence represents does take place under capitalism and the fact that it does is part of the case against capitalism, but capitalism is not kept going by repeat sales of goods consumed by workers.

In fact capitalism is not kept going by consumer demand at all as this is only a consequence of what does keep it going – the accumulation of capital out of profits extracted from wage-labour and converted into money through sales on a market. Consumer demand represents for the most part what workers and their dependents are able to buy out of their wages and salaries, and goes up and down with the level of employment which in its turn depends on capital accumulation.

There is no technical reason why solid and reliable electric and electronic appliances with easily changeable and compatible parts and able to incorporate innovations could not be produced. Industrial designers would surely love to do this but under capitalism it is the marketing department that calls the shots, as what is being produced are not simply products to be used, but commodities to be sold on a market with a view to profit.

Made to Waste (2009)

Book Review from the October 2009 issue of the Socialist Standard

Made to Break. Technology and Obsolescence in America. By Giles Slade. Harvard University Press. 2006.

In 1960 the American investigative journalist, Vance Packard, brought out a book The Waste Makers. Subtitled “A startling revelation of planned wastefulness and obsolescence in industry today”, it exposed how capitalist firms making consumer goods were deliberately designing them to break down after a calculated period of time so as to encourage repeat sales.

This new book covers the same ground and is a history of ‘obsolescence’ in America. Slade identifies three kinds: a product can become obsolete because something new, and genuinely better, has been invented (as happened, for instance, to cut throat razors and gas lighting); or because of advertising; or because it had been deliberately built-in to the product (also known as ‘death dating’).

The manufacturers and their advertisers were quite open about what they were doing. Thus a Justus George in 1928:

“We must induce people . . . to buy a greater variety of goods on the same principle that they now buy automobiles, radios and clothes, namely: buying goods not to wear out, but to trade in or to discard after a short time . . . the progressive obsolescence principle . . . means buying for up-to-dateness, efficiency, buying for . . . the sense of modernness rather than simply for the last ounce of use” (quoted p. 58).

And a Brooks Stevens in 1958:

“Our whole economy is based on planned obsolescence and everybody who can read without moving his lips should know it by now. We make good products, we induce people to buy them, and then next year we deliberately introduce something that will make those products old fashioned, out of date, obsolete. We do that for the soundest reason: to make money” (quoted p. 153).

This provoked a conflict with engineers, who knew they could make solid products that could last for years, but in the end their reluctance was overcome (they, too, are in the end only hired employees who have to do their employer’s bidding). It is also enormously wasteful as still useable products, and the material resources that went into making them, are simply thrown away.

Things have got worse since Packard’s day, with the use of soldered circuits in electronic devices that are now part of everyday life. These are easy and cheap to produce but their chipboards can’t be repaired. According to Slade, there is a growing problem of where to dispose of abandoned (but still useable) cell phones (as mobile phones are called in America) which, together with other ‘e-waste’, contain materials that are harmful to the environment.

Like Packard Slade blames consumers, if not so much as manufacturers. If, he argues, people take account of the effect on the environment of what they buy manufacturers will begin “to adopt design strategies that include not just planned obsolescence but planned disassembly and reuse as part of the product life cycle”. This assumes that the capitalist economy is driven by consumers. It isn’t. It’s driven by the drive of capitalist firms to make as much profit as they can.

Adam Buick