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Private cars were relatively scarce in 1919 and horse-drawn conveyances were still common. In residential districts, electric streetlights had not yet replaced many of the old gaslights. And within the home, electricity remained largely a luxury item for the wealthy.
Just ten years later things looked very different. Cars dominated the streets and most urban homes had electric lights, electric flat irons, and vacuum cleaners. In upper-middle-class houses, washing machines, refrigerators, toasters, curling irons, percolators, heating pads, and popcorn poppers were becoming commonplace. And although the first commercial radio station didn't begin broadcasting until 1920, the American public, with an adult population of about 122 million people, bought 4,438,000 radios in the year 1929 alone.
But despite the apparent tidal wave of new consumer goods and what appeared to be a healthy appetite for their consumption among the well-to-do, industrialists were worried. They feared that the frugal habits maintained by most American families would be difficult to break. Perhaps even more threatening was the fact that the industrial capacity for turning out goods seemed to be increasing at a pace greater than people's sense that they needed them.
It was this latter concern that led Charles Kettering, director of General Motors Research, to write a 1929 magazine article called "Keep the Consumer Dissatisfied." He wasn't suggesting that manufacturers produce shoddy products. Along with many of his corporate cohorts, he was defining a strategic shift for American industry-from fulfilling basic human needs to creating new ones.
In a 1927 interview with the magazine Nation's Business, Secretary of Labor James J. Davis provided some numbers to illustrate a problem that the New York Times called "need saturation." Davis noted that "the textile mills of this country can produce all the cloth needed in six months' operation each year" and that 14 percent of the American shoe factories could produce a year's supply of footwear. The magazine went on to suggest, "It may be that the world's needs ultimately will be produced by three days' work a week."
Business leaders were less than enthusiastic about the prospect of a society no longer centered on the production of goods. For them, the new "labor-saving" machinery presented not a vision of liberation but a threat to their position at the center of power. John E. Edgerton, president of the National Association of Manufacturers, typified their response when he declared: "I am for everything that will make work happier but against everything that will further subordinate its importance. The emphasis should be put on work-more work and better work." "Nothing," he claimed, "breeds radicalism more than unhappiness unless it is leisure."
By the late 1920s, America's business and political elite had found a way to defuse the dual threat of stagnating economic growth and a radicalized working class in what one industrial consultant called "the gospel of consumption"-the notion that people could be convinced that however much they have, it isn't enough. President Herbert Hoover's 1929 Committee on Recent Economic Changes observed in glowing terms the results: "By advertising and other promotional devices . . . a measurable pull on production has been created which releases capital otherwise tied up." They celebrated the conceptual breakthrough: "Economically we have a boundless field before us; that there are new wants which will make way endlessly for newer wants, as fast as they are satisfied."
Today "work and more work" is the accepted way of doing things. If anything, improvements to the labor-saving machinery since the 1920s have intensified the trend. Machines can save labor, but only if they go idle when we possess enough of what they can produce. In other words, the machinery offers us an opportunity to work less, an opportunity that as a society we have chosen not to take. Instead, we have allowed the owners of those machines to define their purpose: not reduction of labor, but "higher productivity"-and with it the imperative to consume virtually everything that the machinery can possibly produce.
FROM THE EARLIEST DAYS of the Age of Consumerism there were critics. One of the most influential was Arthur Dahlberg, whose 1932 book Jobs, Machines, and Capitalism was well known to policymakers and elected officials in Washington. Dahlberg declared that "failure to shorten the length of the working day . . . is the primary cause of our rationing of opportunity, our excess industrial plant, our enormous wastes of competition, our high pressure advertising, [and] our economic imperialism." Since much of what industry produced was no longer aimed at satisfying human physical needs, a four-hour workday, he claimed, was necessary to prevent society from becoming disastrously materialistic. "By not shortening the working day when all the wood is in," he suggested, the profit motive becomes "both the creator and satisfier of spiritual needs." For when the profit motive can turn nowhere else, "it wraps our soap in pretty boxes and tries to convince us that that is solace to our souls."
There was, for a time, a visionary alternative. In 1930 Kellogg Company, the world's leading producer of ready-to-eat cereal, announced that all of its nearly fifteen hundred workers would move from an eight-hour to a six-hour workday. Company president Lewis Brown and owner W. K. Kellogg noted that if the company ran "four six-hour shifts . . . instead of three eight-hour shifts, this will give work and paychecks to the heads of three hundred more families in Battle Creek."
This was welcome news to workers at a time when the country was rapidly descending into the Great Depression. But as Benjamin Hunnicutt explains in his book Kellogg's Six-Hour Day, Brown and Kellogg wanted to do more than save jobs. They hoped to show that the "free exchange of goods, services, and labor in the free market would not have to mean mindless consumerism or eternal exploitation of people and natural resources." Instead "workers would be liberated by increasingly higher wages and shorter hours for the final freedom promised by the Declaration of Independence-the pursuit of happiness."
To be sure, Kellogg did not intend to stop making a profit. But the company leaders argued that men and women would work more efficiently on shorter shifts, and with more people employed, the overall purchasing power of the community would increase, thus allowing for more purchases of goods, including cereals.
A shorter workday did entail a cut in overall pay for workers. But Kellogg raised the hourly rate to partially offset the loss and provided for production bonuses to encourage people to work hard. The company eliminated time off for lunch, assuming that workers would rather work their shorter shift and leave as soon as possible. In a "personal letter" to employees, Brown pointed to the "mental income" of "the enjoyment of the surroundings of your home, the place you work, your neighbors, the other pleasures you have [that are] harder to translate into dollars and cents." Greater leisure, he hoped, would lead to "higher standards in school and civic . . . life" that would benefit the company by allowing it to "draw its workers from a community where good homes predominate."
It was an attractive vision, and it worked. Not only did Kellogg prosper, but journalists from magazines such as Forbes and BusinessWeek reported that the great majority of company employees embraced the shorter workday. One reporter described "a lot of gardening and community beautification, athletics and hobbies . . . libraries well patronized and the mental background of these fortunate workers . . . becoming richer."
A U.S. Department of Labor survey taken at the time, as well as interviews Hunnicutt conducted with former workers, confirm this picture. The government interviewers noted that "little dissatisfaction with lower earnings resulting from the decrease in hours was expressed, although in the majority of cases very real decreases had resulted." One man spoke of "more time at home with the family." Another remembered: "I could go home and have time to work in my garden." A woman noted that the six-hour shift allowed her husband to "be with 4 boys at ages it was important."
Those extra hours away from work also enabled some people to accomplish things that they might never have been able to do otherwise. Hunnicutt describes how at the end of her interview an eighty-year-old woman began talking about ping-pong. "We'd get together. We had a ping-pong table and all my relatives would come for dinner and things and we'd all play ping-pong by the hour." Eventually she went on to win the state championship.
Many women used the extra time for housework. But even then, they often chose work that drew in the entire family, such as canning. One recalled how canning food at home became "a family project" that "we all enjoyed," including her sons, who "opened up to talk freely." As Hunnicutt puts it, canning became the "medium for something more important than preserving food. Stories, jokes, teasing, quarreling, practical instruction, songs, griefs, and problems were shared. The modern discipline of alienated work was left behind for an older . . . more convivial kind of working together."
This was the stuff of a human ecology in which thousands of small, almost invisible, interactions between family members, friends, and neighbors create an intricate structure that supports social life in much the same way as topsoil supports our biological existence. When we allow either one to become impoverished, whether out of greed or intemperance, we put our long-term survival at risk.
Our modern predicament is a case in point. By 2005 per capita household spending (in inflation-adjusted dollars) was twelve times what it had been in 1929, while per capita spending for durable goods-the big stuff such as cars and appliances-was thirty-two times higher. Meanwhile, by 2000 the average married couple with children was working almost five hundred hours a year more than in 1979. And according to reports by the Federal Reserve Bank in 2004 and 2005, over 40 percent of American families spend more than they earn. The average household carries $18,654 in debt, not including home-mortgage debt, and the ratio of household debt to income is at record levels, having roughly doubled over the last two decades. We are quite literally working ourselves into a frenzy just so we can consume all that our machines can produce.
Yet we could work and spend a lot less and still live quite comfortably. By 1991 the amount of goods and services produced for each hour of labor was double what it had been in 1948. By 2006 that figure had risen another 30 percent. In other words, if as a society we made a collective decision to get by on the amount we produced and consumed seventeen years ago, we could cut back from the standard forty-hour week to 5.3 hours per day-or 2.7 hours if we were willing to return to the 1948 level. We were already the richest country on the planet in 1948 and most of the world has not yet caught up to where we were then.
Rather than realizing the enriched social life that Kellogg's vision offered us, we have impoverished our human communities with a form of materialism that leaves us in relative isolation from family, friends, and neighbors. We simply don't have time for them. Unlike our great-grandparents who passed the time, we spend it. An outside observer might conclude that we are in the grip of some strange curse, like a modern-day King Midas whose touch turns everything into a product built around a microchip.
Of course not everybody has been able to take part in the buying spree on equal terms. Millions of Americans work long hours at poverty wages while many others can find no work at all. However, as advertisers well know, poverty does not render one immune to the gospel of consumption.
Meanwhile, the influence of the gospel has spread far beyond the land of its origin. Most of the clothes, video players, furniture, toys, and other goods Americans buy today are made in distant countries, often by underpaid people working in sweatshop conditions. The raw material for many of those products comes from clearcutting or strip mining or other disastrous means of extraction. Here at home, business activity is centered on designing those products, financing their manufacture, marketing them-and counting the profits.
KELLOG'S VISION, DESPITE ITS POPULARITY with his employees, had little support among his fellow business leaders. But Dahlberg's book had a major influence on Senator (and future Supreme Court justice) Hugo Black who, in 1933, introduced legislation requiring a thirty-hour workweek. Although Roosevelt at first appeared to support Black's bill, he soon sided with the majority of businessmen who opposed it. Instead, Roosevelt went on to launch a series of policy initiatives that led to the forty-hour standard that we more or less observe today.
By the time the Black bill came before Congress, the prophets of the gospel of consumption had been developing their tactics and techniques for at least a decade. However, as the Great Depression deepened, the public mood was uncertain, at best, about the proper role of the large corporation. Labor unions were gaining in both public support and legal legitimacy, and the Roosevelt administration, under its New Deal program, was implementing government regulation of industry on an unprecedented scale. Many corporate leaders saw the New Deal as a serious threat. James A. Emery, general counsel for the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM), issued a "call to arms" against the "shackles of irrational regulation" and the "back-breaking burdens of taxation," characterizing the New Deal doctrines as "alien invaders of our national thought."
In response, the industrial elite represented by NAM, including General Motors, the big steel companies, General Foods, DuPont, and others, decided to create their own propaganda. An internal NAM memo called for "re-selling all of the individual Joe Doakes on the advantages and benefits he enjoys under a competitive economy." NAM launched a massive public relations campaign it called the "American Way." As the minutes of a NAM meeting described it, the purpose of the campaign was to link "free enterprise in the public consciousness with free speech, free press and free religion as integral parts of democracy."
Consumption was not only the linchpin of the campaign; it was also recast in political terms. A campaign booklet put out by the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency told readers that under "private capitalism, the Consumer, the Citizen is boss," and "he doesn't have to wait for election day to vote or for the Court to convene before handing down his verdict. The consumer 'votes' each time he buys one article and rejects another."
According to Edward Bernays, one of the founders of the field of public relations and a principal architect of the American Way, the choices available in the polling booth are akin to those at the department store; both should consist of a limited set of offerings that are carefully determined by what Bernays called an "invisible government" of public-relations experts and advertisers working on behalf of business leaders. Bernays claimed that in a "democratic society" we are and should be "governed, our minds . . . molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of."
NAM formed a national network of groups to ensure that the booklet from J. Walter Thompson and similar material appeared in libraries and school curricula across the country. The campaign also placed favorable articles in newspapers (often citing "independent" scholars who were paid secretly) and created popular magazines and film shorts directed to children and adults with such titles as "Building Better Americans," "The Business of America's People Is Selling," and "America Marching On."
Perhaps the biggest public relations success for the American Way campaign was the 1939 New York World's Fair. The fair's director of public relations called it "the greatest public relations program in industrial history," one that would battle what he called the "New Deal propaganda." The fair's motto was "Building the World of Tomorrow," and it was indeed a forum in which American corporations literally modeled the future they were determined to create. The most famous of the exhibits was General Motors' 35,000-square-foot Futurama, where visitors toured Democracity, a metropolis of multilane highways that took its citizens from their countryside homes to their jobs in the skyscraper-packed central city.
For all of its intensity and spectacle, the campaign for the American Way did not create immediate, widespread, enthusiastic support for American corporations or the corporate vision of the future. But it did lay the ideological groundwork for changes that came after the Second World War, changes that established what is still commonly called our post-war society.
The war had put people back to work in numbers that the New Deal had never approached, and there was considerable fear that unemployment would return when the war ended. Kellogg workers had been working forty-eight-hour weeks during the war and the majority of them were ready to return to a six-hour day and thirty-hour week. Most of them were able to do so, for a while. But W. K. Kellogg and Lewis Brown had turned the company over to new managers in 1937.
The new managers saw only costs and no benefits to the six-hour day, and almost immediately after the end of the war they began a campaign to undermine shorter hours. Management offered workers a tempting set of financial incentives if they would accept an eight-hour day. Yet in a vote taken in 1946, 77 percent of the men and 87 percent of the women wanted to return to a thirty-hour week rather than a forty-hour one. In making that choice, they also chose a fairly dramatic drop in earnings from artificially high wartime levels.
The company responded with a strategy of attrition, offering special deals on a department-by-department basis where eight hours had pockets of support, typically among highly skilled male workers. In the culture of a post-war, post-Depression U.S., that strategy was largely successful. But not everyone went along. Within Kellogg there was a substantial, albeit slowly dwindling group of people Hunnicutt calls the "mavericks," who resisted longer work hours. They clustered in a few departments that had managed to preserve the six-hour day until the company eliminated it once and for all in 1985.
The mavericks rejected the claims made by the company, the union, and many of their co-workers that the extra money they could earn on an eight-hour shift was worth it. Despite the enormous difference in societal wealth between the 1930s and the 1980s, the language the mavericks used to explain their preference for a six-hour workday was almost identical to that used by Kellogg workers fifty years earlier. One woman, worried about the long hours worked by her son, said, "He has no time to live, to visit and spend time with his family, and to do the other things he really loves to do."
Several people commented on the link between longer work hours and consumerism. One man said, "I was getting along real good, so there was no use in me working any more time than I had to." He added, "Everybody thought they were going to get rich when they got that eight-hour deal and it really didn't make a big difference. . . . Some went out and bought automobiles right quick and they didn't gain much on that because the car took the extra money they had."
The mavericks, well aware that longer work hours meant fewer jobs, called those who wanted eight-hour shifts plus overtime "work hogs." "Kellogg's was laying off people," one woman commented, "while some of the men were working really fantastic amounts of overtime-that's just not fair." Another quoted the historian Arnold Toynbee, who said, "We will either share the work, or take care of people who don't have work."
PEOPLE IN THE DEPRESSION-WRACKED 1930s, with what seems to us today to be a very low level of material goods, readily chose fewer work hours for the same reasons as some of their children and grandchildren did in the 1980s: to have more time for themselves and their families. We could, as a society, make a similar choice today.
But we cannot do it as individuals. The mavericks at Kellogg held out against company and social pressure for years, but in the end the marketplace didn't offer them a choice to work less and consume less. The reason is simple: that choice is at odds with the foundations of the marketplace itself-at least as it is currently constructed. The men and women who masterminded the creation of the consumerist society understood that theirs was a political undertaking, and it will take a powerful political movement to change course today.
Bernays's version of a "democratic society," in which political decisions are marketed to consumers, has many modern proponents. Consider a comment by Andrew Card, George W. Bush's former chief of staff. When asked why the administration waited several months before making its case for war against Iraq, Card replied, "You don't roll out a new product in August." And in 2004, one of the leading legal theorists in the United States, federal judge Richard Posner, declared that "representative democracy . . . involves a division between rulers and ruled," with the former being "a governing class," and the rest of us exercising a form of "consumer sovereignty" in the political sphere with "the power not to buy a particular product, a power to choose though not to create."
Sometimes an even more blatant antidemocratic stance appears in the working papers of elite think tanks. One such example is the prominent Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington's 1975 contribution to a Trilateral Commission report on "The Crisis of Democracy." Huntington warns against an "excess of democracy," declaring that "a democratic political system usually requires some measure of apathy and noninvolvement on the part of some individuals and groups." Huntington notes that "marginal social groups, as in the case of the blacks, are now becoming full participants in the political system" and thus present the "danger of overloading the political system" and undermining its authority.
According to this elite view, the people are too unstable and ignorant for self-rule. "Commoners," who are viewed as factors of production at work and as consumers at home, must adhere to their proper roles in order to maintain social stability. Posner, for example, disparaged a proposal for a national day of deliberation as "a small but not trivial reduction in the amount of productive work." Thus he appears to be an ideological descendant of the business leader who warned that relaxing the imperative for "more work and better work" breeds "radicalism."
As far back as 1835, Boston workingmen striking for shorter hours declared that they needed time away from work to be good citizens: "We have rights, and we have duties to perform as American citizens and members of society." As those workers well understood, any meaningful democracy requires citizens who are empowered to create and re-create their government, rather than a mass of marginalized voters who merely choose from what is offered by an "invisible" government. Citizenship requires a commitment of time and attention, a commitment people cannot make if they are lost to themselves in an ever-accelerating cycle of work and consumption.
We can break that cycle by turning off our machines when they have created enough of what we need. Doing so will give us an opportunity to re-create the kind of healthy communities that were beginning to emerge with Kellogg's six-hour day, communities in which human welfare is the overriding concern rather than subservience to machines and those who own them. We can create a society where people have time to play together as well as work together, time to act politically in their common interests, and time even to argue over what those common interests might be. That fertile mix of human relationships is necessary for healthy human societies, which in turn are necessary for sustaining a healthy planet.
If we want to save the Earth, we must also save ourselves from ourselves. We can start by sharing the work and the wealth. We may just find that there is plenty of both to go around.
Jeffrey Kaplan has long been an activist in the Bay Area. His articles have appeared in various publications, including Orion, Yes! and the Chicago Tribune.
© 2008 Orion Magazine
62 Comments so far
Show AllThis article puts a real tarnish on the Superman mythos: Truth, Justice and The American Way.
I guess Truth, Justice and Unbridled Materialism doesn't have the same patriotic ring.
...and people think I'm crazy for doing a 180° on unions.
I started a job here in a right-to-work state that was originally scheduled as a 40 hour per week gig. Then a new, foreign (but not to our culture of greed) VP came back to the department and suggested "everyone" work 4 9's and a 4. Everyone, that is, except the support (read: salaried, exempt) staff who now had to work four 10+ hour days and a full 8 (or 10) on Friday.
The people are foolishly buying into this, what is it? avoidance of life? by encouraging their peers to stay even longer and do even more for a free lunch ticket.
It has truly gotten beyond reasonable.
Leave at a fair 8 hours and push back when folks try to guilt you or bribe you into trading even more of that one resource we all have a finite amount of: our Time on this Earth.
Consume, Be Silent, Die.
Amen to toddboyle: The truth is, we must restrain our own appetites, but we also need to practice great discipline to prevent any of our time or resources of any kind, from being captured and consumed by the wealthy/ sociopaths.
To much of our economy is based on waste, just to keep people working forever. The engineers must purposely design products that won't last so you are forced to buy the same thing again. In addition, many things can't be repaired.
Three quotes:
"There is sufficiency in the world for man's need, but not for man's Greed."
"The poorest man in the world is the one with the most desires."
"It is not the standard of living that is important -- but the manner of living."
Bless
iammyself said: "Don't feel bad, ubrew12 - the consumer culture talks to us 24/7. ...It's a life-long process. You've done well just to have read the book [your money or your life].
Yes, I'm at a point in my life where I'm taking those principles VERY seriously. It really is WISE advice, as opposed to merely clever advice, like you'll find on most 24/7 'investment' channels.
Honestly, given the way our modern consumerist culture is run, its a wonder Joe Dominguez and Vicki Robin haven't been arrested or something by now.
Bush's appearances lately are 100% designed to convince the sheep to go out and SPEND their tax rebates, and thereby enslave themselves (er, I mean, stimulate 'our' economy) further.
Humanity decides how much of nature to cut, grind, mill, mine and destroy every year. We decide how much to fish, to plant and harvest, how much fuel to burn.
Our efficiency is very very poor, in conversion of nature's bounty into actual satisfaction of human needs-- all the levels of Maslows Hierarchy, of all the 7 billion people.
Almost the whole page, above, is focused on consciousness raising ---based on the proposition that if more people wake up and work less, it would be a good thing. Alas--you're wrong. The oil, metals, all the bounty of the earth, will be taken by the remaining sociopathic few, those most cunning, hyper-aggressive, long of fang, fleet of foot. The planet will be destroyed even faster, by our abdication.
The truth is, we must restrain our own appetites, but we also need to practice great discipline to prevent any of our time or resources of any kind, from being captured and consumed by the wealthy/ sociopaths. This is a very difficult problem --we have to stop allowing any money to flow to publicly listed corporations or private equity corporations, and stop working for them as well.
There is some people bashing going on among the left, mostly IMHO because people are not looking at the difference between Anomie and Apathy.
Anomie
1. personal state of isolation and anxiety resulting from a lack of social control and regulation
2. lack of moral standards in a society
Apathy
1. an absence of emotion or enthusiasm
2. the trait of lacking enthusiasm for or interest in things generally
I think a lot of what we are characterizing as apathy is really anomie which is a profound and debilitating condition that proceeds not from disinterest in the social condition, sometimes interest is very intense and painful, but from a feeling that an individual or isolated group can do nothing meaningful.
Don't feel bad, ubrew12 - the consumer culture talks to us 24/7. It's a hard habit to break and it's not a straight line.
I took the course many years ago and have slipped and have not really reached financial independence, but have managed to understand the power of money and reclaim some of my mental and financial health. To whit, I no longer have a mortgage and have virtually no debt. It's allowed me to get out of the corporate rat race and scale down my life.
It's a life-long process. You've done well just to have read the book.
iammyself said: "Dave Matthews has it right, doesn't he? And doesn't it sound every bit like a drug addiction?... Kicking the consumerism habit, like kicking a drug habit, takes will... Check out "Your Money or Your Life."
I liked 'Your money or your life' so much, I bought it for all my siblings. However, maybe I wish I'd followed its recommendations myself a bit more...
"Most Republicans are also not afraid of differing viewpoints"
PS is obviously referring to the Republicans of a bygone era, not the ones who have been in power for the last 20+ years.
Let's give a little credit to where this idea originally came from: the Fourth Commandment, to "Honor the Sabbath and keep it holy." Take a look at
http://www.sabbatheconomics.org/content/index.php
The secular and religious left can help each other!
Americans have been forged into narcissistic-consumerist-gluttons. WE are no longer citizens we are consumers.It is the usurers high interest rates that keep people slaves to consumption. We have to "emancipate ourselves from mental slavery" the slavery of narcissistic-consumerist-gluttony. Advertising is relentless the way that it insults and abuses its audiences. Nothing we have is good enough and at the end of a string of advertisements their is an ad for Zoloft the anti-depressant. Our cars, clothes, appearances are all demeaned and now narcissistic-consumerist-gluttony, shopping, is considered to be a display of patriotism. America is the only society in the history of the universe, 15,000,000,000 billion years to derive its sense of security from shopping, being narcissistic-consumerist-gluttons. Nice heritage America.
There is an organization that is trying to fix this problem from the ground up. http://www.networkofspiritualprogressives.org
Here are their main ideas:
Four basic tenets drive everything we do:
Foster a New Bottom Line of love, generosity & ecological sensitivity in our economy, education, media, & government.
Foster a new global consciousness and solidarity.
Promote awe, radical amazement, gratitude & developing an inner spiritual life.
Challenge the misuse of God & religion by the Religious Right and religio-phobia on the Left.
"This is a very important point, but it's also very subtle. When we let the capitalist influence the society, his machine adopts an agenda of its own and shifts from serving people to enslaving people. The machine's agenda is to keep itself running and growing at all cost."
And before too long it will replace most workers. The Japanese are well on their way to producing robots. The US Corporate elite already view workers as a liability, (who out there doesnt see that?)and so... connect the dots.
"I eat too much
I drink too much
I want too much
Too much
— Dave Matthews"
Dave Matthews has it right, doesn't he? And doesn't it sound every bit like a drug addiction?
Kicking the consumerism habit, like kicking a drug habit, takes will, perserverance, and an understanding of what it is that keeps us on drugs. That the pushers will keep on pushing makes it harder, but in the end, is irrelevant. If we want to survive, we must do it ourselves.
Fortunately, there are others out there who can help. One of them has posted here (Ramsay - though, I haven't taken his course). There are others out there too. Check out "Your Money or Your Life." It's a book, a web site, and a 12-step program that enables us to come to grips with the power of money and consumerism and how we can get it into perspective and live a REAL life. I've done it - it's helped!
DD wrote: "I'm afraid that the trend of the world's incorporated employers is to put the jobs (especially those actually making any physical things) into nations where citizens are worried more about eating than about the length of the workweek. That is the effect of 6 billion people (instead of 1 billion in 1850), together with "globalization" which is the rise of corporate power all over the world. Global competition for anything and everything is here to stay."
DD overlooks the fact that the era of cheap energy is over. Cheap energy made possible the globalization that took away our good manufacturing and agricultural jobs and impoverished our communities. The age of globalization is dying along with the age of cheap energy.
Straight in, suck up and go,
Cool it, swallow, swallow
Breathe deep, take it all
It comes cheap
Push it through the doors,
Because in between the lines
I'm gonna pack more lines,
So I can get in.
Ooh... traffic jam, got more cars
Than a beach got sand
Suck it up, suck it up, suck it up,
Fill it up until no more
I'm no crazy creep, I've got it coming
To me because I'm not satisfied
The hunger keeps on growing
I eat too much
I drink too much
I want too much
Too much
--- Dave Matthews
Seems to me this article already out of date. The real driver of the US economy nowadays is the financial industry which produces absolutely nothing, yet accounts for something like 21% of GDP. (I'm reading Kevin Phillips latest book, Bad Money)
What the US really manufactures nowadays is debt, which it then turns around, re-packages and re-sells to domestic and foreign investors. It's a wonderful scam and it creates a whole new batch of billionaires.
old goat sez : The image of Micky Mouse in the Fantasia scene of the Sorcerer's Apprentice with his out of control magical production of hyper-controlled brooms comes to mind as an image for the current market-defined 'policy making'.
Nice one, old goat! If I may extrapolate, it would appear to anyone who dared to peak behind the curtain, that when the Wise Wizard came down the steps with the intention of cleaning up the mess, that Mickey took that trusty axe of his and chopped the Wizard to bits too. And then Mickey went back to sleep to dream his rapturous dream of conducting/directing the entire universe for his own amusement. For Mickey, you see, would never allow his legacy to be tainted by admitting his wrongdoing and being broom-whacked by that arrogant intellectual elitist (and probably gay) liberal Wizard.
The TV issue: it's highly relevant because TV is the MEANS of creating consumption compulsion, and political passivity. I have noticed that among the small number of people I know who were raised without TV, free thinking is much more common. I have thanked my own mother for refusing to allow us to have a TV till I was 12; my adult daughter recently thanked me for doing the same. It was obvious to me that "depriving" my children of TV made them different, especially in one specific way--they were much less passive than their friends, had more initiative, more ability to come up with ideas and figure out how to carry them out. The other kids expected to be entertained at all times, and led. In my opinion, it's irresponsible to have a television in a home with children, especially young children. Theoretically, you could limit use to a few special, educational programs, like my mother said she was going to do when we did get a TV. Ha. That lasted about a week. Only if you are able to not consume junk food in your cupboard, should you imagine you will be able to control TV watching, which is even more addictive and less nutritious.
Another piece that could fit into any solution puzzle, and which went unmentioned by Kaplan, is that we constantly reinforce the overproduction and the overconsumption when we play by the oligarchy's social rules and accord social status in relation to wealth or income. Probably not too many of those who frequent CD would be guilty of this, but there is an offensive and destructive trend in US society to make judgments at least in part based on wealth, and that energizes the feedback loops that have led us to this mess.
Market research studies day to day life in all of its breadth to create advertising. Relative to research constructs, day to day life is organic and does not reflect the tight, stratified MR organization. Little in nature does aside from crystallization processes.
One of the most stinging critiques of US culture is apathy. The term 'apathy' does not address daily life conditions, but only its place within the political market. 'Apathy' does not apply to the individual keeping the family in a home, feeding the kids, etc. Frustrated and stymied perhaps but definitely not apathetic, except to a system that values only the production end.
The image of Micky Mouse in the Fantasia scene of the Sorcerer's Apprentice with his out of control magical production of hyper-controlled brooms comes to mind as an image for the current market-defined 'policy making'.
The American worker is in a state of fear. You can see it in any workplace. People working 60, 70, 80 hours a week with no OT just to keep their jobs. Employers see one or two people working these ridiculous hours and expect everyone else to have that level of "dedication" or you get fired. It's hard to stand up against the employer taking advantage when you can't trust your coworkers to stand with you. I don't know what's going to happen to the American worker, how can they squeeze more hours from us at less pay? I recently got laid off and even though I'm dead broke, can't seem to reconcile myself with going back to work. The rings they make you jump through to hold onto a job are a type of violence.
This is a great article. I am really grateful to see it.
It is very difficult to get people to revision economics, work and consumerism. We've all been simmered into believing that the way things are is the way they have to be.
We don't have to live to work. We can work to live. So long as we permit a greed-driven, dominator economy to exist, which is built upon the idea that there is never enough, that is what we will get.
Surely everyone, liberal and conservative alive, believes that there are enough resources on this planet to sustain all humans with the minimal requirements of shelter and food. How to allocate? What system would allow all to get their needs met? It is possible. We all know it is. But we can't see how.
This article takes us in the right direction.
Only one troll tonight. (must ... resist ... temptation ...)
An interesting read. Was thinking a bit about the futurist H.G.Wells' writing, particularily his story titled 'The Time Machine'. He painted a picture where people had leisure and culture. It appeared idyllic until it was revealed that the beautiful people were being farmed as a food source by the underground people who worked the machines.
Kaplan's article reminds me about a time when dreaming of and working towards a better world felt normal and we expected things to continue improving. It reminds me of some of the reasons to study history -> for information on where we are and how we got here, the choices that were and are available, what is possible, what did not work. History helps us to focus on the realities of the present and the possibilites of the future, both which are difficult to discern without the perspective obtained by study of the past.
An accurate history, warts and all is a birthright to be expected from our parents and we have the responsibility to learn it, test it and to transmit it to our children. Our parents and ourselves have done so poorly, else what Kaplan writes of would be far more widely known. Many children have been left behind.
Remember Margaret Thatcher's dismissal of debate concerning free-market capitalism with "There is no alternative."? She did so quite effectively, but what is is not what was inevitable and her decree does not negate that there are yet many choices available to us that are quite preferrable to the choice she promoted as the only one.
Capitalists have understood the need to artificially create "wants" since the beginning. In particular, the British government at the time that slavery was abolished (in the U.K.) explicitly addressed the issue - in 1836 the Colonial Secretary in the House of Lords wrote a dispatch to his subordinates in the Caribbean indicating that if something were not done to force them, ex-slaves would not sell their labor to export producers, i.e. coffee and sugar plantations. So the ex-slaves were simply denied rights to obtain land. Similarly, peasants in England proper were forced off land ("the commons") several centuries earlier by "enclosure", whereby they were denied land access by acts of parliament, land that in feudal times was occupied by the peasantry without the existence of "title." By the early 19th century British classical economists, e.g., Ricardo, argued outright that citizens had no economic rights except those they could win on the labor market, including the "economic" right to live. In effect, this argument states that profit has the natural right to exist while the worker does not. So never mind "wants" such as wishing to own a radio or toaster, if such is not your desire: how about the "want" to live? Capitalism is based on making the desire to stay alive itself "consumerist."
This article shows how deliberately industry leaders think and work on the problem of how to manage us. They do not want us to keep the anywhere near the full gains of our productivity. They are pretty up front among themselves about what they are doing, but we rarely hear about it.
For years we as a nation have bought the individualist gospel as well as the gospel of consumption. We will each take care of ourselves. This is combined with passivity engineered by hordes of advertisers, social and industrial psychologists, who are paid by big money to devise invisible leashes of soft control. Therefore no labor organizing and no political activism. If you have leisure, it is likely you are worried about money, anxiety ridden looking for a job.
This is a pathetic position to be in compared with the ability of financiers to initiate action in their own behalf. They buy legislation and legislators. They can outsource even profitable enterprises so as to be even more profitable. They can combine jobs so one works twice as hard with the same pay and benefits. They can classify jobs as "management" to make unionizing illegal. They can take gigapay for themselves even while the enterprise goes downhill. They can make us so insecure that we do anything they want.
We are lured into a financial trap not only by addictive entertainment gizmos, excessive clothes and shoes, bloated cars and McMansions but also by necessities like housing, food, education and health care costs that can drain a budget or cause a financial meltdown.
Finally we are unable or unwilling to contend. The powerful are not shy about taking whatever they want. They are also clever and deliberative and have been outplaying us for decades.
We have absorbed the idea that there are no class differences, and that it is an unseemly to act as if there were. This forum is one of the few places I can even begin to learn about and discuss what is possible.
Imagine if a 35 hour work week were the norm. Imagine it paid the bills. Imagine coming home (by public transporation, preferably) to spend time with loved-ones or neighbors or to take a class or grow a garden. Imagine your teenagers were not attached to head devices. Imagine if mom were not always on the computer - oh wait, that's me.
I just looked at this post. Sorry for the length, but I am too tired to shorten it.
The article relies too much on falsified government economic figures, and disregards issues like health costs, taxes, usury interest rates, etc. It's main theme is the globalist agenda to "reduce consumption" to save the planet, when it's purpose is to get people to accept lower living standards so we can be merged with the developing world.
The issue of working hours is interesting. It was a great concern for the industrialists in the early 20th century. If it only required 3 months production at 100% capacity to meet the demand of the people, then how could they achieve maximum profitability while maintaining full employment. There was only one solution in their mind, perpetual war, which allows for the production of weapons and the destruction of weapons and the destructions of the production the weapons destroyed. Thus WWI and beyond.
In 1963, JFK authorized a study on the alternatives of war. The results came out after he was wacked.
From the "report from Iron Mountain, published in 1966.
http://www.projectcamelot.org/Report_from_Iron_Mountain.pdf
"War fills certain functions essential to the stability of our
society; until other ways of filling them are developed, the war system must be maintained -- and improved in effectiveness."
You can skip the forward which is rather long to the report on page 19. It supposedly was a government commsissioned report that leaked.
The values of war and alternatives to war were provided. You can figure out for yourself which they chose following the establishment of the Trilateral Commission in 1973.
I do remember in the early 70's my teachers predicting a 20-30 hr work week. As previously indicated, most families did just fine working 35-40 hrs per week with only the head of the household working. They also had no problem feeding and clothing 4-7 kids. Now families struggle with 2 kids, both parents working, and illegal and legal immigrants flood the country to make up for the reduced population growth due to fewer children being born by European colonist and immigrants in the early 20th century.
The change was not an accident, and it is not the result of greedy overconsumption of the American working class. Look at the cost of health care, college tuition, energy, collective taxation that takes up to 40% of income, fraudulent CPI figures which results in a tax on COLA's and savings, usurious interest rate charges on credit card debt.
When the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 established the 40-hour workweek, it established a penalty for companies working their employees more than the 40-hour "limit". The penalty was the overtime pay provision. Lawmakers believed that the additional half-time "premium" pay would discourage employment of an individual for more than 40 hours and, like the Kellogg's 30-hour week, encourage additional employment. The theory was companies would hire more workers to cover additional hours they needed rather than pay the half-time penalty. Too soon, however, overtime hours were sought after, and unions often worked manditory overtime into their contracts so their members could earn more money. The idea that your free time was worth more than additional money was thus attacked from both sides as the American worker fell for the sparkly lure of consumerism. Subsequent attempts to put the penalty back into overtime hours (by upping the pay for OT hours to 2½ times the regular rate, for example) have never gotten off the ground.
And I keep hearing candidates and pols of every stripe saying how life is good when there are jobs with plenty of overtime. How's about a life that doesn't require plenty of overtime? How's about a life that doesn't push crap on us (with a healthy dose of psychological marketing) and just lets us live within our means?
Well, those are nice things to dream about, but the system that brung 'em will not get rid of them. We, as rational individuals, need to stop buying so much shit.
To those who say "turn off your TV" - I understand. While TV is not the only problem, it is one of the largest means of pushing consumers to consume more. The medium is perfect for psychologically influencing the most people. And while I watch some TV (very selectively), I do not watch ANY commercial TV. It is bad for one's mental health.
'Bernays claimed that in a "democratic society" we are and should be "governed, our minds . . . molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of."'
And this is exactly what has happened to us. To learn more about this (if you dare to swallow the red pill), take a little while to watch the Century of Self:
http://freedocumentaries.org/film.php?id=140
What we are seeing is not just overproduction, but a change in the way wealth is produced. In other words, we cannot eat up the excess production and go back to work. From now on, jobs will be filled by automated production.
We are seeing technology change the world again. This is the age of the "electronic revolution." Technology is no longer "labor saving" it is labor replacing. The working class is in competition with robots.
For example, the development of the integrated microprocessor during the 1960s revolutionized computer technology, opening the way for its deployment across a diversity of economic applications. The deployment of these technologies in production does not merely increase the productivity of labor, it drives labor out of production altogether.
So you really don't have to worry about consuming less. You may have to worry about your basic needs.
So maybe the question should be. How do we build a society that focuses on peoples needs and not maximum profits?
Power Slave,
I just have one question. You talk about the 'health/behavior Nazis', but do you seriously believe we should repeal, for example, the smoking laws? I am a nonsmoker who is allergic to cigarette smoke, and if smoking in the workplace hadn't been banned my life would be one horrible misery! I would be constantly sick, or maybe even dead. (I recently lost two nonsmoking relatives to lung cancer.) So, what exactly do you mean by 'freedom'? You talk of freedom, but shouldn't freedom including being able to breathe clean air?
And you mention the DUI laws.... do you honestly not care that you (or a loved one) could be killed by a drunk driver? Maybe the laws don't deter people from driving drunk as much as they could, but for heaven sakes... driving drunk is criminal behavior! It kills people! Do you honestly believe we should repeal all of these laws and just let people do whatever they want to, even if it includes causing harm or death to another?
I don't call that 'libertarianism'... I call it sociopathy. Sociopaths endeavor to do whatever they want to even if it hurts or kills someone else. I have a hard time believing that's what you meant.
Some of your points make sense, i.e. if a person doesn't want to wear a helmet they shouldn't be forced to, but please... in the name of sanity, how can you be against laws that help protect people from being killed by other people's behavior?
And by the way, the rest of my family are all staunch, conservative Republicans... and there is NO WAY they would want to see either the smoking laws or the DUI laws repealed!
Thank you for listening... it would be wonderful if together we could figure out some kind of middle ground that makes sense.
A very interesting article.
Galbraith had some interesting things to say about advertising and the money waisted on it, advertising as part of our economy is often forgotten about, but I'm wondering, and this wondering is further enhanced by this piece, whether we should start spending more time thinking about it.
Are we not corrupting our economy, our future and possibly the general psychology of our societies by increasing the volume of dissatisfaction. I won't go into the spiritual and personal here, but should we not seriously consider regulating this part of the economy that seems to inspire so much waist.
PS - I said before, I have tried being tolerant of the intolerant, and it doesn't work. There is not a single reason any American human being should be a Republican, although I can see why you would if you had the dough. If you don't, you've been fooled and duped by a series of lies and baitings. I just cannot see it any other way. The republicans are anti-American, anti-Constitution, and just plain evil.
Name me a republican who sees different viewpoints - your head man doesn't even believe in scientific evidence, and has protesters banished so he doesn't have to hear their viewpoints. Pul-leese! Libertarians are a self-centered lot who figure they got theirs and screw everyone else.
Now the corporate Dems are not much better, but a vote for a republican is basically a vote for your own destruction. Thus, the fools and dupes follow the republicans into a fascist hell.
Just want to add my voice to those praising this article and advocating reduced work hours. Thanks to Common Dreams for presenting this article.
Let me get this straight, PS, - You believe the republican party represents peaceful co-existance, tolerance, and non-conformity? It seems to me that doesn't square with reality in the least. Once again, if you are a republican and not a multi-millionaire you are simply a fool and a dupe.
Gott Metta:
"Someone else can have my job – I'd rather have a life!"
Good for you. You not only have a life, by rejecting consumerism, you have also helped the environment and the economy.
Ramsay
Personally I like to be proven wrong, it improves my life. I don't mind if people suggest that I not watch tv, or stop consuming, or grow a garden. I like differences in viewpoints. Each of us is going to choose to live the way we want to anyway. It's only when someone's ego presumes that their opinions are superior to others that I stop listening.
I enjoyed this article and I learned from it. Thanks.
Power_Slave said: "seatbelt laws, motorcycle helmet laws, gun control, child bicycle helmet laws...NONE have passed with significant Republican support."
Good reason to vote democractic.
The emphasis should be put on work-more work and better work." "Nothing," he claimed, "breeds radicalism more than unhappiness unless it is leisure."
There may be a little truth to this capitalist's rhetoric. It's also said that "idleness is the devil's workshop". But while we plan for 15 hour work weeks, we don't advocate leisure and idleness for the rest of the week. The people should be maintaining their homestead production, i.e. repairing their shelter, tools, and systems, growing, and processing their food, managing their communities, and civic affairs, studying, teaching, learning, experimenting, organizing, keeping the boot of the elites off their necks.
Last night when I shared a $10 gourmet pizza and glass of wine with a friend, I thought how fortunate I am. There was no need for a $40 entree, etc to just feel the blessing of a decent meal shared with a friend. I had a very strong sense that one who can appreciate simple things is the one endowed with TRUE wealth. It is not manipulated with advertising style PR about more or better. It is the ZEN path applied to consumerism.
Dr. Seuss, in my view, was a genius. Every one of his "nonsense" books actually teaches a huge lesson about human life and human nature. In THE LORAX a little creature with a strong ecological sense speaks for the trees being everywhere cut down so that "business is business and business must grow." Dr. Seuss even invents a rationale on the part of his "Once-ler" (the pro-business character in the story), and it's THNEEDS. Basically he was sharing with youngsters the same idea as related in this article: that it's all fiction, this "made for you" version of what you supposedly NEED.
The Rolling Stones sang that "you can't always get what you want... but if you try sometimes, you just might find, that you get what you need." When needs and wants are falsely juxtaposed through the psychological voodoo of high-paid PR pros we end up with an obese, apolitical, raging society. Live of quiet desperation never got so noisy!
Power Slave - you make some interesting points and I will research those, tho I don't see how anyone can be against helmet laws (in an 18 months period 4 yrs ago our family lost 3 friends to motorcycle accidents- 2 weren't wearing helmets [the 1 that did had his face scraped off by the rocks he hit, but I digress]). DUI? You can't penalize people who drink and drive ENOUGH!
You have to admit it IS the republicans who want to know the contents of every woman's uterus.
Now we're off topic. Back to regular programming.
Power Slave sez: "The few movements toward freedom, such as the end of the 55 MPH speed limit, the death of the so called assault weapon ban, and the present movement in Missouri to lower the drinking age to 18 have all come about because of Republicans."
You're not winning any friends or making republicans look good with those arguments. If you are a republican and not a multi-millionaire you are simply a fool and a dupe.
Keep the Consumer Dissatisfied
It's good to see Common Dreams bringing in some material on the capitalist's manipulation of market demands, as early as 1929. No doubt the idea was hatched decades or centuries earlier, and probably even before that. But the manipulation of demand is a complete violation of the common sense rules that make capitalism serve the better interests of the society, instead of dominating them. Liberalism was the capitalist's license to dominate and now we have mass addiction to commodities with huge hidden costs. Capitalism is not the ideal, but we can push it very close to the ideal by limiting the size of enterprises to something very small, and purging the corruption and abuse. The system isn't so important as the intentions of the actors. Do your part to build a good society by using your choice of exchange/association to deter bad intents.
Machines can save labor, but only if they go idle when we possess enough of what they can produce
This is a very important point, but it's also very subtle. When we let the capitalist influence the society, his machine adopts an agenda of its own and shifts from serving people to enslaving people. The machine's agenda is to keep itself running and growing at all cost. Capitalists never explain why "economic growth at all cost" is their top policy priority, because it's not a rational priority. The machines should "go idle when we possess enough of what they can produce". This keeps the people free from enslavement to the war machine, the healthcare machine, the petro-machine, all of these machines that serve themselves first, people last.
In this modern world, the Individual is toast, to be consumed. So good government should set rules to be mandatory for all, and have objective oversight (not 'business-friendly' oversight, which is to say, none). In other words, A New Deal. Or else the inconsequential individual will definitely be powerless. And systems and rules that benefit corporate power will trump and smash those that benefit individuals and society and nature.
What is going on now is that TransNational Corporations are pitting one set of national and local rules and populations against another, in a bidding-war race to the bottom of existence. (Do you hear Ross Perot's "giant sucking sound" yet? It seems that the Clintons never do.)
These TransNational players (war criminal-internationalist Henry Kissinger is a prime example) see themselves as above all nations, and better than all governments and laws.
This is otherwise known as 'treason'.
So if they find that there are rules about throwing poisons into streams and minimum wages and worker safety and overtime in one nation (say, America), well then they will just go to a nation or area (like a right-to-work-anti-union area/state) that doesn't have these bothersome rules.
BUT THEN they will still have the gall to claim the RIGHT to IMPORT their goods from that poor place to the place that is rich BECAUSE it has these rules, in a Depraved and Evil version of so-called Free Trade.
And this Gilded Age system of winner-take-all has become the norm in America. In the latest capitalist fiasco, if home prices had remained stable instead of rocketing to the moon, there would be no crisis. Again, the powers pitted individual against individual. Divide and conquer.
The bankers upped the 'valuation' of homes to match the maximum amount that was able to be paid by individuals on lower-interest loans, on homes they would not really 'own' for thirty years, or in other words, a lifetime.
But the suckers were promised they could off-load this debt plus more debt to some other sucker at a higher price (the suckers' profit or 'equity') in future.
Well, the future is now. Whoops, no equity, and instead more debt. Sorry that the 'salesmen' in business and government were all frauds, scoundrels and liars, looking out for number one... themeselves. Too bad for you. Now get lost.
When the Federal Reserve, as usual BY DECREE, raised interest rates to banks because the dollar, and thus this Nation, had lost Half its value against almost all other currencies during these wonderful Bush years, the poor individual found his home 'value' collapsed, his 'equity' the first value eaten away, and his new interest rate unpayable due to stagnant wages in declining-value dollars and massive job cuts made to boost corporate profits.
A perfect economic storm. And not because of 'liquidity' as is played up by the connivers, but because of debt. It is a debt crisis, not a liquidity crisis.
If, instead of Bankers raising the appraisals of home 'values', prices had remained stable, individuals would have had the benefits of saving the extra money from their static salaries that was NOT paid to the banks, and to hedge-fund manipulators (thanks, Mitt Romney) and realtors, and developers.
But then, that was the point of the whole exercise (thanks, Greenspan, you corporatist Republican NeoCon 'free'-market manipulator welfare-for-the-rich-only AynRandian toady). The corporate parties were made richer instead, on the backs of the debt=slavery of individuals. And more and more debt was loaded on, until it could no longer be continued. Then the house-of-cards structure collapsed.
But never fear, the Fed is Now printing Even More money, and now not just for the Bankers alone as in the past, BUT WITH NEW EXPANDED POWERS, FOR THE STOCKBROKERAGES AND HEDGE-FUNDS TOO. Gee, thanks, Stockbrokerage-owner-Secretary Paulson, and Banker-Fed-Chair Bernanke for the overt state welfare to the rich and powerful, and to the corporations, and for charging all costs for this to our children!
And thanks, Republican candidate McCain, for an economic policy consisting of new giveaways for the rich that will add yet another ten trillion dollars, in just your first term, to the debt load of the American people should you become president. On top of the sixty-plus trillion dollars owed right now going forward, and on top of the three or so trillion dollars that the Iraq War is going to cost Americans. What a brain, that McCain! And I mean, what brain? But he will repeat the senile idiotic mantra of the Republican demigod Reagan, and so hypnotize the misled rabble with the recitation of "no new taxes, no new taxes" ad infinitum.
So most of us will continue to have to work more and more, while falling farther and farther behind.
To paraphrase an old ad on the dangers of cocaine; I work more, so I can pay the banks, so I can work more, so I can pay the corprations, so I can work more, so I can pay for the military machine, so I can work more, so they will 'allow' me to live.
On and on in a circle. The debt and compound-interest circle from which there is no escape (allowed).
If corporations were allowed to run slaves, they would. Oh, that's right, in many hidden places, they do. So much for the individual. China is run as just one big business conglomerate, complete with a Chairman. So you can see that Capitalism has NOTHING to do with democracy or freedom or liberty. And certainly not with concern for the rights or dignity or life of the individual.
And the American military machine is in a thousand places around the world so they can 'defend' this country? Give me a break. Like General Smedley Butler knew even long ago, the military forces are there to 'enforce' TransNational corporate 'contracts', in the flat-earth, faux-free-trade, rigged-market, feudal-fiefdom, privateering, buccaneering new world this world is becoming.
The corrupting Capitalist-greed pseudo-philosophers of Free-Markets and Free-Trade and No-Government-Interference essentially shout to the American Public that it can just go take a flying frigging leap at a rolling doughnut, so far as they are concerned.
Problem is, that many people believe the crap coming from these 'experts' and 'officials' and keep trying that leap, thus keeping the paradigm going.
So how can we stop the futility of this dog-eat-dogism wherein the value created by the labor of others is usurped by the money manipulators and coporate masters, and instead fight the power. Good question. Isn't it.
Excellent article. And a rationale for why I took my frugal Irish friend Paddy's suggestion "to live below my means" and retire as soon as I possibly could. Work today is "in for a penny in for a pound" - I didn't have a choice about working overtime, forfeiting vacation or taking it in December. The extra "stuff" I could buy didn't make up for the time I lost with my wife, family (especially my Dad who died before I could retire) and friends. What good is extra stuff, if there is no time or energy to enjoy it? Or to pursue other more meaningful endeavors? So I eschewed the extra stuff, saved the overtime and retired at 53. I have never regretted the decision for a millisecond. Someone else can have my job – I'd rather have a life!
When my children were young I was able to work 28 hours a week in a job that provided benefits. It was wonderful. I did volunteer work at school and elsewhere, and spent a lot of time doing things with my kids. We didn't miss the money. Now I see co-workers retiring and I'm not able to, but I don't care. It's worth it to me, shifting those work hours to the later part of my life when my children are gone.
I am concerned about the point several people have brought up about TV and other passive entertainment. Yes, there can be worthwhile things on TV, and it can be watched in moderation. However, I don't know how many people really have the strength to do that. I believe it's addictive.
My kids were brought up with a very limited amount of TV viewing. We read and spent time in the outdoors. That made them different as kids, and they are still different today as young adults. They're not big consumers. They're content with what they have. They know about all the latest gadgets and such, but they don't covet them. They still value the outdoors and family time.
I thought this was a very interesting, important, and revealing article, but I fear that TV, and not a lack of leisure time, may be the reason that people don't participate in government or the lives of their communities.
I resent it when people write "turn off your tv." If I wanted to be told what to do I'd become a republican. I don't have cable and I DO watch TV. I find it entertaining at times, educational at times - and sometimes both. Maybe that's because I'm selective.
Thank you diodd for your contributions. I find them thought-full and appreciate it.
The simple shift in Kaplan's narrative from life to numerics is a lovely illustration of where we are. The entire scope of the shift is presented in a nutshell setting out a tap root.
Human nature is to explore, love and create. It is important to keep in mind that the 'elite' are where they are due to creativity of most who were and are not 'elite' placed into userous paradigms. Life consists of an unlimited number of narratives and connections, all necessary for the unending dance of creative common ground.
The sadly polarized monoculture of industrialism and disregarded pollution/waste of all sorts renders the 'elite' numeric analysis seriously disconnected from its own roots and consequences, perhaps a tool worth keeping, but only one in the toolbox.
There is the 'old saw' that for someone with only a hammer - everything looks like a nail. The manufacture of desire to develop addiction to the hammer is itself an addiction. The imposed horizon of hammer addiction is slowly giving way to other tools like wind mills, conversations and renewed creative vigor - necessity being the mother of invention when karma runs over dogma.
Thank you Jeffery Kaplan for engaging a thread of oral traditions that tell a story with some of the roots of our common condition in recovery from hammer addiction.
Alas, Daniel David does have a point about globalization and population. Europe has held out on its vacation and leave benefits so far, but no telling how long it will last.
Oooh, population, the third rail of even left-wing politics. Daniel David's comment makes me think about how a stable or smaller population could benefit us even if we DIDN'T have so many ecological limits to worry about. As the ecological problems mount, why is the assumption so often that if we CAN somehow find some new technology to keep population growing, we SHOULD? We have two possibilities: a large steady-state population that is right at the cusp of ecological carrying capacity, where we all end up impoverished (the natural result of globalization will be the lowering of labor standards here to those in China). Or, a reduced population that leaves plenty of "breathing room" between us and the carrying capacity, has more wild places, requires less intensive and herculean efforts to secure the resources we need (i.e., less work, getting back to our original point), and allows for a higher average material standard of living (anti-consumerists please note that material standard of living also includes things like parks and clean water and public libraries and bike trails)? And yes, with fewer of us, labor would have more influence.
Isn't it odd to think that the central problems of our world are caused by things our traditions tell us are virtues (working more than we need to, having larger families)? What if INCREASED LAZINESS is the key to humans making it to the next stage?
I think I'm gonna go hang out by the lake now!
"Turn off your TV because it is a monopoly controlled marketing machine with limited channels and viewpoints."
Besides living within your budget it is the only vote that Americans can cast that will definitely change things.
I don't want to be a party pooper (though some here at CD think I always do) but I'm afraid that the trend of the world's incorporated employers is to put the jobs (especially those actually making any physical things) into nations where citizens are worried more about eating than about the length of the workweek. That is the effect of 6 billion people (instead of 1 billion in 1850), together with "globalization" which is the rise of corporate power all over the world. Global competition for anything and everything is here to stay
I also think that, except for the most disciplined who actively resist outside intrusive temptations, that TV, radio, video games, movies on demand, the Internet, sports, cellphones, texting and other modern innovations will tend to sap away that "relax with friends and family" time that we say we need---yet often somehow put in last place.
And, here we are typing instead of smelling flowers with a buddy.
Jeffrey:
Good Article. It's titled the "Gospel of Consumption", I would like to point out one date that show cases the power of consumption in our society, December 25th.
The battle between Jesus Christ and Santa Claus. Jesus who speaks of love, modesty, forgiveness. And Santa Claus who speaks of desire, greed, and materialism. Santa Claus wins the battle everytime. Santa Claus speaks the "Gospel of Consumption."
I remember watching a PBS series many years ago titled "Connections". It was the the late 70's, or early 80's, and the computer was beginning to become mainstream. The host proclaimed that the computer would mankind from many mundane tasks, creating greater productivity, and inevitably leading to more "Leisure Time". Obviously, that has not happened, people are now enslaved by their computers, cell phones, and blackberrys.
I am attempting to convince people, with my own efforts, that lowering their consumption will make them healthier and wealthier. In order to reverse people's behavior, they need to be convinced that the alternative is more beneficial, appealing to the same forces that drive them towards consumption.
12 Steps to Over coming Over Consumption
http://www.iplanretirement.com/retirementblog/12-steps-health-wealth/
Green Retirement - Save hundreds of thousands of dollars, retire early, and help save the planet.
http://www.iplanretirement.com
If even the prospect of eternal life in hell, can't keep people from the mall, what chance does the warning of global destruction truly have? This is the reality and the frustration.
Society must be presented with the facts, that the culture of over consumption has led not only to environmental destruction, but also personal destruction. Poverty, obesity, impotence, mental illness.
And then the alternative, conservation must be presented to society, with the facts on how it will improve their personal lives. Wealth, health, more sex, age slower, live longer.
As with Jesus Christ, humans appear to be mostly immune, to the "Gospel" of heaven and hell. They act out of self-interest, make being "Green" a selfish act, then we may begin to see a meaningful societal shift.
Ramsay
Okay, I promise I'll shut up after this. The article is right that we can't get our time back ONLY with individual action. If you like having one spouse stay home, that's one way that works on your own, but that shouldn't be the only option available, and right now there just aren't that many 30 hour a week jobs out there, especially with health benefits, for families where both spouses want to work.
So we will have to make them. It will take awhile, and even if you're lucky enough to have a union, the big unions are not in touch with this issue. So I say bring back the wildcat labor action, and start small with bringing back the paid lunch-- remember when "9 to 5" actually meant what it said?
Turn off your TV, turn on your computer, e-mail your coworkers, and ask them if they'd like to get a paid half-hour lunch. Probably you won't get it every day at first, maybe one day a week. Then, e-mail your department head all together, at the same time, and say, don't worry, we aren't forming a u-n-i-o-n or anything scary, but we can take our PTO all at the same time for the next week, and have your office be empty, or, you can talk to us about a little more time off, like a paid lunch now and then.
Also, I did discover one thing I don't like about this article: the title ("The Gospel of Consumption" in the CommonDreams version). It makes you think it's going to be just another feel-good article for those of us who buy less stuff to make fun of those of us who buy more. It should explicitly state what it's about, like the old handbills did when they won the 8-hour day. Like "Less Work, Less Stuff, More Living" or perhaps more concretely, "Bring Back the Paid Lunch."
Turn off your TV because it is a monopoly controlled marketing machine with limited channels and viewpoints.
Turn on your computer because it is an open forum with millions of channels that allow participation.
I can't wait for the death of the monopoly controlled cable lineup. We need to be able to access internet content through our television sets. This will greatly improve our democracy.
The best thing in life is not things. Do with less and have more free time.
My husband works 40 hours a week at a job he absolutely loves. I teach piano 3 afternoons a week, which I love. Yet our families cannot understand why I don't go and get a "real" job for 40+ hours a week and make some serious money so we can have more stuff. It's not just businesses that don't always value that unpaid time factor.
Responding to TurnOffYourTV who posted at the same time as I did: You know, I think it's true that we Americans watch too much TV and I personally spend too much time at the computer, but I also take issue with this solution that is so often suggested when issues like work time or work-life balance are discussed. A lot of people I know, the reason they don't hang out with friends as much as they used to or do other "active" leisure activities or participate in citizenship, is because they're mentally and/or physically exhausted at the end of a long day at work plus more chores at home. Yeah, the TV could be reduced, and a lot of the household chores could be reduced too if fewer of us fell for the "home remodeling / interior design" aspect of consumerism.
But this sort of scolding is not going to win us any votes. What we are doing when we just say "turn off your TV" is creating a vision of Progressive life that involves nothing but work. We are reinforcing the notion that the ONLY way to achieve gender equality is for everybody to work a 40, 50, 60 hour week and then take care of the kids and the house and maybe not even see their spouses, let alone their friends.
A lot of the progressive press (unlike this particular article) is reinforcing the notion that a Good Progressive Person is ALWAYS out there protesting and growing his own food and attaching solar panels to her own house and cooking nutritious organic meals at home, on top of their day jobs. Well, it WOULD be a nicer world if people were out in the community gardens and had more solar panels and took the time to bicycle commute, but why don't we offer people some time to do it in? What's wrong with giving them something that benefits them?
I say: Shorten the workweek and if you wanna watch TV, go right ahead, invite over your friends and call it Building Community. Have a beer, if you like beer. Let's make being liberal fun!
HERE HERE! Glad to see this issue being discussed again, if only ever so rarely. Let me drum up some controversy among future posters by pointing out that employers took unfair advantage of the entry of women into the workforce-- it wasn't feminists' fault at all, since the unions in the 1970's were sexist as all get-out and losing influence anyhow, and therefore there could not be a strong feminist-union alliance stating "Equality for women now, and a twenty-five hour week!"
But think about it-- even if you take account of the fact that working-class women always worked outside of the home, and single people all worked the "normal" 40-hour week, when you take into account the family wage and the housewife phenomenon in the 1950's and 1960's, the average paid workweek had to have been 25-30 hours. For married middle-class couples it was 20. Not "it could have been 20"-- it WAS 20. And now, those of us who very much want equality of the sexes in the workplace and a fair balance of work at home, are forced to sell this wonderful idea with the yoke of an 80-or-more-hour-per-couple workweek tied around its neck?
How do we establish "work-life balance"? By shortening the workweek, putting a mandatory cap on overtime, reducing the "exempt" category of workers who don't get overtime, and demanding minimum levels of paid vacation, similar to Europe.
And what's the first step to that? Not feeling guilty any more when we say no to our employers and yes to our family, friends, and community-- we can start by saying the same thing when asked to stay past 5pm that we already say when asked out to lunch by a friend: "Sorry, I'd love to, but I'm too busy." Of course, we will need organization on the union and political level too-- but the first step is to move past the notion that asking for more vacation time is "selfish" or "lazy" or insufficiently "ambitious." Taking your pay in time instead of money is better for the environment, better for your family, friends, and community, and, yeah, it's also better for you, but what's wrong with that?
Turn off your TV and you'll find a couple extra hours every day! Now about that time spent at the computer...