he end of
the Cold War and the rise of globalization have made the
stresses and strains of life under late capitalism apparent.
The reigning theory of rational
choice and its application
in political economy, neoliberalism, have reduced all human
interaction to exchange based on individual self-interest.
Market logic rules from the linoleum-tiled aisles of
Wal-Mart to the polished marble corridors of Washington DC.
Not long ago, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher
declared, "There is no such thing as society. There are
individual men and women, and there are families." To be
sure, it seems the whole of humanity has been set adrift to
flounder in the swirling currents of uncertainty that
presently mark the worldwide economic system. Cheap goods
increasingly pull down the value of wages, and what
economists call "externalities," such as pollution and
social inequality, never factor into the equation. Yet
rather than point out a need for a new critique of capital,
this situation suggests that many of the traditional
analytical tools of the left are more relevant than ever.
Much of the average
American's paranoia about the effects of globalization
focuses these days on China and India, but the reality is on
display much closer to home. According to statistics
compiled by the Migration Policy Institute, America's
leading trading partner is in fact Canada (with Japan and
Mexico coming in behind it), accounting for US $411 billion
in trade in the year 2000 with more than US$1 billion
crossing the border on any given day. Some two-thirds of
that trade is shipped by truck with about 10 million trips
being made annually across the US-Canadian border. A lot of
this activity is connected to the automobile industry, which
since the 1970s has increasingly disaggregated production in
search of higher profits, a process greatly accelerated in
the last decade by the North American Free Trade Agreement
(NAFTA), a model of neoliberalist policy that eliminates all
trade barriers between the USA, Canada, and Mexico.
The Detroit-Windsor
border is the primary crossing point for US-Canadian trade,
handling one-third of all annual volume. The largest share
of Canada's trade with Mexico also passes through the
Detroit-Windsor conduit. The preponderance of this activity
is funneled through a single point, the Ambassador Bridge
over the Detroit River, by itself accounting for more than
one-quarter of all merchandise trade traffic between the US
and Canada. Semi-tractor-trailer rigs constantly stream
across the bridge in the same way tailed-finned Cadillacs
once flowed from the assembly line of the old Clark Street
Fleetwood plant that used to be just a few blocks away and
is now a barren brownfield dotted with rubble.
Looking north from the
middle of the Ambassador Bridge, the cylindrical
glass-and-steel towers of General Motors Corporation's
headquarters are visible on the downtown riverfront skyline.
Stretching downriver to the south are coal and slag heaps,
decaying loading docks, and in the hazy distance the
smokestacks of the colossal River Rouge Plant, where Henry
Ford perfected the techniques of vertically integrated mass
production that bear the eponymous designation of Fordism.
The street grid of the neighborhood around the bridge on the
Detroit side has been cut up to accommodate the heavy
traffic volume and provide walled holding areas for customs
inspections and for security purposes. (The Detroit area is
home to the largest Arab population outside the Middle East,
fueling ever-lurking fears of a possible terrorist attack.)
Looming in the background is the abandoned Michigan Central
train station, designed in 1913 by Warren & Whetmore who
also did Grand Central Terminal in New York City. Long ago
rendered obsolete as railcars gave way to motor cars, its
12-story empty shell has been stripped bare of anything
remotely of value by decades of scavengers.
Early in the twentieth
century, Detroit set the pace for the modern age with the
high output/high wage system first pioneered by Ford at his
facilities in Highland Park, a small municipality completely
surrounded by the city of Detroit, carved out of it pretty
much as a tax dodge. The Highland Park plant is idle, a vast
silent hulk that serves as a backdrop for a strip mall,
named Model T Plaza, now occupying what was once the Ford
Motor Company employee parking lot. The front of the grocery
store anchoring the plaza has a replica of the Model T
assembly line set above the checkout lanes; behind it is a
downsized reproduction of Diego Rivera's magisterial mural
cycle, Detroit Industry. The population of Detroit
is now less than half its postwar peak and its unemployment
rate more than double the national average. Nearly one-third
of its residents live below the poverty line, a statistic
rivaled only by New Orleans. Every street has abandoned
buildings crumbling into ruin and many neighborhoods are
reverting to open fields where wild game freely ranges. The
city has been hollowed out like the manufacturing industries
that once provided its working classes with some of the
nation's highest living standards. And it wasn't a hurricane
that wreaked the devastation. The Economic Policy Institute
attributes tens of thousands of high-wage job losses and
lower living standards in Michigan directly due to NAFTA,
with the results for Canada and Mexico not any more
encouraging.
While American
automobile companies, their suppliers, and employees seem to
be facing yet another crisis, automobile manufacturing
continues to drive a large part of the worldwide economy.
Automotive is still the world's largest industrial sector
according to Global Inc., an atlas of the global
economic system. More people make cars worldwide than ever;
they just aren't doing it in America or under a union
contract. As a result of these changes and similar ones in
other industries, real wages in the US have fallen over the
past three decades and the social safety net is in tatters.
In the 1950s, the former chairman of General Motors, Charles
E. Wilson, famously quipped, "What's good for the country is
good for General Motors and vice versa." With GM on the
verge of declaring bankruptcy (and its parts-supplier
spin-off Delphi already having done so), can the rest of
America be that far behind?
Global Capital
Unbound
Writing at the
dénouement of the Second World War, Joseph E. Schumpeter
took stock of the world likely to emerge afterward and
predicted, more than a little ambivalently, that capitalism
would increasingly take on socialist characteristics until
being completely transformed. In Capitalism, Socialism,
and Democracy, he notes that the unrivaled efficiency of
large-scale capitalist production and its tendency toward
monopoly lays the groundwork for socialism, as he defines it
as centralized economic control under public ownership.
Schumpeter acknowledges the prescience of Karl Marx's
analysis of capitalism particularly considering his vantage
point in the mid-nineteenth century. Marx saw sooner than
most economists of his time the eclipse of entrepreneurial
capitalism and the emergence of the managerial bureaucracy
and rationalized efficiency of production under
oligopolistic conditions. He correctly understood the role
an advanced proletariat would play in bringing true
socialism into being, especially in light of capitalism's
need and astonishing ability to continually adapt to new
circumstances. According to Schumpeter, what Marx got wrong
was that he predicted the failures of capitalism would bring
on revolution when in fact it would be its unparalleled
success that would lead to a socialist order. However, the
hindsight of the last half-century suggests that Marx may
have been right there, too.
Schumpeter was writing
at the dawn of the golden age of High Fordism (usually taken
to extend from the late 1940s to the mid-1960s), on the eve
of what Daniel Bell once termed "the treaty of Detroit," the
détente achieved in the 1950 automobile union contract
negotiation in which industry, labor, and government agreed
to cooperate in the interests of all concerned. The
resulting rise in productivity and stability would lay the
foundation for what historian Lizbeth Cohen terms "the
Consumers' Republic," the broad-based increase in living and
consumption standards for many (though certainly not all)
segments of American society during the period. Schumpeter's
treatise would soon be countered by the analysis of mass
society, in what's known as the critique of
other-directedness, mounted beginning in the early 1950s by
social commentators like David Riesman, C. Wright Mills, and
William H. Whyte in books such as The Lonely Crowd, White
Collar, and The Organization Man. At the same
time, economist Kenneth J. Arrow's "impossibility theorem"
claimed to mathematically prove that collective social
decisions couldn't be derived from individual preferences.
The impossibility theorem provided the basis for what was to
become rational choice theory, the embrace of the "liberal
individualist" vs. the "irrational collectivist"
underpinning the ideology of American Cold War foreign
policy, which ultimately carried over into the domestic
arena with the decline of the welfare state beginning in the
1970s. (The genealogy of rational choice theory and its
policy implications is outlined in S.M. Adamae's
Rationalizing Capitalist Democracy: the Cold War Origins of
Rational Choice Liberalism.)
Schumpeter notes that
the revolutions of Soviet Russia and Maoist China failed to
meet Marx's prescription of being driven by workers in the
advanced industrial sectors of the capitalist economy, and
as a result, they shouldn't be used to gauge the potential
for success or failure of the communist vision. The demise
of the Soviet Union and the unleashing of China's horde of
low-wage labor into the capitalist production system
underscore the apparent failings of their respective forms
of socialism along the lines of Schumpeter's reading of
Marx. And it's only in this time of global capitalism
unbound that the incapacity of that now-unchallenged system
to equitably sustain itself is most obvious. Simply put,
pulling the rug out from under the feet of workers, breaking
the Treaty of Detroit, has done a lot to raise class
consciousness. The crisis of the capitalist profit motive
vis-à-vis administration of the nation-state, for example,
appears to argue in favor of socialized medicine and pension
reform in the United States in the eyes of many in both
management and labor. (The US system of welfare capitalism,
in which corporations assume responsibility for the
long-term well being of employees, was engineered by the
corporate sector, an obligation they have unilaterally
abandoned and from which they shouldn't be excused. See
Sanford M. Jacoby's Modern Manors: Welfare Capitalism
since the New Deal, featuring a photo of downtown
Detroit on its dust jacket.) It's no wonder that
globalization, in particular as it has progressed under
neoliberalism, has engendered a variety of discontents.
On one hand there are
those trying to reform the capitalist system from within.
From this perspective, the fall of the Soviet Union and the
abuses of what should be more correctly understood as if not
an ersatz communism then at least an incomplete one of
twentieth-century experience has taken Marx off the table.
The journalist William Grieder and John Bogle, founder of
Vanguard mutual funds, are both in search of a soul for
capitalism, a way of bringing the bonds of civility to bear
on the narrow definition of rational self-interest asserted
by neoliberalism. But much like the Tin Man of The Wizard
of Oz whose search for a heart ends with his receiving a
heart-shaped testimonial watch and chain to wear instead,
their answer is regulation by the external forces of
government and activist shareholders, a system of checks and
balances bound by jurisdictions being world-historically
transcended in the age of transnational capital. A similar
tinkering is advocated by Nobel laureate Joseph E. Stiglitz
and financier George Soros, who propose amending the
transnational institutions of capitalist regulation, the
World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade
Organization, etc., to adopt a kinder, gentler brand of
development, a way of harvesting value in the global economy
along the lines of the abandoned Treaty of Detroit.
Another more holistic
approach is offered by Paul Smith (co-founder of the
retailer Smith & Hawken) and Jane Jacobs, who tie markets to
ecology, seeing economic development as part of the natural
process of human evolution. Smith and Jacobs, in Natural
Capitalism and The Nature of Economies,
respectively, advocate aligning economics with the cycles of
nature--investing, nurturing, harvesting, and reinvesting
anew--to assure long-term sustainability rather than the
short-term focus on accumulation that the
ever-forward-moving clock time of modernity seems to demand.
While there is much to appreciate in these proposals,
especially Jacobs' well-taken observations on the early
vertical integration of the American automobile industry and
its subsequent effects on the destruction of the city of
Detroit under globalization, they require accepting
responsibility of externalities for which there is
absolutely no incentive in the current environment. They are
perhaps cautionary tales doomed to go unheeded until it's
too late.
Then there are those
diaphanous studies of empire that deal in abstract metaphors
appealing primarily to graduate students and devotees of
literary criticism, abstruse cultural expression in lieu of
political action.
Perhaps most promising
is what's come to be known as the global justice movement.
First coming to worldwide prominence with the Battle of
Seattle in 1999, where protestors representing organized
labor, environmentalists, consumer groups, and international
fair-trade activists confronted World Trade Organization
policymakers, it has all the makings of a global people's
movement. Underlying its heterogeneous public face is an
advanced understanding of media and social network theory.
Coordinating efforts through the Internet and other global
communications systems led to the worldwide protests of
February 15, 2003, the largest-ever gathering of people on
earth to protest the impending US invasion of Iraq. Since
then, a loose affiliation of activists has shared
information and resources to support a host of local actions
in various parts of the world. While seemingly concerned
with a wide range of social and political issues, the global
justice movement essentially directs its efforts against two
main concerns: the economic oppression and environmental
exploitation that seem to go hand-in-hand with the global
capitalist system. What it lacks is the theoretical
underpinning an understanding of Marx's critique of capital
could provide.
Most global justice
activists see themselves as anti-capitalist; however, few
have seemed willing to take the next step in accepting
outright socialism, embracing anarchism instead. This is a
result no doubt of perceived failures of Soviet-style
communism along with the "one nation, two systems"
disconnect of Chinese state-sponsored capitalism, coupled
with residual disillusion over the inability of 1960s and
1970s social movements to affect lasting change. There's
also the dominance of rational choice theory, the hegemony
of self-interest, in virtually every aspect of public
discourse, from economics to education to politics to
reality TV. The global justice movement has made inequality
a worldwide public issue, primarily in terms of the economic
exploitation of workers and environmental degradation in
lesser-developed countries by transnational corporations.
Bringing that awareness and solidarity to workers in
advanced sectors of the global economy, as advocated by
Peter Bohmer of Evergreen College in Washington in a paper
on Marxism and the global justice movement, opens
possibilities for considering alternatives to capitalism
that transcend national borders.
Rebooting the
Critique of Capital
for the Postmodern Age
Indeed, the economic
structure of the postmodern world has arguably set the stage
for the Marxist critique like no other time before. The
slippery character of global capitalism reinforces Marx's
admonishment of the Young Hegelians and social democrats in
works like "The Jewish Question" and The Eighteenth
Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte that political solutions in
and of themselves aren't sufficient to end exploitation
without a realignment of property relations. "Sacrificing
the crown to save the purse" is embodied in supra-state
organizations such as the World Bank, International Monetary
Fund, and World Trade Organization, all nongovernmental
entities dedicated to promoting the interests of global
trade and capital flows as they are currently dominated by
transnational corporations. There may be many nations but
increasingly there's only one economy, physically dispersed
yet managed through a worldwide telecommunications and
information technology network by an international
elite--what London School of Economics sociologist Leslie
Sklair terms "the transnational capitalist class"--and its
subalterns.
Starting in the 1970s,
in the wake of the initial restructurings of the global
political economy that often goes under the rubric post-Fordist
(which began initially in the automotive, apparel, and
electronics industries and soon spread to other sectors),
Immanuel Wallerstein and others affiliated with the Fernand
Braudel Center for the Study of Economies, Historical
Systems, and Civilizations at State University of New
York-Binghamton developed world-system theory as a way of
understanding the movement of capital and goods outside the
boundaries of national markets. Given impetus by then
current events, Wallerstein et. al. sought to explain from a
broad historical-materialist perspective the apparent
contradiction between an increasingly integrated global
economy and the discrete system of nation-states that has
come to characterize the geopolitical order, a condition
having origins in "the long sixteenth century" of early
European colonial expansion. Rather than focus on the
nation-state as the primary unit of analysis, world-system
theory speaks in terms of core, periphery, and
semi-periphery, that is, the relationships of power within
the international division of labor in the production of
specific commodities from initial inputs typically in
peripheral and semi-peripheral regions of the world to final
output typically in the core.
One of the more
fruitful analytical tools of world-system theory is the
concept of the commodity chain, the complex of interlinked
steps in the creation of value. In an article published in
1977 in the Braudel Center's journal Review,
Wallerstein and Terence Hopkins define the concept thus:
"Take an ultimate consumable item and trace back the set of
inputs that culminated in this item--the prior
transformations, the raw materials, the transportation
mechanisms, the labor input into each of the material
processes, the food inputs into the labor. This linked set
of processes we call a commodity chain." This archeology of
the means of production operates both on an economic and on
a social level, seeking to uncover what from a Marxist
perspective are the conditions of the reproduction of class
power within the base and the superstructure of the
capitalist system. (Be that is it may, world-system theory
is often criticized for underemphasizing culture in favor of
pure macroeconomic analysis.) Commodity chain analysis as
practiced by the world-system theory school is primarily
historical, analyzing the division of labor in the
production and distribution of flour in the early European
colonial era, for example, with a goal of demonstrating
globalizing tendencies as being a function of capitalism
from its very beginning.
The need to explain
more recent developments in the global capitalist system has
spawned a variant of world-system theory that is especially
relevant to revitalizing the critique of capital in the
present day. What's known as global commodity chain
analysis emerged in the early 1990s to examine links in the
division of labor in mass-industrial and so-called
postindustrial segments of production. Generally associated
with Duke University sociologist Gary Gereffi and
colleagues, global commodity chain analysis seeks to
identify where value is created in the various steps of
production and by whom. Global commodity chain analysis
offers an agenda of amelioration for peripheral and
semi-peripheral actors to advance in the value-creating
process, thereby attaining an element of self-determination
in the economic segments within which they operate.
The primary way for
exposing these opportunities is by understanding the
governance structure of particular commodity chains.
Producer-driven commodity chains tend to be
resource-oriented and vertically integrated. Buyer-driven
commodity chains tend to be demand-oriented and
disaggregated. These governance structures tend to dominate
the division of labor of long-run, standardized mass
production on the one hand and the division of labor of
short-run, flexible batch production on the other. These
distinctions are those commonly assigned to Fordism and
post-Fordism, respectively. Since the 1970s, global
capitalist production is increasingly being organized around
buyer-driven commodity chains. Outsourcing, independent
contracting, just-in-time delivery, turnkey systems, and
full-package services are just a few of the prevalent
techniques in buyer-driven commodity chains. The opportunity
for upgrading, then, depends on the ability to recognize and
occupy positions in the chain that have the potential to
offer the highest rewards. Yet, as Yale sociologist Jennifer
Bair (whose unpublished paper on the evolution of commodity
chain analysis informs this discussion) points out,
empirical evidence suggests that "moving up" the commodity
chain doesn’t necessarily lead to greater rewards. What
Giovanni Arrighi terms "the hierarchy of wealth" still
determines asymmetrical relations of power within various
commodity chains and, as important, between them. For
example, Wal-Mart increasingly demands "value-added"
services from suppliers without compromising on
specifications for efficiency and cost reduction, squeezing
ever-more profit from every segment along the chain.
There are also the
barriers to entry from "intangible" aspects of production,
such as branding, product design, marketing and promotion,
etc., that constitute core activities of buyer-driven
commodity chains and from which some of the greatest value
is derived. For example, the so-called intangible value in a
Nike basketball shoe is generally more than three times that
of material production. Regulating intellectual property on
a global level has become one of the primary concerns of
transnational capital with nearly every nation now having
some form of official oversight as a result of efforts to
coordinate such control by the core. The Agreement on Trade
Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) was
adopted in the 1990s, and is overseen by the World Trade
Organization. The World Intellectual Property Organization,
a United Nations agency, also helps promote intellectual
property rights around the world, especially among
lesser-developed nations in the periphery and
semi-periphery. (Among the UN's other efforts is
World Book and Copyright Day, a series of events to promote
"reading, publishing, and the protection of intellectual
property through copyright" held annually throughout the
world, this year on March 23.) If the aristocracy
ruled over land and the bourgeoisie over labor, then the
transnational capitalist class rules over language, the
exchange of information, ideas, images, thought and
expression, relations governed by loan contract, purchase
order, and an increasingly vertically integrated global
media and telecommunications network.
A kind of commodity
chain analysis has been used with some success by the global
justice movement, although whether activists fully
comprehend its genealogy in the Marxist response to the
modernization thesis and dependency theory in development
studies is certainly open to question. Specifically, the
notion of identifying lead firms and supplier relationships
in the commodity chains of many consumer products has
enabled pressure, generally in the form of consumer
boycotts, to be put on the leaders to develop and enforce
codes of conduct among the suppliers, generally with respect
to anti-sweatshop and environmentally friendly production.
What's known as "peeling away the
brand veneer" to expose the backward links of a commodity
chain-- examining production practices, environmental
impacts, monopolistic competitive strategies, antiunion
activities, etc., that are normally obscured under the
"aura" of the brand--has forced companies such as Nike and
The Gap to alter some of their business practices (or at
least be circumspect about them) or face sanctions in the
consumer marketplace. However, these efforts, though
certainly well-intentioned and even effective to a certain
extent, are tactical and rarely make connections across
broad social categories or national borders beyond a general
recognition of the exploitation of low-wage labor and
resources in the peripheral and semi-peripheral sectors.
The most pressing
limitations of commodity chain analysis are the external
forces that bear upon the networks of firms and processes
that are typically the objects of study. Bair cites
regulatory factors, such as trade and monetary policies, and
the institutions through which they are implemented that
construct global commodity chains, for all intents and
purposes dictating certain configurations of authority (and
thus opportunity) and geographical distribution. And while
the primary value of commodity chain analysis is its ability
to "cut through the clutter" of the ossified geopolitical
system in understanding the workings of global capital,
there is also much to be gained by factoring the
nation-state back in to better understand how nimble
transnational corporations use comparative advantage to
exploit opportunities for value accumulation. Another
externality is the interdependency between commodity chains,
i.e., the role particular links play within the different
commodity chains of which they're a part. As Wallerstein
notes, the output from an agricultural commodity chain is at
the same time an input to an industrial one in that factory
workers eat.
Then there's the issue
of culture, which commodity chain analysis, like its
forebear world-system theory, doesn't adequately address.
What economists call "intangible" other social scientists
recognize as "cultural production," a concept analyzed at
depth most notably by Pierre Bourdieu and his disciples.
Given the very tangible economic value of cultural
production to the core of global capitalism, it's an aspect
of commodity chain analysis that merits further scrutiny.
For example, how does cultural production, in this reputed
information age, bear on questions of economic dependency
and social inequity for a world in which half of the
population has never received a telephone call let alone
swapped MP3s peer-to-peer? A "culture-revitalization"
approach to development and commodity chain management has
enabled Bolivian cooperatives to use local knowledge in
producing for and accessing worldwide markets for fair-trade
sustainable products, such as cocoa, quinoa, and textiles,
while providing upward mobility for workers and educational
opportunities for women, as Kevin Healy reports in his 2001
book, Llamas, Weavings, and Organic Chocolate:
Multicultural Grassroots Development in the Andes and Amazon
of Bolivia. Any consideration of cultural production,
however, needs to retain its connection to a
base/superstructure analysis, the need for which can be seen
by looking at purely "culturalist" approaches to
globalization.
The rapid growth over
the past few decades of an integrated worldwide mass media
and linked network of consumer markets has spawned awareness
of (and concern over) the potential convergence of
communication and community on a global level, of global
markets producing a global culture that is homogenizing,
rootless, predictable, and ultimately devoid of meaning, a
process American sociologist George Ritzer terms the
"globalization of nothing." Against this vision of a
burgeoning worldwide United Markets of Generica has emerged
the riposte that globalization constitutes a hybridizing
process, a creolization of global culture when consumed at
the local level. This notion inheres in Roland Robertson's
term "glocalization," asserting that the world gets more
pluralistic as individuals and local groups adapt global
culture to their own tastes and needs. Anthropologist Karen
Tranberg Hansen argues, for example, that salaula
(the Zambian term for secondhand clothes meaning "picked
from the rummage bale") enables indigenous consumers in
Africa to create unique meanings in their use of Western
castoffs, thereby theoretically escaping to a significant
degree dependence on their former colonial masters. Yet the
glut of used Western clothing (which enter the commodity
chain as charitable donations) coming into Zambia in the
wake of International Monetary Fund-mandated reforms has
decimated local cloth and garment manufacturing because
these sectors simply can't compete with the high-quality
low-cost imports. While it may be, as Hansen asserts, that
salaula truly reflects the sui generis
Zambian love of fashion, it's an eddy in a tide of global
forces, more a defensive tack than a self-determined course
of grassroots empowerment. On the other hand, Ritzer's
concept of "grobalization" (a mashup of the words "growth"
and "globalization") recognizes Arrighi's hierarchy of
wealth as by and large propelling the global system in a
particular direction, with media and commodities as key
forces in the process.
A method that seems to strike the right balance is global
system theory, which has emerged as one of the most useful
tools for the critique of capital from an
historical-materialist perspective in these postmodern
times. Where world-system theory
and global commodity chain analysis tend to minimize
politics and culture in favor of economics, and global
culture theory minimizes economics and politics in favor of
culture, global system theory seeks to understand
transnational capital in its many dimensions, tying base and
superstructure together.
First codified in book form in Sklair's 1991 Sociology of
the Global System, the global system model
is based on the transnational practices of non-nation-state
actors across nation-state borders. These practices fall
into three spheres: economic, political, and
cultural-ideological. Each sphere has a major institution:
the transnational corporation in economics, the
transnational capitalist class in politics, and the
culture-ideology of consumerism in culture-ideology. Each of
these spheres and institutions operates within
nation-states, between nation-states, and at the supra-state
level. The goal of global system theory is to understand how
transnational corporations, the transnational capitalist
class, and the culture-ideology of consumerism work to
transform the world along lines favorable to global
capitalism. One of the most significant achievements of
global system theory is bringing together production and
consumption as a nexus of relations that serves to reproduce
capital on a worldwide basis.
In particular is the way the
culture-ideology of consumerism stimulates demand for
new goods in the core through niche marketing to select
status groups and promotes consumption generally in the
periphery and semi-periphery to bring them into the global
system. The global consumer-citizen constitutes a new form
of subjectivity, a universalizing
of identity politics in the neoliberal individualist whose
interests lie outside local, nation-state, and even
international jurisdictions. The culture-ideology of
consumerism is promoted primarily through the increasingly
vertically integrated global media, which channel news,
information, entertainment, and advertising through a
transnational corporate hierarchy based for the most part in
the core. Alongside these global image and idea factories
are linked networks of goods and capital that flow
worldwide. (Media theorist Robert McChesney has analyzed the
growing interconnection between global media conglomerates,
advertising agencies, and marketing firms as primary
institutional structures for the culture-ideology of
consumerism, although he doesn't use that term.) Much of the
content of the culture-ideology of consumerism originates in
the US, though this shouldn't be viewed as a process of
Americanization specifically so much as an economic
amortization of investments in cultural production for
worldwide consumption. The flow from core to periphery and
semi-periphery is more a matter of path determination: the
images begin in the US as the world's primary consumer
market and move downstream to realize economies of scale.
The flow could as easily move in another direction as
demonstrated by the growth of such cultural production as
so-called world music. It should also be noted that the
process isn't appreciably different structurally from the
logic described by Raymond Williams in his mid-1970s study
on the culture and technology of television. If anything,
what needs to be better understood from an
historical-materialist point of view is the role of the
consumer in the global system. That requires examining
traditional Marxist perspectives on the relationship between
production and consumption in light of present
circumstances.
The Production of
Consumption
Marxist theory has
traditionally had a "producerist" bias. (This is true for a
good deal of social science as well: The Encyclopedia of
Sociology has no entries for “consumption,” “consumer
society,” or any variation on those terms.) If considered at
all, consumption is typically understood as a site where
material and social inequality are reproduced. As Marx sets
out in Chapter 1 of Capital, commodities are
mystifications of production, fetishes that obscure
relationships of property and therefore class. For later
theoreticians like Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno (as
well as heirs like Stuart Ewen), commodity consumption
constitutes consensus to the force of the economic and
ideological hegemony of capital. Under the labor theory of
value, commodities bearing the full value of the labor time
required to produce them are purchased with worker wages
that are discounted, allowing for the accumulation of
surpluses that become the basis for subsequent exploitation.
The culture-ideology of consumerism (conceptually linking
bottom-up consensus and top-down force) doesn't contest
Marx, especially as it describes the trickle down as it were
from core to periphery and semi-periphery, so much as it
opens up the possibility of using the concept for more
critical ends.
While it may seem
obvious, it's necessary at this point to acknowledge the
appeal of the commodity as both a material and symbolic
fulfillment of the promise of capitalist productivity. In
her study of US living standards over a large part of the
twentieth century, economist Clair Brown shows a dramatic
increase from 1918, when mass consumables became more
broadly available, and 1973, the point David Harvey and
others identify as the postmodern turn, after which they
decline on an absolute basis to 1988 when the study ends.
Marx and Engels were unabashed in the Communist Manifesto
and elsewhere in their respect for capitalism's prodigious
capability to provide a cornucopia of goods and to muster
surplus accumulation to make broad social and political
reforms possible. These observations made in the nineteenth
century were to be fulfilled perhaps even beyond their
expectations in the next century by the innovations
initiated under Fordist production.
Marx anticipated the
potential to greatly accelerate capitalist production
through the relative surplus value realized by what
Schumpeter terms "creative destruction" in contrast to the
absolute surplus value of traditional working
methods. Absolute surplus value is surplus value
realized by expanding the total amount of labor time
dedicated to commodity production, whereas relative
surplus value is surplus value realized by increasing what
can be produced within a particular time period as a result
of technological innovation. This happened at Ford's
Highland Park plant with the standardization of component
parts, the harnessing of electricity, and, most importantly,
the invention of the moving assembly line, which dissolves
the work site into a flow, a dynamic mechanism for reaping
labor power. The process is made visible in the full-scale
version of Rivera's Detroit Industry, created for the
Center Court of the Detroit Institute of Arts at the height
of the Great Depression under the patronage of Henry Ford's
only son, Edsel. The central panel of the mural features a
gargantuan stamping press in the figure of the Aztec goddess
of agriculture with gangs of men, arrayed like rows of
maize, attached to the belts and pulleys of the line,
representing the production cycle from the gestation of the
automobile in raw materials until its harvest as a finished
product at the end of the line.
The Fordist system
increased productivity ten times and enabled prices to be
cut in half, all the while making Henry Ford the world's
richest man and its first billionaire. This was possible
even though Ford doubled wages to an historic $5 a day in
part to combat a staggering 380 percent worker turnover
rate. As Antonio Gramsci notes in his essay on Americanism
and Fordism, this unprecedented largesse also laid the
foundation for the social and political system that drove
mass consumption and the welfare state for most of the
twentieth century. Mass media advertising helped stimulate
desire to absorb expanded productivity through increased
personal consumption, a process made easier with the
availability of time payments for durable items such as
cars, houses, and appliances. Modern brands also streamlined
the consumer decision-making process, enabling faster
turnover of product at the point of sale. But as Marx also
foretells, relative surplus value only provides temporary
productivity gains and capitalism must eventually return to
the extraction of absolute surplus value. Even in the heyday
of High Fordism, in the Pax Americana after the Treaty of
Detroit, the net profit rate wobbled and toward the end of
the period began to fall so that by 1975 it had declined
nearly 60% from its postwar peak two decades earlier, as
reported by Organization for Economic Cooperation and
Development statistics.
In the 1970s, the
return of absolute surplus value took form in expanded total
household work hours with the entry of more women into the
workplace in non-managerial positions and an increase in the
commitment of future labor in the dramatic growth in
revolving credit debt. Accompanying this was a decrease in
household net worth, primarily as a result of higher home
mortgage balances secured with lower down payments. This was
coupled with the more primitive forms of accumulation that
Harvey terms "accumulation by dispossession," for example,
in Detroit where tens of thousands of homeowners abandoned
all claims to evaporating equity by fleeing a tumbling
housing market, leaving properties to revert either to banks
or the government. Absolute surplus value was also being
realized with the initial forays into Mexico and overseas
with outsourcing and the mobilizing of enormous new pools of
low-wage labor pioneered by the automotive, apparel, and
electronics industries. And yet consumption continued
virtually unabated over the decade even as real incomes
fell, US government statistics show. It's in this period
that logos first moved from the inside of clothing to the
outside, when Nike and Esprit turned consumers into walking
billboards for their products, when Calvin Klein and Gloria
Vanderbilt transformed the utilitarian blue jean into a
marker of democratized designer distinction, when the
culture-ideology of consumerism connected with the
transnational commodity chains of post-Fordism.
The producerist bias of
conventional leftist perspectives casts consumption as
passive, typically seeing the consumer as either a dupe of
capitalist ideology or a victim of its material processes.
(The culture industry of Horkheimer and Adorno, including
advertising, is by their account an instrument of "mass
deception.") This in part responds to utilitarian notions of
political economy that present consumption as a matter of
rational choice. But consumption can and should also be
viewed as an active form of expression. Active consumers
express individual sovereignty through
identities constructed by
acquiring and displaying goods that convey information about
themselves and their self-proclaimed position within a
constellation of social networks. And as the reception
theory of the Birmingham School of cultural studies
maintains, these expressions may concede to capitalist
hegemony, oppose it, or seek to negotiate a position
somewhere in between.
One form of opposition is the
consciously irrational potlatch of Burning Man, a festival
of expenditure that takes place each year in the Nevada
desert that bans corporate logos on any and all items
brought into the festival campgrounds as well as financial
transactions of any kind. (Although it hasn't entirely
escaped market logics: economies of gift giving, bartering,
and other forms of symbolic exchange have arisen within the
confines of the festival over the years.) Another opposition
is the "brand boomerang" of culture jamming, often an
adjunct of the global justice movement, that becomes a
negotiation as it provides an
incentive for producers to respond to consumer demands for
environmental sustainability and an end to labor
exploitation, ameliorating certain market failures of
the global system. On Canal Street in New York City and at
swap meets around the world, counterfeit designer handbags
and other pirated items provide mechanisms for negotiating
symbolic status markets at deeply discounted prices. Even in
terms of consensus, producers in highly penetrated market
segments acknowledge the authority of the consumer through
the emphasis on trend spotting, cool hunting, "viral"
marketing, and the like, constituting deference to a
buyer-driven commodity chain of another sort. All of these
positions must be factored alongside analyses of production
of transnational capital in the global system.
De-Rationalizing
Choice
One of Marx's primary
intentions in undertaking his analysis of capital was to
rebut the political economists of the English Enlightenment
who sought to ground all human interaction and morality in
the individual pursuit of self-interest. So too must the
critique of capital in the present day confront political
economy's more radical heirs, rational choice theory and neoliberalism. As S.M. Amadae points out in her historical
account, Rationalizing Capitalist Democracy: the Cold War
Origins of Rational Choice Liberalism, rational choice
theory is the brainchild of the American military-industrial
complex, a "regime of knowledge production" designed to
provide the ideological underpinning for US foreign policy
during the Cold War. It sought "objective" (i.e.,
quantifiable) criteria to guide decision-making in the
bipolar power struggle (pun intended) against the Soviet
Union and for doing so in a way that would not be subject to
popular democratic political debate. Rational choice theory
continues to drive the neoliberal assertion of individual
sovereignty in all areas of life and the supposedly natural
preeminence of so-called free markets. Its universalizing of
absolute self-interest independent of all specific social
contexts is the genetic code of the culture-ideology of
consumerism within the global system.
Rational choice theory
was initiated under the auspices of the RAND think tank (at
the time still a division of military supplier Douglas
Aircraft) with start-up capital provided by another Ford, in
this case Henry's grandson Henry Ford II, who at the time
controlled the Ford Foundation in addition to serving as
chief executive of Ford Motor Company. Rational
choice theory has its foundation in economics but has spread
to other areas of political and social science research.
Rational choice theory uses game and set theory to assess
risk and uncertainty. One of its first accomplishments was
to mathematically demonstrate a "missile gap" between the US
and the Soviet Union that history has proven didn't really
exist. It did, however, fuel a national debate that resulted
in a massive arms build up, greatly benefiting military
contractors like Douglas Aircraft. Mark L. Lichbach, a
self-proclaimed adherent to rational choice theory in
political science, acknowledges that it prevails most often
in environments that are evidence poor. This admission is
born out by recent empirical studies suggesting people are
far more altruistic than rational choice thought experiments
such as the Prisoner's Dilemma predict. (The Prisoner's
Dilemma pits two suspects against one another with the
logical outcome of each reasoning to protect them self by
testifying against the other, resulting in a less than
optimal outcome than would have been achieved if both had
maintained their innocence.)
Rational choice theory
also can't account for externalities, such as the reciprocal
obligations of preexisting social relationships required for
making and enforcing contracts and ensuring fair
competition. (Even Adam Smith knew that!) Nor does it factor
in the often irrational desires that decades of consumer
research show drive actual purchase decisions in the
marketplace, rationalizing choices rather than
choosing rationally While rational choice theory can
perhaps be waived off as academic (or maybe even ignored as
the domain of socially inept libertarians flaming one
another in Internet chat rooms), its real-world application,
neoliberalism, has had and continues to have serious
consequences. So-called free market reforms in both
developed and lesser-developed nations have increased social
and economic inequality and created turmoil for millions
around the world. Structural adjustment programs and
free-trade agreements are the cannonballs for breaking down
Chinese walls in the postmodern age, allowing for the
unfettered flow of goods and capital for the benefit of the
new transnational capitalist class. Nearly 20 years after
the fall of the Soviet Union, rational choice theory and
neoliberalism can now be seen for what they really are:
increasingly apparent and thus unconvincing masks for the
brutal way capitalism really works. In the face of this
stark reality, resistance is growing. The global justice
movement has made social and economic equality and
environmental sustainability issues of concern at the
highest policy levels and broadly throughout the world.
South America, through a series of democratically elected
progressive governments, is coming together to oppose the
machinations of the global system, providing a model of
self-determination for others in the periphery and
semi-periphery. What needs to happen next is for these
trends to galvanize and align with growing discontent among
workers of all kinds within the core. The tools for doing
this exist in the independent media and social movement
networks sprouting up from the cracks of the global system.
Meanwhile back in
Detroit, Super Bowl XL recently played to great fanfare.
Prior to the Big Game, the city's homeless where rounded up
and shuttled off to a shelter to watch the spectacle on
large screen TVs out of the range of cameras and tourists.
And the trucks continue to roll off the Ambassador Bridge.
Vince Carducci is an adjunct instructor in
Liberal Arts at the College for Creative Studies in Detroit
and a PhD student in sociology at the New School for Social
Research in New York City.