Consumption and Capitalism: Maybe an analogy would help

WISDOMfromPO-MO

I don't know why I have to argue for this, but in an earlier thread it was dismissed as the "conventional" thinking of someone who has been brainwashed.

Here is what is supposedly evidence that I have been brainwashed: I believe that if the group in the global capitalist system that does the consuming was to suddenly dramatically reduce its level of consumption that the whole system would implode.

In other words, the thought of the consumption of SUVs, Hawaii vacations, delivery pizzas, Halloween candy, NFL officially-licensed apparel, Christmas decorations, smartphones, Netflix, etc. stopping tomorrow and the world not missing a beat sounds nice, but that is not the way it works.

I do not think that what is being said is being correctly understood, so I thought of an analogy that might help: during the immigration debate in the U.S. it has often been pointed out that undocumented workers do a lot of the jobs that make the economy we have possible and that deporting all of them would be disastrous.

I am not saying that the latter is correct or incorrect. Please do not turn this thread into a debate over immigration. I am saying that, correct or incorrect, it is analogous to what I believe about the role of consumption in our 500-year-old global capitalist system.

I do not know why I have to argue that for the system to work enough people have to be willing to buy the products and services--much of it being junk that contributes little to our happiness or well-being and ends up in landfills or in the form of the excess body fat that more and more of us are carrying around--that it produces, even if they don't really want or need them. "It's not the consumers' job to know what they want", said Steve Jobs.

Even Ronald Wright--no defender of the status quo--says in A Short History of Progress that "We can't go back to hunting and gathering".

Let's assume that I am wrong. If I am wrong that means that tomorrow if consumption in the global capitalist economy instantly dropped 50% we would not miss a beat. Factories would not shut down. Restaurants and retail stores would remain open, and keep the same level of staffing. Activity at factory farms and family farms would be uninterrupted. Advertising revenue and ticket sales would not be affected, and the entertainment industry would keep on producing the same number of movies, documentaries, ball games, concerts, etc. Meanwhile, the gap between the rich and the poor would shrink and the Earth would start to heal from centuries of industrial activity. Cut your spending in half, your lifestyle will in no way be disrupted, a great many economic injustices will be corrected, and centuries of environmental destruction will start to be reversed! Don't you dare think that violence, crime, wars, mass unemployment, social unrest, etc. will result, you conventional thinker!

It would be nice to know without a doubt that I am wrong.

But I don't see how an instant, seamless transition from mass consumption and perpetual economic growth to mass frugality and sustainability with no horrors is possible.

We do over-consume. I have little doubt about that. I see it every day in the two jobs that I work. It seems that the only thing a lot of people know how to do is be consumers of whatever commodities are thrown at them in this consumer culture that dominates our lives. Therefore, they spend much time and energy throwing fits because it said on the shelf that the bag of candy is $2.00 but it is scanning at the register as $2.10. They spend a lot of their time and energy making sure they are first in line for Black Friday deals. What else are they going to spend their time and energy on? Fighting AIDS in Africa? Helping homeless veterans? Saving the habitat of polar bears? Who would buy all of those TV sets and greasy, sugary chain restaurant meals?

Honestly, I am afraid of what those people would do if the system was suddenly disrupted. They do not know how to make their own food, soap, linens, etc. Even if they knew how to make those things, they believe that they are entitled to them at minimal cost. The fact that that minimal cost depends on people working in sweatshops with barely even a bathroom break never makes it into their entitled minds.

I doubt that any historian or cultural anthropologist could produce an example of a system being completely disrupted and a smooth, seamless, benign transition following.

I think that if we really want peaceful, positive change we need to start by rejecting the ideas of progress and perpetual economic growth. More realistic expectations are what is needed. Keeping the same mindset and same system in place while expecting people to embrace moderation is unrealistic. Saying that if such moderation were carried out everything would be hunky-dory is naive at best.

But what do I know? I'm just another conventional thinker, right?

praxis

Clearly a 50% drop in global consumption would devastate economies. Maybe you’ve misapprehened what this person was saying?

I suppose it could workout if along with the simpler lifestyle choice everyone became relatively self sufficient, growing their own food, generating their own power, and so on. And that might only avoid economic collapse if people dropped off the grid very gradually.

Nils Loc

"It's not the consumers' job to know what they want", said Steve Jobs.

This reminds me of that script that cashiers ask but hope you don't have a problematic answer to:

"Did you find everything you need?"

This always becomes a philosophic question in my mind, that buckles at its restricted consumer context, but I'm bound to a conventional "yes" or "no."

A a version of the Steve Jobs meme : "It's not the consumers' job to know what they need."

I know what I want not what I need. Nothing really needs anything unless it is inseparable from want. I don't need to be alive but I want to be alive.

BC

↪WISDOMfromPO-MO

The economies of the EU, China, Japan, Brazil, South Korea, and the US would be in trouble if consumption fell 10%, let alone 50%.

One element of the problem is that factories and farms have reached high levels of productivity. Supplying the basic needs of food, clothing, and shelter no longer drives the economy. Now it is wants and wishes for the superfluous and unnecessary that drives the economy. The economy of mass consumption is quite wasteful and all the waste fuel, CO2, etc. is coming around to bite us in the ass.

Were there an epidemic of simple living -- a lifestyle involving much less consumption, much more re-use of items, a simpler lifestyle, etc., not only would major companies crash, but the practitioners of simple living would also crash -- unless they had actually become self-suffience and independent of the economy -- a condition that is about 99% phantasy.

Is this the only way we can live? Of course not, but the transition to an economy driven strictly by need (and not almost entirely by wishes) will probably not be voluntary. Look at the better post-apolyptic literature: Earth Abides, by George R. Stewart; James Howard Kunstler's World Made by hand series, including The Harrows of Spring; and A History of the Future.

A gentler transition to a simpler economy is difficult to imagine, because it requires such a wholesale shift of thinking and behaving, and it means the disestablishment of the power elite. Tricky, that one.

praxis

unless they had actually become self-suffience and independent of the economy -- a condition that is about 99% phantasy. — Bitter Crank

Amish.

Perhaps small relatively independent communities like this could develop with a modern mindset, using technology to help maintain an ethic of sustainability. Something like deep ecology maybe. Societal values might be based in aesthetics, reinforce by nonsectarian contemplative practice, communing with nature (deep ecology), and art, rather than the prevaling rationalization/religious values that seem to exist today.

BC

Amish — praxis

There is much to like about the Amish, but their goal isn't to be independent of the economy. They buy and sell, but they want to keep their distance from technology beyond their baseline era. They consume modern medicine.

The world's agriculture in the 1920s and '30s was largely organic -- the massive application of pesticides and herbicides hadn't begun yet. We need to figure out a way to feed everyone without poisoning--or starving--everyone in the process.

We could certainly go back to far more sustainable past practices, but there is one very big problem in doing so: A sustainable economy would involve much less consumption, and largely unnecessary consumption drives the world's economy. Sustainability is a critical goal, so we must find a way to shrink unnecessary consumption without wrecking everything. Tricky.

WISDOMfromPO-MO

I think that "consume less" misses the point.

The prices of many--and maybe all--of the commodities that are consumed in the major markets for consumption include very little of the costs of producing those commodities and getting them to the consumer.

And the costs that those prices do include, such as the price of the cheap labor of women in Third World sweatshops, would be unacceptable to most consumers who took the time to educate themselves about them.

Even when costs are being publicized, such as the news media covering Native Americans' fight against oil pipelines--even when it is in a consumer's own country--people are mostly ignorant about actual costs and respond religiously to price.

One way to bring price closer to reality is taxes. But consumers mostly see taxes as an injustice to their own selves or, at best, a cost unrelated to free markets.

If--miraculously--Westerners suddenly decided to account for all costs of commodities and to no longer fall for distorted prices, corporations would look for other markets in which to sell their products. If capital doesn't hesitate to go where the labor is cheapest, I'm sure it doesn't hesitate to go where consumers are the most ignorant and willing.

Basically, "consume less" means change your behavior in formal markets.

Transcending formal markets is what would really be revolutionary. Learning to be self-reliant / self-sufficient and only entering formal markets when it is one's only choice (you can't fly your own aircraft, so you hire an airline to fly you somewhere; you can't mine your own minerals, so you buy them from a mine operator, etc.) is what would be revolutionary.

But the highly-educated minority have convinced themselves that the magical power of formal free markets and price-based rationing turns everything it touches into an earthly paradise and that anything outside of it's historically unprecedented efficiency is folly. And consumers mindlessly go along with that to a degree that the world's religions probably can only dream of getting from their followers. Nothing gets a response out of a human being more than a change in price.

WISDOMfromPO-MO

Maybe you’ve misapprehened what this person was saying? — praxis

I will let you be the judge.

Here is the exchange:

WISDOMfromPO-MO It's true that is we consume less we will need to produce less, which is fine. The only one hurt will be the profiteers. They'll have to live in billions instead of 10s of billions. The point is, if one is if one is concerned with pollution just consume less. — Rich

A contraction in output due to decreased consumer demand will likely result in unemployment, — WISDOMfromPO-MO
Absolutely not. The problem is wealth concentration not of production. Conventional thinking is making this world into one polluted mess. The top 1% had sure been successful in messing with everyone's thinking. So what is the point of the OP? You still are buying into all of the marketing junk pouring through the media. When it comes right down to it, you are still quite conventional. — Rich

Nils Loc

Learning to be self-reliant / self-sufficient and only entering formal markets when it is one's only choice (you can't fly your own aircraft, so you hire an airline to fly you somewhere; you can't mine your own minerals, so you buy them from a mine operator, etc.) is what would be revolutionary. — WISDOMfromPO-MO

I sense a contradiction in this paragraph. How would someone determine when entering a formal market is their only choice? Wouldn't such a decrease in the demand to travel outside of one's own geographic locality make air travel too expensive for the average joe. Air travel wouldn't be there as choice. Whatever the old market was it wouldn't be there anymore and the new kind of market would be the formal market(?)

BC

↪WISDOMfromPO-MO

One of the terms you might find useful here is "externalized costs". Manufacturing steel in a plant that emits tremendous amounts of pollution is cheaper because the pollution is "externalized" -- dumped in the environment for other people to clean up. Coal plants that have no emission controls "externalize" the the cost of CO2, mercury, sulphur compounds, and soot. The people down wind from the power plants will have to deal with acid rain, mercury poisoning, and bad air. They will bear the externalized costs.

Coal fired power plants without emission controls in the midwest and Ohio valley were externalizing their costs, and it was the mid-Atlantic and New England states that were picking up the external costs. Now, rate payers in the Midwest and Ohio valley are paying for emission controls, which are "internal" production costs.

WISDOMfromPO-MO

One of the terms you might find useful here is "externalized costs". — Bitter Crank

I know.

I'm a picky writer, I guess. Using the word "externalities" did not feel like it would have the desired effect.

If chicken is produced in the U.S., shipped to China where it is made into frozen chicken nuggets, shipped back to the U.S., and then sold in a package labeled "Product of the U.S.A.", the consumer probably does not know about 1% of the costs of making that product and the retail price probably doesn't reflect much more of those costs. Things like peasants being dispossessed to free up the land to build the factory, young women being recruited under false pretenses to leave their families and move far away to work in that factory, etc. are nowhere on the consumer's radar and are not reflected in the price.

Consume more local products when operating in formal markets, and increase economic activity outside of price rationing and formal markets, and we don't have those problems to the extent that we do.

"Consume less" does not break the cycle. Buying only two bags of the frozen chicken nuggets each year rather than four bags does not break the cycle.

WISDOMfromPO-MO

I sense a contradiction in this paragraph. How would someone determine when entering a formal market is their only choice?... — Nils Loc

He wants or needs something, but he can't supply it himself.

Wouldn't such a decrease in the demand to travel outside of one's own geographic locality make air travel too expensive for the average joe... — Nils Loc

Just because people withdraw from, say, the market for cauliflower does not mean that the market for air travel would operate any less efficiently. Supply would adjust to demand, and prices would adjust.

Airavel wouldn't be there as choice. Whatever the old market was it wouldn't be there anymore and the new kind of market would be the formal market(?) — Nils Loc

Where do you get that one market shutting down results in an unrelated other market shutting down?

You believe that if households decide to make their own hand soap rather than getting it through markets that air travel would cease to exist?

BC

↪WISDOMfromPO-MO

It gets even worse than that. For a while some Scandinavian companies were air-freighting freshly caught fish to China to be gutted, de-scalled, filleted, frozen, and packaged--then flown back. The air-freight fuel is a good example of externality, as is the pollution caused by dumping all the fish guts into the river. (I don't know if they did that. More likely they processed the fish guts into fish sauce. You put the guts in a tank, ferment, decant, run it through a sieve, add salt and vinegar, and serve.) Goes well on egg roles. Bon appetit. The externality in that process is dead bodies caused by food poisoning. I've never heard of anybody dying from fish sauce (except for some people who tried making it at home).

Nils Loc

Where do you get that one market shutting down results in an unrelated other market shutting down? — WISDOMfromPO-MO

I'm just wondering what this local manufacturing economy would look like. Maybe other markets would still exist but their prices might adjust to exclude those who have nothing worth trading. Isn't that kind of why developing nations don't really change quickly, as they have nothing to bring to the table by which they could evolve their economies.

The surplus that is to be gained by specializing in a very desirable product and scaling up reshapes the geography around it. Going in the opposite direction (losing surplus value by which you can trade) may reshape your local geography and its available resources in a way you don't expect or are very not pleased with respect to how you live currently.

You think we could never have enough chocolate but these workers aren't compensated so well for their goods. Would they be better off if the demand for chocolate went down?

Consumption and Capitalism: Maybe an analogy would help

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