It is generally accepted as a truism that capitalism requires growth. No matter what the profit, capital investors require increased profit for the next term or they will place their money elsewhere. For a capitalist organization to increase its profits it must either reduce its costs, e.g. mass layoffs or it must increase its market share or find new markets.
Within this context I want to focus on what happens when a market becomes saturated with a given product. By one account I read, but can no longer find, an early president of General Motors, concerned that the auto market was becoming saturated decided to offer a colored automobile instead of the ubiquitous black. He chose this option to create a new market because painting a car body was much cheaper than changing functional specifications, e.g. motor, brakes. He began with the top of the line Cadillac and found the response so impressive that it was implemented in the rest of the GM line. Other automobile manufacturers soon followed suit. At this point the automobile was no longer focused on meeting a need, but became a fashion statement. It appealed to our brains, which I shall call desires, not to the relief of our muscular needs to move our bodies over distances.
Creating markets by appealing to our desires obviously preceded this particular illustrative event. However, as the world’s needs are progressively met, and by world’s needs I mean that portion of the world that can afford to meet its needs with money, the satisfaction of our desires will become an increasingly predominant market. What happens to humans and their societies when marketing is increasingly focused on their brains? I believe we get a foretaste of the consequences from our current American society.
Business enterprise is increasingly targeting our brains (including the emotions.) After World War II as the Japanese economy began to recover, the Japanese initially invested in American real estate. Then they focused on banking as they brought their banks to this country. In the last twenty years or so they have focused on entertainment, e.g. Sony bought MGM. In effect they passed from marketing things, to marketing the representation of things (money), to marketing images per se to the brain,
Our brains as a market offer in abundance what capitalist markets desire most, e.g. a very flexible market capable of absorbing a wide variety of products, difficult to saturate, minimal materials requirements and relatively inexpensive manufacturing costs. For these reasons we can expect massively increasing efforts to address this market.
Creating markets in our brains
At capitalism’s inception the objective was to find a market for one’s goods and, having found it, to try to control it. One of the earlier commodities for capitalism was salt. Wherever it was discovered there was an attempt to control it usually for purposes of taxing it. As late as the 20th century the British prohibition against making salt by Indians in order to protect producers in England precipitated Gandhi’s famous salt march to the sea where Indians defiantly made salt by evaporating sea water.
The next step for capitalism was to create markets. This was initially done by colonialism. Today it is increasingly done by creating markets in our brains. The advertising industry is a prime example of this form of capitalism. An early example was Lifebuoy antiseptic soap introduced in 1895 by Lever Bothers. It was promoted as fighting Body Oder (B.O.). Dial soap carried this forward with the slogan “Don’t you wish everybody did?” use Dial soap. This body-oder marketing has now played out to racism. See the book Lifebuoy Men, Lux Women: Commodification, Consumption, and Cleanliness in Modern Zimbabwe. All this coming from an appeal to the brain albeit with the sale of a physical product as its objective.
Finally, the brain need not only constitute a market for things external to itself, but it can also be the consumer of its own content. As the need for and ability to produce physical objects decreases, again for the affluent portion of the global population, I suspect we will see increasing marketing of brain-satisfying items. Initially these may be called experiences. This, in my judgment is the ultimate market because the brain has an enormous capacity to abstract, fantasize, and emote, all of which are targets for marketing. We are beginning to see this market in video games, many of them played world-wide on the Internet. For millions, these games are highly addictive. They can create an economy of their own in which real money is paid to another player for a weapon the other player has acquired through successful play. South Korea has indicated that it intends to make the production of video gaming software a cornerstone of its economy.
What does such an intensely mental world mean for progressivism? What values should obtain? What are the politics? In brief, will progressive presuppositions such as the primacy of society, by extension the human species, still have a function? Will people turn progressively inward as they so often have with new technology, e.g. television brought the movie and its public theater into the privacy of the home. The automobile took people from the bustling city to the reclusive suburbs leaving the city with the poor and less affluent and without the tax base to provide for them. Will people continue to identify with larger groups, e.g. communities, states, nations and indeed the world at large? Will they be so lost in their virtual worlds, with all their possibilities to satisfy, that they will no longer be able to identify with their families or others? Note, for example, the migration from the family dinner table where the whole family gathered each evening to eat and converse to fast-food eating out or the catch-as-catch-can meals at home.
One response to the above dilemma has been a movement called Sustainable Capitalism, which for neoclassical economists would be an oxymoron. Capitalism, they hold, requires growth which is not a feature of sustainability. Sustainable Capitalism seems to be one more call to redress the environmental degradation that has been increasingly capitalism’s bequest to the future. One feature of it would require a constitutional amendment requiring all capitalist undertakings to be measured against the needs of future generations, which although unborn, would have the same rights as those currently alive. This to me opens a Pandora’s Box which, among other things, the Religious Right would love because the fetus and the fetus’ assumed fetus ad infinitem would be considered equals of those alive at the moment. This would make those alive prey to whatever fantasies were applied to an unknown future. One can imagine wars of the future fought over the presumed future of one class or another of a future population. As we now set about extending human conflict into the vastness of space we would be extending into the even lesser known future. This is the kind of predicament one can get into when trying to stop the juggernaut of environmental destruction.
However, my point lies elsewhere. Sustainable Capitalism, like all efforts to change society, relies on a continuous exercise of will from which the mass of people readily tire. The corporate world, with its short term profit horizon, can offer the mass of people the pleasures of brain stimulation thereby easily counteracting the force of will in most people. We see this playing out in TV channels like Fox where the pabulum of “reality” shows, sports and sex is used to seduce the populace into complacency. In brief, progressivism is a social movement relying on masses of self-motivated individuals. Corporations have, and will increasingly address individual psyches producing unwitting automatons as people pursue their own corporation-induced desires. In a contest between the effort of will and the seduction of satisfied appetites, which is a mass society likely to choose? The answer may be perceived in the rampant purchasing of gas guzzling, over-sized SUVs and trucks when the consequences for society and the environment are well known. The politics of the individual versus the politics of the group will continue to be played out, but in different terms. Jefferson’s solution to this dilemma was through education provided by society to assist each individual in realizing her/his full potential. How will progressivism address this world of induced and comfortable individualism that should instead be focused on the welfare of all? One suggestion I would offer is that progressives make the individual’s self-potential realization the clear and stated goal of their social programs.
Bob Newhard.
