Consumers and Producers

The class struggles, which Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, in the Communist Manifesto (first published in 1848) identified as underlying and animating all human social history, did not end with the supposed “fall” of Communism in the late twentieth century. They continue unabated.

The spectacular success of global capitalism has resulted in remarkable new configurations of exploiters and exploited. Marx and Engels, from the vantagepoint of the mid-nineteenth century, believed that capitalists, in mobilizing mass industrial workforces, were creating their own gravediggers. They did not adequately foresee the crafty potential for capitalist ideology, elaborated and disseminated in pop culture, to pit workers, wage-laborers, and producers against one another and, most importantly, against themselves. Perhaps they underestimated the proclivities toward pleasure and immediate self-interest in human nature.

Consumerism and its seductive commodities culture make producers and low-level marketers of those commodities voluntary accomplices in their own exploitation, the exploitation of other producers, and the unsustainable plunder of the natural world. In becoming consumers, producers are divided against themselves. This is the competition of the proletariat for individual survival, harnessed by capitalism for private profits, which Marx and Engels identified as the dynamic of capitalism, but now ratcheted up to new levels of social and psychological alienation.

Ask the AFL-CIO whether business management has ever fought fair in their treatment of labor interests. Ask Walmart employees, or cross-examine its middle managers, how swiftly and resolutely the world’s largest retailer and wealthiest corporation deals with any whispered rumor of labor organization and union.

Big business in this country, along with the government, remains deeply, even violently inimical to labor unions. In the last thirty years American presidents of both parties have stepped in to break labor strikes, sometimes in the name of “national security,” contrary to the interests of labor. At the same time, many hard-working Americans, even among the working poor, will express anti-union sentiments and hold skeptical opinions about organized labor.

Many decent hard-working Americans actually believe that federal budget ills are mainly caused by the “welfare state.” How wrong they are! Social Security, food stamps, WIC and other social programs are hardly at fault; the blame rests squarely on a bloated military industrial complex, and that other, “corporate welfare” program, the systematic favoring of business and particular moneyed interests at the expense of the public interest. These parasitic social diseases have ruined our fiscal solvency.

But where could the working poor have got such an idea? From business and government itself, both of which has spent untold resources on combatting the ethics and processes of collective labor, and keeping American workers divided against themselves, and against workers in other countries. Anti-communist propaganda throughout the twentieth century, especially during the Cold War from the 1950s to the ’80s, was expressly underwritten by corporate America. The “Red Scare” was the fright of the privileged few who saw the underprivileged many as a threat to their moneyed interests and the rise of their stock portfolios.

A small headline in the business section of a Salem, OR, newspaper on January 1, 2005, attests very eloquently to the class struggles still simmering in this country: Possible unions biggest worry to health-care bosses.

The brief article runs: “Northwest health-care executives are most concerned about union organizing, according to a survey by a national labor-relations firm….Nearly 71 percent of the surveyed executives said they are most concerned about union organizing, but 96 percent agreed that educating employees is the best method to prevent it.”

“Preventing” union organization through “educating” employees—that is precisely the sort of cynically self-interested language that business thrives on, here suggesting that unions are a sort of public health issue that needs to be staved off through well-intentioned public awareness campaigns.

Yet the labor union is deeply democratic in principle: that the conditions and compensation for work should be adequate to the needs of all workers, and be reflective of all workers’ basic health and welfare. This is but an instance of the most basic principle of democracy, inscribed in the American Declaration of Independence, that the nature and authority of any government ought to derive from the consent, not the coercion, of the governed.

But government and business leadership do coerce the compliance of employees with the same whip that has always been used by ruling classes to control those they rule: by limiting the means to subsistence and basic survival, food, water, shelter. By holding over the poor the grim prospect of poverty, of penniless destitution and propertyless indigence, capitalism has continued to advance its successes at the ongoing expense of democracy everywhere.

But the stick of threatened poverty has also been supplemented by the genetically modified carrot of industrial overabundance, that outlandish basis of the consumer culture and the real secret of the “American middle-class miracle.” Consumerism too depends on workers being divided against themselves, because overproduction and overconsumption are not in anybody’s or anything’s longterm interest, considered rationally; they only serve the short-term profit interests that reside at the top of the tall and steep global wealth pyramid erected by capitalism and buttressed up by undemocratic regimes, environmental devastation, and human misery worldwide.

Because of overproduction and overconsumption America and other “First World” nations are now entering a postconsumer stage of capitalist development.

The addictive thrill of consumption is fading. Its negative side effects everywhere abound. Mountains stand denuded of ancient forests. Hills are gutted in industrial mining operations, and ever more earth is moved for massive building projects. Suburbs of cheaply built homes sprawl far and wide. Food portions balloon out of all proportion to basic nutritional needs. Motorists clog the highways, driving longer, farther, faster, demanding more roads to satisfy their thirst for driving novelties, driving just for its own sake, consuming ever more gasoline. Inventories of cheaply made goods, apparel, homewares, electronics, sit on shelves, then are swept away into the gray and black markets of dollar stores and street vending, to make way for the next season’s fashions and fads. All of it a burdensome drain on the limited resources of the planet’s biosphere, adding to the warming greenhouse gases, all of it destined for trash heaps.

The most eloquent symbol of the postconsumer culture is the garbage truck and the landfill. Although capitalism touts “efficiency,” its most authentic, end-stage product is waste itself. The postconsumer culture thrives on and revolves around rituals of waste production and disposal. Every instance of consumption, from opening the package to throwing out the leftovers, is bookended by generating trash and removing it from one’s presence, in preparation for the next instance of consumption. Postconsumer culture is addicted to its own pollution.

In a mere thirty or so years, the capitalist marketplace has created a vast sector of grossly underpaid service employment, comprised of degrading, mind-numbing jobs to sustain the culture of convenience and overconsumption demanded by industrial overproduction. These workers are required to work through weekends, holidays, twenty-four hours a day, 365 days a year, their employment kept constantly precarious by bullying middle managers and the threat of dismissal for the least infraction or dissent. No one would argue that a Seven-Eleven cash register attendant is a high-skilled job that deserves a very high wage. But the job should not exist in the first place. Nobody ever needs a Slurpee and a hot dog at 3:30 in the morning. The culture of convenience exists only to cater to, and promote, overconsumption.

An economy of overproduction relies on ever decreasing the quality of products in favor of unlimited quantity. The ideal commodity is one with designed obsolescence; things are made to be broken. It relies on a duplicitous ad-driven pop culture that abuses consumer intelligence with lies of endless novelty and product improvement. It relies on the exploitation of genuine human sentiment and ideals, and of human sexuality, in order to tinge commodities, trinkets, and food items, with a residue of sentimental and erotic desire.

Overproduction is thus dependent on a truly nefarious exploitation of human motivations and psychological drives in order to generate the necessary demand for overconsumption.

Participation in pop culture, therefore, entails a very real element of masochistic self-abuse. The effect of this self-abuse is a demoralized complacency. Both capitalism and “conservative” reactionary political factions further capitalize on this demoralizing effect to advance their narrow and antidemocratic interests, and thus have learned to foster overconsumption above all else as the most effective means to maintaining the corporate capitalist status quo.

The surreal obesity epidemic in the US and other “First World” areas is indicative of overconsumption’s self-destructive dynamic. Overproduction, which Marx and Engels saw as the novel danger of technological industrialism, has been turned to the task of continually stuffing the void of psychological dissatisfaction among the working classes, who suffer from a nagging sense of helplessness and a lack of civic and political agency.

In such a climate it is no wonder that all varieties of junk religion now abound, which offer over-simplified versions of reality, of human history and human potential, while providing individuals a social setting for sentimentalized emotional outlet in song, “worship,” “praise,” and basic human companionship and fellowship. Nevertheless, contemporary forms of traditional and evangelical Christianity (not to mention religions and sects deriving from other historical traditions) are not very successful at removing their adherents in any real way from the moral seductions and entrapments of the capitalist consumer culture.

Indeed, the political status quo of that culture, the so-called “conservatives,” have proven very successful at manipulating the traditional language and symbolic forms of mainstream Christian religious culture in order to persuade them that capitalist exploitation—through industrial and corporate occupation of their rural areas, through fewer and fewer jobs with less pay and lower benefits, through the impoverishment and trivialization of their children by poorly funded public education and the constant assaults of pop culture—that these forms of physical and spiritual colonization are actually in their best interest.

Told that urban populations are their natural born enemies, suburbians and what is left of the rural citizenry have learned to distrust and react against “liberal” ideas and “values.” This rhetorical ploy is part of the more general strategy of keeping working classes from recognizing their basic common interests, against the real elite of money which cares neither for rural nor urban poor, nor academia and science, nor laws and regulations, except as so many hurdles to leap and barriers to overcome in the pursuit of expanded fields for profit-taking.

Thus one pressing goal for progressives, if they want to achieve any success, will be to cut through the current political rhetoric that pits country against city in a culture war, thereby making rural and urban working poor inimical to one another, despite their common economic and social interests.

In 1944 Woody Guthrie and Cisco Huston first recorded their song “The Farmer- Labor Train,” which called for workers of city and country nationwide to unite in a political party. The song was used in modified form in 1948 by Henry Wallace in a third-party Presidential campaign. To the tune of “Wabash Cannonball” Woody and Cisco articulate what is still today a relevant message, and angle of vision, for working class interests that cuts across the deceptive “culture wars” which are in large part so much ideology for a corporate-government status quo that keeps money flowing in the “right” direction: towards the wealthy and greedy and away from the poor and needy.

It is a powerful song. Find it, listen to it. Let us make it one of our anthems. Let’s have it guide us in our strategy of rearticulating the labor class interests across the geographic and demographic spectrum of this country, and beyond to other nations, in order to achieve some real progress, sooner rather than later.