From sufficiency to planned obsolescence … and back?
by Tom Walker
Econospeak
Book proposal: Marx’s Fetters and the Realm of Freedom: a remedial reading — part 2.6
From sufficiency to planned obsolescence… and back?
In the Grundrisse, Karl Marx argued that capital’s response to the barrier to increasing production posed by satiated consumption took three paths: promoting greater consumption of existing products, expanding markets for existing products to new territories, and creating new needs through the “discovery and creation of new use values.” In the twentieth century, with the help of advertising and marketing, capital has added a fourth method: create new needs through the premature destruction of old use values by planned obsolescence. These methods allow capital to “ideally get beyond” the barrier to production posed by consumption but can’t really overcome the fundamental contradiction that “real wealth has to take on a specific form distinct from itself, a form not absolutely identical with it, in order to become an object of production at all.”
In “Political Ecology: Expertocracy versus Self-Limitation,” André Gorz argued that capitalism has swept away everything “that might serve as anchorage for a common norm of sufficiency, and has abolished at the same time the prospect that choosing to work and consume less might give access to a better freer life.” Gorz viewed the obstacles to re-establishing a norm of sufficiency as not insurmountable if approached as a social project rather than an individual choice, “The norm of sufficiency, deprived of its traditional mooring, has to be defined politically.”
this deserves more comments than it has gotten. the language is a little obscure but it seems to contain the answer to some confuse among AB readers about how living standards might increase even as production of concrete and steel and petroleum decrease.
When I get done with these posts, I will have one post with all the links to the series on that post. I also noticed I have them in the wrong order.
Well my point wasn’t that humanity was wedded permanently to existing norms of material well-being, but that the timeframe of social evolution to a sufficiently less material sense of the good life to support achieving the various aggressive calendar goals for decarbonization was pretty unlikely. 2080, 2090 strike me as more plausible. Also Mr. Gorz sort of sounds like that cliche “you will own nothing and like it.”
Eric
if he sounded like that to you, i can’t see why. i started to learn in about the tneth or 11th grade that i sometimes need to go back and see what the other guy said, and not just what i thought he said. but I had good teachers. [as well as a few bad ones.]
i think i did mention something that sounds to me like just what you are saying now. i hate to try to paraphrase it because when people call me a liar I think they are calling me a liar.
i don’t know why 2080 or 2090 shouls sound more plausible to you. Do you know something I don’t know?
as for material prosperity…well if you keep defining prosperity as plastic toys and big cars, you will..as I think Louis Armstrong said…nver get to know.
my guess is you could learn to brew beer and invite your friends over for a barbecue and never miss the big car.
there was a famous psychotherapist who believed that careful listening was key to good therapy. he had a trick of speech, when he wanted to be sure he undertood a person he would say, “what I hear you saying is…”
and then paraphrase. I don’t think too many of his patients called him a liar, except maybe the ones that never got better.