The Gospel of Consumption (Great read!)

An excellent article on one of the major societal diseases of our time.
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original-orionmagazine

The Gospel of Consumption

And the better future we left behind
by Jeffrey Kaplan
Published in the May/June 2008 issue of Orion magazine

PRIVATE CARS WERE RELATIVELY SCARCE in 1919 and horse-drawn conveyances were still common. In residential districts, electric streetlights had not yet replaced many of the old gaslights. And within the home, electricity remained largely a luxury item for the wealthy.

Just ten years later things looked very different. Cars dominated the streets and most urban homes had electric lights, electric flat irons, and vacuum cleaners. In upper-middle-class houses, washing machines, refrigerators, toasters, curling irons, percolators, heating pads, and popcorn poppers were becoming commonplace. And although the first commercial radio station didn’t begin broadcasting until 1920, the American public, with an adult population of about 122 million people, bought 4,438,000 radios in the year 1929 alone.

But despite the apparent tidal wave of new consumer goods and what appeared to be a healthy appetite for their consumption among the well-to-do, industrialists were worried. They feared that the frugal habits maintained by most American families would be difficult to break. Perhaps even more threatening was the fact that the industrial capacity for turning out goods seemed to be increasing at a pace greater than people’s sense that they needed them.

It was this latter concern that led Charles Kettering, director of General Motors Research, to write a 1929 magazine article called “Keep the Consumer Dissatisfied.” He wasn’t suggesting that manufacturers produce shoddy products. Along with many of his corporate cohorts, he was defining a strategic shift for American industry—from fulfilling basic human needs to creating new ones.

In a 1927 interview with the magazine Nation’s Business, Secretary of Labor James J. Davis provided some numbers to illustrate a problem that the New York Times called “need saturation.” Davis noted that “the textile mills of this country can produce all the cloth needed in six months’ operation each year” and that 14 percent of the American shoe factories could produce a year’s supply of footwear. The magazine went on to suggest, “It may be that the world’s needs ultimately will be produced by three days’ work a week.”

Business leaders were less than enthusiastic about the prospect of a society no longer centered on the production of goods. For them, the new “labor-saving” machinery presented not a vision of liberation but a threat to their position at the center of power. John E. Edgerton, president of the National Association of Manufacturers, typified their response when he declared: “I am for everything that will make work happier but against everything that will further subordinate its importance. The emphasis should be put on work—more work and better work.” “Nothing,” he claimed, “breeds radicalism more than unhappiness unless it is leisure.”

By the late 1920s, America’s business and political elite had found a way to defuse the dual threat of stagnating economic growth and a radicalized working class in what one industrial consultant called “the gospel of consumption”—the notion that people could be convinced that however much they have, it isn’t enough. President Herbert Hoover’s 1929 Committee on Recent Economic Changes observed in glowing terms the results: “By advertising and other promotional devices . . . a measurable pull on production has been created which releases capital otherwise tied up.” They celebrated the conceptual breakthrough: “Economically we have a boundless field before us; that there are new wants which will make way endlessly for newer wants, as fast as they are satisfied.”

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complete article here

I don't see what's so terrible about everyone working 3-day weeks, and there being enough work to go around, personally! I'm off to read the whole article, though...

It is, and always has been, about control. Power over others and the power to dictate the course of an industry, a people, a nation, that is what these psychos crave.
:kick:

This particular 'solution' to this inevitable problem of capitalism has proven particularly damaging. Ya can't fix or reform capitalism, it's mandate is to increase profits, ya gotta put a stake thru it's heart.

(emphasis added)

That's been the gospel of Corporate America ever since! (Actually, it's always been that way).

Of note is that the American labor movement in the late Thirties, was "almost" at the point of pushing aggressively for the Six Hour Day. But WW2 with its "Full Production" put that idea to rest. But the west coast longshoremen (ILWU) still has the Six Hour Day wired into their contracts.

pnorman

I saw a documentary about Los Angeles toying with the idea of mass transit (several years ago).

It showed actual footage of the streetcar system, a shiny, clean streetcar stopping to let off a passenger on a beautiful Leave It To Beaver type street. But apparently the streetcar companies were bought by the oil companies, Ford, Goodyear -- all the industries that would benefit from selling automobiles, and the rest is history. They essentially took away any other option.

The irony is, the routes used lo those many years ago, were practically identical to the ones being suggested for the rapid transit proposal.