The Chair, by Vincent Van Gogh. 1888
Norman Mailer wrote, in the pages of Dissent back in 1959, about the difference between 19th century capitalism and the 20th century version, provoking much thought. Basically, in the 19th century, a worker would toil in hardship, for little pay, but when he went home, capitalism didn’t follow him there. His own industry didn’t follow him. He wasn’t besieged on all sides by marketing and advertisements pushing him to fill his home with scads of fads and endless consumer goods. He could leave capitalism behind for the most part when he left his job each day.
The root of capitalist exploitation has shifted from the proletariat-at-work to the mass-at-leisure who now may lose as much as four or five ideal hours of extra leisure a day. The old exploitation was vertical — the poor supported the rich. To this vertical exploitation must be added the horizontal exploitation of the mass by the State and by Monopoly, a secondary exploitation which is becoming more essential to a modern capitalist economy than the direct exploitation of the proletariat .… Nineteenth century capitalism could still find its profits in the factory; when the worker was done, his body might be fatigued but his mind could look for a diversion which was relatively free of the industry for which he worked.
In other words, capitalists have squeezed most of the surplus value they can out of workers via their wages and hours (stagnant wages since roughly 1973), and now must go after our leisure time, which ostensibly has increased, thanks to new laws and regulations reducing the work week. What the government took away from capitalists in the form of exploitation at work, capitalists get back (and more) via an invasion of your home life. Again, following Rilke, there is no place that capitalists don’t see you. They must enter your home through your TV, your radio, and now the Internet. They must enter it via your cell phone. Soon, they will, like that scene in “Minority Report,” follow you wherever you go, literally, buzzing you, swamping you, overwhelming you with advertisements custom-tailored to your “life-style,” your consumer history, your financial status, your demographic, and your location. Your coordinates will be your chains and your loss of privacy and independence. Your coordinates and your digital footprint will be your essence and your destiny, at least as far as capitalism is concerned.
Of course, one could say that no one forces you to buy anything you don’t want. True. No one forces you. But it’s amazing, isn’t it, how much stuff we do buy, and how rarely we end up fighting off the powers of marketing and advertisements? We don’t say “no” very often. And the habit of saying “yes” to so many things makes it that much harder to say “no” when things really get dicey, when things are actually essential to our survival, our health, our welfare. This also becomes a habit politically. Saying “yes” so often is a form of acquiescence, if not outright capitulation to the powers that be.
Take a look inside your home and compare that with, say, Van Gogh’s yellow room. Compare and contrast the “stuff” we have and that simple chair, that pipe, those onions. And then think about where all of your “stuff” comes from, who made it, how much they were paid, and the cost to Nature in the bargain. Paradoxically, while we are being inundated with an overwhelming amount of information about products and services, most of us know next to nothing about the true costs of anything, to workers, to the environment, to the losers in every one of these transaction. And, yes, contrary to the myth promulgated by those who worship of the gods of the market, someone always loses whenever a capitalist exchange is made. It’s built in to the system itself. Someone always loses. Or some thing. There is no escape from that. Capitalism is built on the premise of surplus value going to the very top of the food chain. Those not at the top lose.
We need to change our lives.
