Gotham Diary:
Grievances
21 November 2013
In the new Harper’s (December), Jenny Diski makes a statement about advertising, consumerism, and capitalism that I take issue with. I agree with everything that Diski was saying about the book she was reviewing, Virginia Postrel’s book about glamour, which sounds perfectly awful. The remark that raised my eyebrows was something of a sideline, a bit of obiter dicta.
Instead, she seems satisfied to make glamour virtually synonymous with the function and activity of advertising: “By binding image and desire, glamour gives us pleasure even as it heightens our yearnings. It leads us to feel that the life we dream of exists, and to desire it even more.” This she directly equates with the undeniable fact that advertising is the heart (if that’s the word) of capitalism.
Whoa! Whoa!
I’m no fan of advertising, although I have more trouble with its making a lot of entertainment “free” than I do with its consumerist content; and I’m certainly no supporter of free-market capitalism. I understand the temptation to cast both of these devils into the same boiling cauldron. But it must be resisted, because the resulting fumes are confusing rather than clarifying.
The heart of capitalism is: buy low and sell high, with the help of as few employees as possible. Industrial capitalism was a transitory phase, in many ways a perversion of capitalism. True capitalists don’t make things. They use their capital to buy things that other people make, which they then sell elsewhere. Think spice, think diamonds. Or think finance, for that’s pretty much what capitalism has come to in our time. True capitalism is rare.
Capital accumulations are also put to work starting up businesses. This can be done in either of two ways, directly (as equity) or indirectly (as debt — think bank loans). The industrial revolution witnessed the creation of many large corporations, some of them businesses, but large, innovative, profitable corporations have become difficult to sustain. Most industrial products and services, once their market steadies, tend to look more like public services, more properly paid for by taxes than by purchases.
Free-market capitalism is a chimera. It exists only for those who devote their lives to some form of trading, and it is confined to the specific market(s) in which that trading is undertaken. True free-market capitalism would be paralyzingly complex for the human organism; not even Eugene Fama could bear it.
A lot of what people call “capitalism” is nothing but a constructed receptacle for everything that’s meant by “not communist.” This construct stopped being even marginally useful when communism vanished from the political scene. Communism, unlike capitalism, is a moral system, with a great deal of internal coherence. If it doesn’t work, that’s because human beings aren’t sufficiently self-effacing to meet its minimum demands — and probably won’t be for the foreseeable future. Communism is a dream, a hope for some better future. That’s a problem, too, because people are impatient; they want to live the dream. Communism belongs in the same closet where we keep projects for perpetual-motion machines and philosophers’ stones.
What most people mean by capitalism, in contrast, is moral rubbish, amounting to no more than “do your own thing” and “leave me alone.” There’s nothing wrong with doing your own thing if you can swing it without hurting anybody else, but this is hardly the foundation of a moral system. And healthy people do not really want to be left alone. “Give me some space” is more like it; that is truly a moral, social claim.
Talk about capitalism and communism is highly colored by moral biases. On the one hand, the moral neutrality of what people call capitalism leads to objectionable outcomes, such as incidental accumulations of enormous wealth. (By incidental, I mean that making lots of money, while probably always the hope, is usually not the project that wins great fortune. Making hula hoops, or electric cars, or Viagra — those are projects. Most projects do not lead to wealth.) This makes capitalism a bad thing to many people, such as, I suspect, Jenny Diski. (But note: she is not talking about true capitalism.) On the other, communism cannot tolerate human nature as it is, and it also deals poorly with natural differences. Most experiments in communism have been more or less vengeful antidotes to capitalist excess. This makes communism a bad thing to many people, and instills in most Americans an unthinking dread of something called “socialism.” So, instead of moral analysis, we get grievances from both sides. Talk about capitalism and communism has preempted serious moral discussion since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution.
***
Consumerism is also a consequence of the industrial revolution, and it also perverts social relations. It is best thought of as an infectious disease, to which survivors eventually develop a resistance. Sometimes it seems to me that we’re still in the middle of the consumerist plague; sometimes it seems that the end is truly nigh. We are always going to want stuff, but we are going to be a great deal more discriminating. And advertising, beyond telling us when and where to go, and how much to expect to pay, is going to have nothing to do with our desires.
Advertising is the nexus of industrial capitalism and the consumer. It announces the promise of realizing the desires that it seeks to create, if some sort of purchase is made. People with a resistance to consumerism already know their own desires, and so remain unmoved by advertising’s announcements; they also mistrust advertising at a visceral level. Postrel and Diski seem to be fascinated by a Louis Vuitton ad showing Angelina Jolie and a leather bag by the side of a stream in Cambodia. The ad promises that a certain kind of leather bag exists. You may want the bag, and you may save up the money to buy it. That is the only part of the ad that will make money for Louis Vuitton. But the ad obviously announces other promises, only some of which are actual possibilities. You may travel to Cambodia, if you save up for that. You may even be photographed by Annie Liebovitz. But you will never be Angelina Jolie. This is not a problem for the survivor of the consumerist plague. The survivor may wish to be more like Angelina Jolie, or in the alternative may wish to marry her. But no survivor wants to be Angelina Jolie. The sign of survival is determination to be yourself, only better, because that is the only dissatisfaction capable of putting a stop to the consumerist itch. For the survivor of consumerism, the Vuitton ad is nothing more than a more or less appealing postcard.
Museums and libraries are the ultimate consumers of everything truly valuable. That’s as close as we’re going to come to communism for a very long time. But the world would be a duller place if Jenny Diski stopped taking swings at “capitalism.” I could watch her all day.