Real-World Economics Review Blog

This is an excellent analysis on what I feel is the core topic of 2021 economics: the rule of corporate capital, and the authors do great work in putting it out there. But can we lose the incessant use of acronyms please?

The way I see it, Catholicism and early Protestantism (Calvinism) of the pre-elightenment and even early to mid-enlightenment eras, remained a set of brutal systems of thought-control and body-control. This was until they were finally put into retreat by humanism and scientific humanism. The Church supported and was supported by brutal post-feudal monarchist states. We just have look at the Spanish in the New World (many tens of millions of indigenous dead), the Philippines etc. and the Inquisition; or Calvin in Zurich, merrily hanging or burning people at the stake as heretics. Christianity, of those variants, only became humanized and reasonable AFTER it started losing hearts and minds to scientific humanism. Then it changed its spots (somewhat) to get back into the hearts and minds game.

This is a fairly confrontational analysis I admit. A similar analysis of Marxism can be be made in the sense that the dogmatic, authoritarian, Soviet Marxists and later the Maoists distorted Marx’s body of work for their own purposes. This is just as it can very reasonably be asserted that the Churches departed in many from Christ’s teachings (and/or those of his early followers and recorders).

I am not at all happy with dogmatists in religion or in political economy. They usually distort initial teachings and analysis for their own gain. Humans are inherently corruptible and easily misled. Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. At the same time, dispensing with religion and sanctity also leads to dangers; of a kind of idolatry. Men deify themselves and sanctify pure reason, instrumental reason, empiricism, science, greed, self-interest and wealth. If religion is dispensed with we then have to make sure we do make not make religions and shibboleths of our new beliefs and our new philosophies of empirical knowledge.

Power is commonly seen as the ability to influence the decision making of the other. Max Weber attempts to be more specific. Weber defined power as the chance that an individual in a social relationship can achieve his or her own will even against the resistance of others. This is an overly broad definition and includes a very wide range of types of power. To make this definition more useful in the study of history and society, Weber suggests domination as an alternative, or more carefully defined concept. Weber defines domination “as the probability that certain specific commands (or all commands) will be obeyed by a given group of persons” (Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, p. 212) In Michel Foucault’s term (Power, 1983) power is a ‘set of actions upon other actions.’ He also argues that “Power is employed and exercised through a net-like organisation. And not only do individuals circulate between its threads; they are always in the position of simultaneously undergoing and exercising this power. They are not only its inert or consenting target; they are always also the elements of its articulation. In other words, individuals are the vehicles of power, not its points of application.” (Foucault, 1980 in power/knowledge). In turn power influences the behavior of the other. Major anthropological descriptions of the dynamics and institutions of power have until recently had a markedly Western bias (an oversight continued by Bichler and Nitzan). Thus, other systems of power often have been described as alternatives or variations of those found in Western industrial contexts. Major issues informing the direction of research appear to have been influenced by the problem of order, as first laid out by Thomas Hobbes (1651) in his discussion of the need for the state. A focus many economists share even more emphatically. Undoubtedly, the centrality of this question for early anthropologists and for economists is related to the imperial dominance of the West and the development of anthropology and economics in such a context. An early and important focus of anthropological inquiry concerned so-called “stateless societies.” Evans-Pritchard’s classic study of the Nuer (1940) became the model for such investigation and demonstrated that the forces located in kinship and other social processes obviated any necessary need for the state in the promotion of order. Evans-Pritchard implied that state forms are a potential, given certain historical conditions such as invasion, colonial conquest, or large scale civil war of non-state systems.

One area important for anthropologists is institutional power. It should also be important for economists but currently is not. Those undertaking such work must engage the debates formulated within sociology about structure and agency. C. Wright Mills (The Power Elite, 1956) argued persuasively that social stratification and hierarchy are vehemently maintained by the ‘power elite,’ those who, between themselves, mobilize the power to transcend ‘ordinary’ social environments and make decisions that pertain to the lives of people they will never meet, in nations they might never visit. This kind of structural analysis can be seen, for example, in anthropological studies of the itinerant power of transnational corporations. Class analysis has been used by anthropologists to study inequality in many social contexts, not all of them industrialized (see, McGuire and Paynter 1991). Anthropologists have also argued that class analysis has its limits, especially in contexts where exploitation is multidirectional, and have been drawn to reformulations of historical materialism, as in Giddens’s theory of structuration—in which ‘power is regarded as generated in and through the reproduction of structures of domination’ (Giddens 1981:4), across time and space, whether those structures of domination rely on the allocation of material resources (as emphasized by Marx and some mainstream economists today) or on, for example, information and surveillance, or transactional politics.

There are many other important concerns about stratification and hierarchy investigated by anthropologists on which economists focus too little or hardly at all.

Thanks for the interview copy. It is interesting. I can understand why the editors ultimately rejected it.

Anthropologists begin with only two fundamentals. That humans have relationships with the things around them, both human and nonhuman (e.g., mountains, forests, lakes, pixies, gods, etc.). And that humans perform their lives based on the relations in which they are and have been involved. Humans create themselves, as pointed out long ago by British anthropologist Gordon Childe. There is no ‘human nature.’ Only the natures that humans create in this way. If humans do not do the work, there is no human nature of any sort. Regarding the topics here, capitalism and power, humans create them as well. It is part of the work of economic anthropologists to reveal and describe this creation process.

While open and uncertain, the performance process did lead to some commonalities among most humans of which we have knowledge. First, humans created ‘sociality.’ The notion or concept that humans should live in groups in which their lives are intertwined and the members of the group share common beliefs, norms, and values that while not fully coercive on the members placed their beliefs and ways of life on very similar pathways. It seems likely we know little of humans who did not adopt the community path because most such humans did not survive to reproduce. It also appears that most human groups created a religion or religions, a concept of knowledge, and a concept(s) of a good life. All these creations anthropologists summarized with the notion of culture with the patterns of interactions formed from the culture referred to as society. Culture and society can range from the rather simple and straightforward hunter-gatherer to the complex of the 21st century. The earliest human socio-cultures were likely kinship-based. Becoming more remote and varied as humans made and remade themselves again and again.

The culture of capitalism rejects actively most of what I just wrote. Anthropologist Richard Robbins points out the culture of capitalism is devoted to encouraging the production and sale of commodities. For capitalists, the culture encourages the accumulation of money; for laborers, it encourages the accumulation of wages; and for consumers, it encourages the accumulation of goods. In other words, capitalism defines sets of people who, behaving according to a set of learned rules, act as they must act. And as with most cultures those who live within it cannot see it size or shape and often ‘take-for-granted’ that it is the best possible culture.

But as with any culture, there is nothing natural or inevitable about capitalism. People are not naturally driven to accumulate wealth. There are societies in which such accumulation is discouraged. Human beings do not have an innate drive to accumulate commodities; again, there are plenty of societies in which such accumulation is discouraged. People are not driven to work; in fact, contrary to popular notions, members of capitalist culture work far more than, say, people who live by gathering and hunting (see, e.g., Schor 1999). How does culture, as anthropologists use the term, encourage people to behave in some ways and not in others? Specifically, how does the culture of capitalism encourage the accumulation of money, wages, commodities, and debt? How does it, in effect, encourage perpetual growth and what amounts to perpetual change?

The answer is culture. It is not easy to describe the effects of culture on people’s lives; anthropologists have noted that culture consists of all learned beliefs and behaviors, the rules by which we order our lives, and the meanings that human beings construct to interpret their universes and their places in them. Yet, using these abstract descriptions, it is difficult to understand how pervasive our culture can be in determining our view of the world and our actions in it. Every society has its agents, those individuals who are given or who take responsibility for representing the universe to others and who have the power to define those elements that are essential for others in locating and defining their identities. Capitalism’s agents are everywhere, reaffirming the vision of abundance central to the consumers’ view of the world. Marketing specialists, advertisers, government agents, corporate public relations specialists, entertainers, and journalists, create a vision of the world designed to maximize the production and consumption of goods. They have helped to create a culture in which the prime elements are commodities and in which the consumer’s first duty is to buy (or “Shop till you drop,” as a popular bumper sticker advises). It is a culture in which virtually all our everyday activities—work, leisure, the fulfillment of social responsibilities, and so on—take place in the context of commodities, and in which shopping, serves as a therapeutic activity. These agents construct for us a culture in which at one time or another every individual assumes the identity of consumer. The question we need to explore first is, how was the universe of the consumer and the consumer her- or himself created? And next how were people convinced to sign on?

This is a complex story. Here are a few examples of how a world made up solely of consumers, laborers, and capitalists was created and spread.

But we need to keep in mind these conditions. First, every actor is really an actor-network. Each actor is a history of associations and experiences. And the details of those associations and experiences is always important. That is the case whether the actor is biological person or a non-biological actor such as a government, corporation, religion, etc.

Second, we need to consider the complexities of power, authority, etc. What forms of power and authority exist in a culture. More fundamentally, what are the differences between power and authority. What is legitimate vs. illegitimate power and authority. Etc.

Third, sociality, living as a community among humans has and can take many forms in human history. From kinship network to corporation. But they all are a home for humans.

Finally, we need to consider that most of the examination of power and authority in anthropology is directly or indirectly involved with stratification and creation of hierarchies within societies.

The consumer did not appear full blown in the early 20th century US. Mass consumption of certain goods—notably addictive substances such as tobacco, opium, rum, gin, coffee, and tea—likely stimulated the Industrial Revolution and even Europe’s colonial domination of Asia, Latin America, and Africa (see, e.g., Trentmann 2016). This consumption also defined the methods by which later commodities were produced, distributed, and consumed (see, e.g., Trocki 1999). But, since these items were physically addictive and required little marketing, merchants generally paid little attention to how these and other goods were advertised or displayed, if when people needed their products, they would buy them. It was this attitude in the US of a century ago that was to undergo a profound change.

However, this change was helped along by new marketing interests. In fact, the culture of 19th century America emphasized moderation and self-denial, not unlimited consumption. People, workers in particular, were expected to be frugal and save their money; spending, particularly on luxuries, was seen as “wasteful.” People purchased only necessities—basic foodstuffs, clothing, household utensils, and appliances—or shared basic items when they could. If we look at a typical inventory of the possessions of an American family of 1870-1880, we
find a pattern noticeably different from that of today. In 1870, 53 percent of the population lived and worked on farms and produced much of what they consumed. One Vermont farmwife recorded making 421 pies, 152 cakes, 2,140 doughnuts, and 1,038 loaves of bread in one year (Sutherland 1989:71). Household items were relatively simple—a dinner table, wooden chairs, beds, and perhaps a carpet or rug. There were a few appliances to aid housework—cookstoves, eggbeaters, apple parers, pea shellers, and coffee mills—but
most other housework required muscle; even hand-cranked washing machines were not available until the late 1870s. Although most people, except the poorest or most isolated families, did buy some readymade clothing, most of the items people wore were made at home and were largely functional. Furthermore, because the vast majority of American families lived on farms, most of the family capital was invested in farming tools and implements. There were, of course, exceptions. The wealthy members of society competed with one another in the ostentatious display of wealth and luxury, as they had for centuries. But they represented a small percentage of the population.

Of course, Americans did not yet have electricity, the automobile had yet to be invented, and the money supply was far more limited than it is today. Nevertheless, to transform buying habits, luxuries had to be transformed into necessities. In America, this was accomplished largely in four ways: a revolution in marketing and advertising, a restructuring of major societal institutions, a revolution in spiritual and intellectual values, and a reconfiguration of space and class.

For me, the most interesting of these changes is ‘The Transformation of Spiritual and Intellectual Values.’ This involved changes from an emphasis on such values as thrift, modesty, and moderation toward a value system that encouraged spending and ostentatious display. T. J. Jackson Lears argues that, from 1880 to 1930, the United States underwent a transformation of values from those that emphasized frugality and self-denial to those that sanctioned periodic leisure, compulsive spending, and individual fulfillment (Lears1983). This shift in values, writes Lears, was facilitated in American life by a new therapeutic ethos, an emphasis on physical and psychological health. This shift was promoted in part by the growth of the health professions and the popularity of psychology, along with the increasing autonomy and alienation felt by individuals as America ceased being a land of small towns and became increasingly urban. Advertisers capitalized on these changes by altering the way products were advertised, rather than emphasizing the nature of the product itself, they began to emphasize the alleged effects of the product and its promise of a richer, fuller life. Instead of simply being good soap, shoes, or deodorant, a product would contribute to the buyer’s psychological, physical, and/or social well-being (Lears 1983:19).

Clothing, perfumes, deodorant, and so on would provide the means of achieving love; alcoholic beverages would provide the route to friendship; and the proper automobile tires or insurance policy would provide the means of meeting family responsibilities. Commodities would be the source of satisfaction and a vital means of self-expression. Ponder, for example, the following description by a forty-year-old man of the relationship between himself and his expensive Porsche:

Sometimes I test myself. We have an ancient, battered Peugeot, and I drive it for a week. It rarely breaks, and it gets great mileage. But when I pull up next to a beautiful woman, I am still the geek with glasses. Then I get back into my Porsche. It roars and tugs to get moving. It accelerates even going uphill at 80. It leadeth trashy women… to make pouting looks at me at stoplights. It makes me feel like a tomcat on the prowl Nothing in my life compares—except driving along Sunset at night in the 928, with the sodium vapor lamps reflecting off the wine-red finish, with the air inside reeking of tan glove-leather upholstery and the … Blaupunkt playing the Shirelles so loud that it makes my hairs vibrate. And with the girls I will never see again pulling up next to me, giving the car a once-over and looking at me as if I was a cool guy, not worried, instead of a 40-year-old schnook writer. (Belk 1988:148)

In the late 19th century, a series of religious movements emerged that became known as mind-cure religions. William James, in his classic 1902 book Varieties of Religious Experience, drew attention to the mind-cure movements, although he was not the first to use the term. These movements—New Thought, Unity, Christian Science, and Theosophy, among others—maintained that people could simply, by an act of will and conviction, cure their own illnesses and create heaven on earth. These movements were, as William Leach (1993:225) put it, “wish-oriented, optimistic, sunny, the epitome of cheer and self-confidence.” Absent were sin, darkness, and evil; it was all sunshine and health.

These movements held that salvation would occur in this life and not in the afterlife. Mind cure dismissed the ideas of sin and guilt. God became a divine force, a healing power. Proponents argued that Americans should banish ideas of duty and self-denial. As one early twentieth-century advocate put it:

If you want to get the most out of life, just make up your mind that you were made to be happy, that you are a happiness machine, as well as a work machine. Cut off the past, and do not touch the morrow until it comes, but extract every possibility from the present. Think positive, creative, happy thoughts, and your harvest of good things will be abundant. (Success Magazine 1903)

These new religions made fashionable the idea that, in the world of goods, men and women could find a paradise free from pain and suffering; they could find, as one historian of religion put it, the “good” through “goods.”

Popular culture also promoted the mind-cure ideology. As examples, there were L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, which Leach characterizes as “perhaps the best mind cure text ever written,” and the Billikens doll, a squat Buddha-like figure, sometimes male and sometimes female, that represented the “god of things as they ought to be.” Its success was without parallel in the toy trade and helped ignite the doll craze in America. Billikens, it was said, would drive away petty annoyances and cares. One contemporary put it this way: “An atmosphere of gorged content pervades Billikens. No one can look at him [or her] and worry.”

The popularity of the Billikens doll signaled change in spiritual values. It was now permissible to seek self-fulfillment in this life and find elements of satisfaction in manufactured commodities. The world was a good place: There was no misery; poverty, injustice, and inequities were only in the mind. There was enough for everyone.

These changes were not unique to America. Many of the same changes have occurred in other nations, most notably Great Britain, Germany, and France (Carrier 1995), and all over the world. The consumer revolution of the early 20th century toys are a direct descendent of the century that was not the first of its kind either—but it evolved with great intensity and Billikens doll, a figure designed to hurry in America.

Thus, by the 1930s, the ‘consumer’ as a category of person had, as Lizabeth Cohen (2003) points out, replaced the “citizen,” adopting a spiritual and intellectual framework that glorified the continued consumption of commodities as personally fulfilling and economically desirable—a moral imperative that would end poverty and injustice. A moral imperative that remains in place in the 21st century. Even in the face of multiple economic downturns, the resurgence of Fascism in the nation, and a raging pandemic. Consumerism is an all-American value now.