Consumed By Consumerism

Let’s talk about growth:
Compare and contrast a garden with cancer.

A garden follows an orderly plan.  Not super-orderly to the point of being machine-like, but orderly enough to strive to produce the best possible results.

Despite appearances, a garden doesn’t grow wildly, not if it is to thrive.  Gardeners carefully plant their crops, water them, pluck weeds, trim and prune the plants as needed, eliminate any pests that attack their crop, and in the end enjoy a bountiful harvest.

Done right, a carefully tended garden produces ample food for your own table and perhaps enough surplus to trade for things you don’t have.

Sometimes you don’t even make a trade:
“Here, I have too much squash, I can’t eat it all.  Take some.”

Cancer grows
uncontrollably
and kills you.

Oh, not always quickly, but if you let it grow unmonitored, well, the outcome is not pleasant.

“Not pleasant…”  That’s a piss poor euphemism

Howzabout the outcome is demeaning, demoralizing, degrading, deplorable death?

Got a better picture now?

Good.

Capitalism can be a garden…

…or it can be a cancer.

When it’s a garden, each element gets its own chance to flourish and prosper. 

It can accomplish great things and benefit many -- provided it stays regulated.

A cancer just starts growing and eating and consuming, interested only in getting bigger at its host’s expense.

A garden can last forever; indeed we have gardens around the world that are centuries old.

A cancer can only be killed or it will kill its host.

American capitalism is a cancer based on the myth of the ever expanding frontier.

Instead of striving for a more balanced society where all can benefit, it focuses on infecting the cells of that society (i.e., you and me, folks) and luring them to their own destruction.

Even a seemingly benign analogy -- “Space!  The final frontier!” -- implies resources so vast we need never worry about squandering them…

…yet paradoxically we as a society allow the vast resources we do possess to be denied to those who need them the most.

Capitalism in any form is set up to funnel money and resources (i.e., capital) into the hands of a small, self-select few.

Again, properly regulated, this is not a problem.

People invest time / money / labor into work intended to produce enough surplus value that it can be traded for more capital, or for products the investors / workers can’t provide for themselves.

There’s nothing inherently unfair / unethical / illegal / immoral / or fattening about that.

The problem lies in those with access to large amounts of capital deciding unilaterally that the best interests of society are served by making sure they get even more capital.

A circular argument, no?

To that end they use the economics of scarcity to drive prices up, and to guarantee a steady demand for scare product, relentless advertising / marketing / promotional campaigns designed to overcome consumer hesitation.

Unlike a garden, where decisions are reached in regard as to how to best manage the available resources, American capitalism is never satisfied with a steady state of affairs that provides enough surplus to sustain the lives and homes of those employed from head office down to factory floor while meeting all other business needs such as plant maintenance and research & development, but rather an ever increasing slice of the pie, either destroying or absorbing all competition until a tiny handful of trusts and mega-corporations exert grossly undue influence over the societies and communities that make their financial success possible.

To expand markets, they constantly introduce novelty disguised as “innovation” or “improvement” in an effort to suck more capital out of the pockets and purses of consumers by using their huge advertising and marketing budgets to convince consumers to go further and further into debt in order to prop up their shareholders already grossly inflated dividends or their managements even more grotesquely inflated bonus -- all of which are derived from “expanding” their market share regardless of the damage it does to either consumers or the long term health of the corporation!

They’ve bought politicians and judges, using them to reduce regulations that prevent them from preying unfairly on consumers and workers.

There is nothing inherently evil about capitalism, but neither is there anything virtuous about it.

It’s a system that can work, but like a draft horse, it needs to be put in harness and controlled for the good of all, not just the spoiled brat who wants to jump on and play cowboy.

Full disclosure:
I wrote for G.I. Joe and Transformers and a bevy of other toy based programs and while most of my producers encouraged us to be the best writers we could possibly be, the truth is they wanted to peddle toys to kids and those shows were 30 minute commercials.

I’m proud of the quality of work I did on those shows -- but I recognize I can’t separate outcome from intent.

That’s what we did with G.I. Joe and Transformers.

While children both want and need to play in order to grow up fully human and humane, we used multi-million dollar advertising campaigns to convince them G.I. Joe and Transformers (and Jem and My Little Pony, let’s not leave them out) were the specific playthings they wanted.

And mind you, this is a relatively innocuous example, but it does illustrate my point:   There is no genuine freedom of choice, no actual free market, when a small number of people possess complete dominance over the choices the market presents.

Now, it’s fair to ask “What’s the big deal when it comes to kids’ toys and TV?”

Truth be told, there is a strong argument against it, one based on the concept of local TV and radio stations being community assets, not multi-national corporate assets, but we’ll stick to the specific point of toys.

If Hasbro and Geppetto (to use a fictional example) are in the same business (i.e., making toys), and Geppetto serves his neighbors by making toys for them, how is his community helped by an out of town corporation overpowering his market share?

‘Cuz that’s exactly the same thing that happened when Wal-Mart steamrolled over literally tens of thousands of privately owned mom & pop businesses, wiping them out through economies of scale they could not hope to duplicate, and despite offering lower prices, sucking local capital out instead of plowing it back in the communities the way the mom & pops did.

“Caveat emptor” you say?

That’s a damned irresponsible and sociopathic response when you consider the big multi-national corporations funnel enormous amounts of capital into the campaigns of political stooges who then vote to undermine public schools and fiscal accountability.

I can’t locate the quote readily, but it’s been observed that freedom of speech and equality under the law means little if all you are afforded is a soapbox while the opposition has a loudspeaker.

Those who think this is fair and just and equitable are either (a) the same people willing to send tens of thousands of their fellow citizens to long, lingering, terrifying deaths in order to keep their own profit margins high, or (b) people who like to pretend they will be part of the (a) group some day.

The 1% in all their various guises -- Old South plantation owners, Gilded Age robber barons, 1920s stock brokers, 1930s industrialist -- constantly chip away at and erode the foundation of the middle classes, despite the fact that strong middle classes produce stable and prolific cultures

© Buzz Dixon