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Manufacturing the Love of Possession

By Richard York

In 1877, speaking at the Powder River Conference, Chief Sitting Bull
of the Lakota nation said of the European invaders who were
destroying his people and their way of life,
"The love of possession is a disease with them."
Disease is an apt term, because
it does not necessarily imply that the love of possession was
inherent in the nature of the invaders, but rather that the
affliction may have been acquired. Thus, any scholar wishing to
locate the origin of the affliction should, like an epidemiologist,
search out its sources and possible transmission vectors.

Michael Dawson is an "epidemiologist" of the finest type, seeking the
origin of the most insidious ailment currently afflicting Americans
(along with a growing share of humanity): hyper-consumerism, the love
of possession in its latest form. Despite what neoclassical
economists may tell us, people do not have an inherent, insatiable
desire to consume without end. Rather, the desire to possess and
consume must be created. The purpose of The Consumer Trap is to
analyze how this desire is manufactured, by whom, and for what
purpose.

Dawson goes to the source of the disease, big business and its
marketing apparatus, and analyzes how the consumer trap is carefully
set both to ensnare and infect its victims, to ensure that the rich
get richer and that power remains in the hands of the powerful.
Dawson bases his analysis in large part on the writings of corporate
marketing specialists themselves and shows that they are quite frank
about their purpose: to generate profit by manipulating people's
thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. Marketing, in effect, attempts to
turn people's private lives into just another part of a grand
production/consumption line. In short, Dawson argues that the purpose
of marketing is to perpetuate the capitalist system and its
concomitant inequalities. Thus, Dawson shows us that the source of
the love of possession in the modern world is more like weaponized
anthrax than it is like the smallpox virus. It does not readily
spread from one individual to another, living freely in a population.

The theoretical foundation for Dawson's work comes from Thorstein
Veblen and later scholars, Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy in particular,
who have drawn on Veblen's political economy to address the age of
monopoly capital. Dawson argues that Veblen's work has been hijacked
and mischaracterized by consumer culture theorists. Far from focusing
on the behavior of individual consumers, Veblen's political economy
is firmly rooted in a recognition of the coercive power of the
economic elite. Dawson manages both to pull the theoretical rug out
from under consumer culture theorists and develop a truly radical
approach to consumerism by appropriately utilizing Veblen's
framework, which argues that corporate capitalism requires class
coercion to expand sales and to achieve social domination.

This is not a work of abstract theoretical showmanship, however.
Dawson sticks close to his purpose, never drifting from his focus on
the practice of marketing. A large part of the text is concerned with
tracing the development of marketing in order to put our current
situation into historical context. Dawson traces modern marketing
tactics to Frederick Winslow Taylor's "scientific management" in the
early part of the twentieth century. He writes:
Harlow S. Person, then the Taylor Society's managing director, argued
that corporate capitalism itself was eventually "going to force" its
leading firms into a new "inclusive system of management." Person
labeled the impending system "sales engineering" and predicted that
once it took root corporate leaders would find themselves approaching
the task of manipulating people's off-the-job perceptions and actions
as rigorously and intentionally as they had already learned-thanks to
Fred Taylor's teaching in workplace scientific management-to treat
the task of engineering employees' on-the-job doings. (pp. 17-18)

Person was entirely correct, as Dawson shows us. Modern marketers
rely on a large research apparatus to determine ways of manipulating
people into buying and using products. The knowledge gained from such
research is not only used in advertising, but also in the entire
marketing process from product design to sales. Thus, throughout the
twentieth century, marketing was thoroughly Taylorized so as to make
people's behavior outside of the workplace as conducive to capital
accumulation as their on-the-job activities.

Dawson shows how the culture industry has developed substantially
from that which concerned scholars in the Frankfurt School, who
analyzed the more subtle (although surely still powerful) ideological
manipulation perpetrated by the economic elite. Marketing makes the
capitalist production of culture far more directed and focused, often
bludgeoning people into submission by its sheer inescapable ubiquity.
The first two sentences of his book tell the story:
Big businesses in the United States now spend well over a trillion
dollars a year on marketing. This is double Americans' combined
annual spending on all public and private education, from
kindergartens through graduate schools. (p. 1)

The extraordinary sum of money spent on marketing belies widespread
claims that people make their own decisions largely free of corporate
influence. Either marketers are stupid (and they are not) or the
money spent on marketing more than pays for itself in consumer
compliance. Given the fact that a great deal of public and private
education also serves to further the interests of capitalists-classes
on marketing, business, and neoclassical economics are the most
obvious examples, but the capitalist perspective has also infiltrated
most, if not all, other aspects of education in the United States,
from history and literature to biology and physics-one is left to
wonder whether the typical American receives much in the way of a
critical education at all.

Although concerns about government surveillance of our "private"
lives are not unwarranted-especially during the present reign of the
paranoid, jingoistic, and militaristic far-right in national
politics-surely we should be at least as concerned with the
penetration of marketers into our homes and families. Dawson notes
that in addition to the routine monitoring of our behavior in the
workplace, we are not free from corporate intrusion when we leave
work. Not only are we assaulted overtly by direct marketing-all that
junk mail and those phone calls-but our demographic and lifestyle
conditions, our Internet use, and our purchasing habits are monitored
and recorded whenever possible for use by marketing researchers to
help target us for further marketing. Big Brother is watching, but
not only, or even primarily, in the guise of Attorney General John
Ashcroft. Instead, Frederick Taylor's ghost serves as the eyes of
monopoly capital, monitoring all our behaviors.

Dawson's discussion of macromarketing (pp. 117-23) is especially
interesting, although unfortunately short. Macromarketing refers to
the management by the corporate elite of the larger sociopolitical
context, particularly public policy, to make it more conducive to the
interests of capital. Dawson presents several examples of this, one
of which is corporate influence on the development of the U.S.
Interstate Highway system. The passage of the Federal Aid Highway Act
of 1956 was a boon for capital, in that it undermined public
transportation and greatly expanded marketing opportunities,
particularly, and most obviously, for automobile manufacturers. The
passage of this act and subsequent federal support for highway
development, were no accident; they were the product of the strategic
intervention of capitalists into public policy. Such intervention
continues to this day with political lobbying and campaign financing
by automobile and oil companies.

Macromarketing is fascinating because it is far more overtly
political than other aspects of marketing. Rather than simply trying
to get people to buy a specific product, macromarketing is concerned
with structuring our entire way of life around consumerism.
Macromarketing is unique to monopoly capital because in
small-business capitalism no individual business has the resources to
engage in macromarketing and, furthermore, even if it did, the
benefits would be too diffuse to make it worth its while.
Nevertheless, as monopoly capital expands and competition diminishes,
big businesses clearly have more to gain by working not only to
market specific products, but to ensure that we fulfill all of our
needs and wants and define our lives through consumerism, because a
large share of consumer dollars will end up in a few wealthy
corporate hands. Surely this topic is worthy of more than a
seven-page treatment. Nonetheless, Dawson covers a lot of ground in
this relatively short book.

Dawson does an admirable job of closing the book on a hopeful note by
discussing how we can escape the consumer trap by "reclaiming our
macro choices." Capitalist propaganda has been so successful in the
United States that a great many people accept that we have no option
other than our present system of corporate capitalism: It's either
capitalism or the totalitarianism of fascism or Stalinism. Democracy
and capitalism are too often seen as interchangeable terms, when
nothing could be further from the truth. Dawson is entirely correct
when he writes, "[M]odern corporate marketing is, in the final
analysis, an instrument for preventing the democratic governance of
large-scale economic institutions and the big decisions that they
make" (p. 166). Although there are surely many other ways in which
capitalism suppresses democracy, marketing has become one of the most
powerful tools of capitalism in the contemporary era.

In the end, however, we can choose something other than totalitarian
oppression or capitalist exploitation; we have other macro choices.
Dawson argues that democratic socialism remains an option and one
that is well worth pursuing. The disease of consumerism must be
stamped out at its source: corporate capitalism. The solution to
bringing about a more just and sustainable world lies not in micro
choices, but in structural change that wrestles power-economic,
social, and political-from the corporate elite. The final sentences
of The Consumer Trap make its purpose, and importance, clear: [I]f
democracy were to conquer the economic sphere of life, it would place
severe limitations on the private priorities that presently drive it.
The people might then enjoy not just a wide array of micro
choices-which deodorant, toothpaste, car, or magazine to buy-but also
an unprecedented degree of control over macro choices, including the
option of putting people before profits. (p. 174)
~~~~
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