Overselling capitalism
Why today's markets are headed for disaster unless there is a shift in focus.
By Benjamin R. Barber | Los Angeles Times | April 4, 2007
THE CRISIS IN subprime mortgages betrays a deeper predicament facing consumer
capitalism triumphant: The "Protestant ethos" of hard work and deferred
gratification has been replaced by an infantilist ethos of easy credit and impulsive
consumption that puts democracy and the market system at risk.
Capitalism's core virtue is that it marries altruism and self-interest. In producing
goods and services that answer real consumer needs, it secures a profit for producers.
Doing good for others turns out to entail doing well for yourself.
Capitalism's success, however, has meant that core wants in the developed world
are now mostly met and that too many goods are now chasing too few needs. Yet
capitalism requires us to "need" all that it produces in order to survive.
So it busies itself manufacturing needs for the wealthy while ignoring the wants
of the truly needy. Global inequality means that while the wealthy have too few
needs, the needy have too little wealth.
Capitalism is stymied, courting long-term disaster. We still work hard, but only
so that we can pay and play. In order to turn reluctant consumers with few unsatisfied
core needs into permanent shoppers, producers must dumb down consumers, shape
their wants, take over their life worlds, encourage impulse buying, cultivate
shopoholism and invent new needs. At the same time, they empower kids as shoppers
by legitimizing their unformed tastes and mercurial wants and detaching them from
their gatekeeper mothers and fathers and teachers and pastors. The kids include
toddlers who recognize brand logos before they can talk and commodity-minded baby
Einsteins who learn to shop before they can walk.
Consumerism needs this infantilist ethos because it favors laxity and leisure
over discipline and denial, values childish impetuosity and juvenile narcissism
over adult order and enlightened self-interest, and prefers consumption-directed
play to spontaneous recreation. The ethos feeds a private-market logic ("What
I want is what society needs!") and combats the public logic fashioned by
democracy ("What society needs is what I want to want!").
This is capitalism's all-too-logical way of solving the problem of too many goods
chasing too few needs. It makes consuming ubiquitous and omnipresent, turning
shopping into an addiction facilitated by easy credit.
Compare any traditional town square with a modern suburban mall. In the square,
you'll find a school, town hall, library, general store, park, movie house, church,
art gallery and homes — a true neighborhood exhibiting our human diversity
as beings who do more than simply consume. But our new town malls are all shopping,
all the time.
When we see politics permeate every sector of life, we call it totalitarianism.
When religion rules all, we call it theocracy. But when commerce dominates everything,
we call it liberty. Can we redirect capitalism to its proper end: the satisfaction
of real human needs? Well, why not?
The world teems with elemental wants and is peopled by billions who are needy.
They do not need iPods, but they do need potable water, not colas but inexpensive
medicines, not MTV but their ABCs. They need mortgages they can afford, not funny-money
easy credit.
To serve such needs, however, capitalism must once again learn to defer profits
and empower the needy as customers. Entrepreneurs wanted! With micro-credit, villagers
can construct hand pumps and water filters from the clay under their feet. Pharmaceutical
companies ought to be thinking about how to sell inexpensive retro-virals to Africans
with HIV instead of pushing Botox to the "forever young" customers they
are trying to manufacture here. And parents can refuse to relinquish their gatekeeping
roles and let marketers know they won't allow their kids to be targeted anymore.
To do this, we will require the assistance of democratic institutions and an adult
ethos. Public citizens must be restored to their proper place as masters of their
private choices. To sustain itself, capitalism will once again have to respond
to real needs instead of trying to fabricate synthetic ones — or risk consuming
itself.
BENJAMIN R. BARBER is a professor at the University of Maryland and is the author
of many books, including "Jihad vs. McWorld." His latest book is "Consumed:
How Markets Corrupt Children, Infantilize
Copyright 2007 Los Angeles Times