Addiction, Advertising, & Easy Virtue (was Re: How far do we go?)

[Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1@xxxxxxx>]

Michael Perelman wrote:

> I would rather affect smoking by eliminating privileges of the corporations
> that sell the cigarettes, such as eliminating the tax deductibility of
> advertising -- I would do it for all advertising, but that's me.

I am in favor of eliminating cigarette advertising (as well as all
idiotic corporate advertising, though it's impossible to do so under
capitalism).  However, it is not clear whether the absence of
corporate advertising will make a huge dent in consumption of
addictive goods & production of addiction.

No corporation bombards us with ads for pot, cocaine, heroin,
glue-sniffing, etc.; in fact, use of such drugs for recreational
purposes has been often strictly regulated and/or prohibited by the
state, frequently with stiff penalties; moreover, NGOs as well as
governments have saturated most nations with negative ads against
recreational drug use (sometimes going so far as to try scaring the
living daylights out of people -- remember _Reefer Madness_?).  _And
yet_, addiction has & will remain a problem.  The root cause of
addiction, it seems to me, is _alienation & oppression_ (& relative
and/or absolute _impoverishment_ in the case of the poor).

The presence of addictive goods alone does _not_ cause addiction; nor
does advertising for them.  It is social relations that are
responsible for it.

Consider the eating disorder.  Foodstuffs -- coffee, chocolate, etc.
excepted -- are _not_ addictive goods in themselves; _and yet_,
consuming or not consuming food can become a _consuming passion_.  We
may ban ads for food, but I do not think that banning food ads will
make the eating disorder disappear.

The appearance of compulsive behaviors that are named addiction in
large part is rooted in the social relations fundamentally defined by
direct or indirect subjection to the compulsion of M-C-M'.  I doubt
that pre-Columbian tribes in the Americas were addicted to tobacco,
peyote, etc., though they did make use of them.  Use of tobacco did
not become abuse then when there existed no ensemble of social
relations that would give rise to behaviors directly or indirectly
driven by M-C-M'.

In the case of the eating disorder, in addition to the compulsive
logic of M-C-M', I hold sexism responsible for its emergence &
development.

_Only by eliminating our subjection to M-C-M' & all other oppressions
that compel us_ will we all -- not just the exceptional few -- be
able to practice the virtue of moderation in an Aristotelian fashion.
(Remember that under capitalism _even_ an attempt at moderation can
paradoxically become itself compulsive.)

_Virtue must come easy_ -- in sex & everything else.  Socialism, I
believe, is in part about _creating the ensemble of social relations
conducive to the practice of easy virtue_.  The Old Man of the Left
said, "In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and
class antagonisms, we shall have an association in which the free
development of each is the condition for the free development of
all."  It is important to keep in mind that Marx did _not_ say that
"the free development of all is the condition for the free
development of each."  Why?  Because Marx differed from Rousseau &
said no to the republic of Spartan virtue.  To agree with Marx here
is not the same as rooting for libertarianism.

Yoshie