RE: [Pen-l] Shemano on consumer behavior

["David B. Shemano" <dshemano@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Charles Brown writes:

>> Humans are highly social animals. The unique human characteristic of
>> humans as compared with other species is that we are more social than
>> they are. Other species are more individualistic than we are.  So,
>> "individualism" moves us closer to other animals, and away from our
>> uniquely human nature, which is highly social.

I would think it is all relative -- more social than spiders, less social than bees and ants.  But more pertinently, you seem to be begging the question, in that you believe humans are "highly social animals," and then complain that humans don't always act as "highly social animals."  If humans don't act like highly social animals, why do you think they are highly social animals?  At the first step of the analysis, to determine what is a "uniquely human nature," don't we have to start by looking at how people actually act?

>> The human aspect of a human individual is her sociality , not her
>> individuality.

Again, this seems an entirely arbitrary opinion.  If you want my opinion, the human aspect of human individual (other than consciousness) is the ability to be both individual and social, and to choose when to be individual and when to be social.

>> 
>> The critical unique quality of human productive activities is that they
>> are highly social, social labor or work.  The Robinson Crusoe model of
>> the isolated individual producing is a profound misrepresentation of the
>> human production model.

Again, yes and no, in that it is all relative.  No doubt the children growing up on the Blue Lagoon were limited in their capacity to produce compared to millions of people engaged in the division of labor and benefiting form thousands of years of preexisting knowledge.  However, at the same time, when we look at the advancement of knowledge, technology, production, we can see that individual human beings had eureka moments that were necessary to the process and not inevitable

>> However, capitalism perverts the fecundity which unsuspectingly lay in
>> the lap of social labor. Like the Sorcerer's Apprentice who releases
>> powers that he cannot keep under control,  Capital  must have an
>> ever-growing GDP and ever-growing types, variety , of goods and
>> services. Not for the ever better and efficient good and service of the
>> consumers of these goods and services, but for the ever increasing
>> accumulation of capital by Capital.
>> 
>> To realize this accumulation in the form of money all the stuff must be
>> bought. The few capitalists, the tiny elite,  have no use for great
>> redundancies of _personal consumption_ goods and services.  What sense
>> would it be for a rich-man to buy 10,000 cars or go to a restaurant 50
>> times per day ? An individual can only consume so much.  The great  mass
>> of workers/producers are the only locus of enough individual demands to
>> buy all the personal/individual consumer goods so massively produced.
>> 
>>  So, the ruling idea from the ruling classes on this is ( and the
>> rulers control the socializing institutions) : Have a Jones for
>> commodities; shop, shop, shop until you drop; then come back and buy
>> again tomorrow. Otherwise, we'll start laying people off.

Again, this ignores my quesion, which is why is it so easy for the masses to buy into the concept of shop till you drop, as opposed to other concepts.  Until relatively recently, was not the bourgeoris message save, save, save, deny yourself, deny yourself, deny yourself?  Do you believe it was a conscious goal of the ruling classes to overthrow that bourgeois ethos and substitute a consumer ethos?  If you do, why was it so easy, as compared to so many of the other unsuccessful social engineering episodes we are required to live through?  I mean, look at the end of the Soviet and Maoist experiments -- generations of anti-capitalistic ruling class ideology and it took about two minutes for the masses to buy into the consumer ideology.  You can't ignore the alignment of consumerism with human nature.

David Shemano


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