[Pen-l] Shemano on consumer behavior

["Charles Brown" <charlesb@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I would think it is all relative -- more social than spiders, less
social than bees and ants.
^^
CB: I know what you mean , but when you think about it, humans are more
social than bees and ants too.   All your consumer goods and services
link you to thousands of others who participated in making them.  All
the people you see in the mass media. All the people you pass on the
street in a car are socially linked to you and you to them in obeying
traffic laws.  All the books and other material you read links you
socially to other humans. Bees and ants are only linked to those in the
particular hive.

And the biggest one it that humans are linked socially to those from
dead generations of the human species through language and culture. Bees
and ants don't have this one at all. Culture, tradition, custom and
language links us to dead generations of the species.  We are socially
linked to millions of members of our species dead and alive.

^^^^

  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."
^^^
CB: They do _act_ as a highly social species. It is just that
individualist ideology ( bourgeois ideology) tells us that we don't. In
other words, one big problem with individualist ideology is that it is
not a true description of how we actually are.  There are no Robinson
Crusoes , in fact.  Yet, we fictionalize , tell stories, tell lies, as
if there are. Trouble is it is not only is self-proclaimed fiction that
we claim there are rugged individuals, totally independent individuals. 
Every human has many ties and dependencies to other humans. There is a
world wide web of labor.

^^^^

  If humans don't act like highly social animals, why do you think they
are highly social animals?
^^^
CB: They do act like highly social animals, in fact.  The words to
describe them in modern bourgeois culture misrepresents the way they
actually act.

^^^^^^^

  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?

^^^
CB; Exactly. If you start doing that you will see that humans are
highly social. 

Start with a child., an infant. From the beginning we are all highly
social and dependent on other humans.   Think about yourself. Aren't you
dependent on many, many other people ? Who made your shirt ? Who took it
to the store where you bought it ? You are dependent on them, and they
on you .  Who made your car ?   Isn't everyone you drive by on the rode
dependent upon you not killing them with your car ? Think how much trust
we put into everyone of the thousands of people we pass on the rode. A
bee doesn't have to trust as many bees as critically as that alone.

^^^^

^^^^

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

Again, this seems an entirely arbitrary opinion. 
^^
CB: No, it is based on an enormous amount of empirical evidence. See
above.

The rugged individual is a big myth. They don't exist. This can be
demonstrated by each individual themselves if they look at their lives
as they actually are, with their myriad of connections to other people,
other humans.

^^^^^

^^^^^

 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.

^^^^
CB: Even when you contemplate silently in your head, the words you talk
to yourself with are highly social. You yourself invented almost none of
the words you talk to yourself with. The grammar was invented by
somebody who is dead now. Many of your personal goals and dreams are
made up of ideas and concepts that you learned from others. Even if you
choose one for your self, you are choosing from an array that others
developed, and it is thereby 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.

^^^
Even Eureka moments are concerning material or subject matters that do
not originate with the genius. All geniuses stand on the shoulders of
giants who lived before them.  Creativity is creating something out of
something that preexisted. Its significance as creative cannot be
understood except in relation to the "old" it is creative in
relationship to. This is the dialectic of the old and the new. As you
say relativity. Can't define something as new except relative to the
old. The creative person is creative relative to the crowd of old
people.

^^^^^

>> 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.
^^^^^
CB: When you say "easy" what do you mean ?  It takes a long time for
someone to get socialized into buying frenzy.   But it's like many other
things that people are socialized into.  If many educating and training
and socializing institutions in your society are teaching it, most
people tend to learn it.  A lot of it is sort of unconscious.  Why would
it be hard for people to "buy into " it ? Write there, you use the
metaphor "buy into it" which is exactly what we are talking about. The
notion of "buying" is so widespread, that you use it unconsciously to
refer figuratively to something that is not literally buying .  Masses
don't literally pay money for acquriing the habit of buying a lot of
things literally. But you think of a non-buying act as "buying", because
you have "bought into" the concept so deeply. It becomes reflexive,
unconscious, deep in our psyches. We are brainwashed to buy a lot.   So,
people don't literally buy it, they are brainwashed subtley into it.  It
is socially constructed. We are encultured to do it.

^^^^

  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? 
^^^
CB: I think that was a bit of a myth. Especially the bourgeoisie itself
was not saving. They were investing. On the other hand, savings were had
by banks.  So, that sector of the bourgeoisie had access to all the
saving. But in general, I'd imagine there was a simultaneous message to
buy. Otherwise, who would buy all the stuff that was made. 

^^^^

 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.

^^^^^
CB:  The Soviet ideology was not that the working masses should not
consume.  As compared with the pre-Soviet Russia, one promise of the
revolution was that there would be more goods and services. That was
part of why they industrialized quickly. One slogan of the revolution is
"nothing but the best for the working class". That means a step up from
the life of the peasantry.

So, part of the answer to your question is you seem to have an
inaccurate idea of what the ideology of socialism is.

Socialism in the Soviet Union was to improve distribution away from
skewing the curve with concentration of riches in the rich.  Use the
abundance produced by the technology so highly developed under captalism
to abolish poverty.

^^^^

David Shemano




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