Economic “growth” is a euphemism
for the desired outcome of government and corporate policies to countermand
chronic overproduction intrinsic to capitalism with engineered “overconsumption,”
largely through artificial obsolescence of commodities, the arms race, which is driven
by yet another strand of artificial obsolescence, and so-called “demand management.”
The third strategic pillar in the overconsumption drive is the collaboration
and/or compliance of intellectual labour required for designing and carrying
out the overconsumption policies – the proverbial “professional-managerial class”
or PMC. Amnesia, narcissism, alienation, or dementia are metaphors for the consciousness
determined by the artificial obsolescence mode of overconsumption.
In Social Amnesia (1975),
Russell Jacoby argued that purported innovations in psychoanalysis were not
necessarily improvements. He borrowed the insight from Herbert Marcuse that the
much heralded “obsolescence” of Freud’s thought was akin to the planned
obsolescence of consumer durable goods:
The evident acceleration of
production and consumption in the economic sphere, and hysteria and frenzy in
life itself, does not preclude that a fixed society is simply spinning faster.
If this is true, the application of planned obsolescence to thought itself has
the same merit as its application to consumer goods; the new is not only
shoddier than the old, it fuels an obsolete social system that staves off its
replacement by manufacturing the illusion that it is perpetually new.
Christopher Lasch wrote an
introduction to Jacoby’s book. Four years later his The Culture of
Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations was
published. U.S. President James Carter’s 1979 “Crisis of Confidence” speech was
inspired, in part by Lasch’s book, although Carter missed its point. Social
Amnesia and The Culture of Narcissism shared their extension of diagnostic
terms for individual “disorders” to a collective. Both authors also referenced
planned obsolescence. It is a recurring subtext in Jacoby’s book. In Lasch’s,
it appears in one section that addresses aging and contemporary society’s
“instrumental view of knowledge, according to which technological change
constantly renders knowledge [and wisdom] obsolete and therefore
nontransferable.”
The term “planned obsolescence” was
popularized in the 1950s by industrial designer, Clifford Brooks Stevens, who
designed the Oscar Meyer Wienermobile:
Our whole economy is based on
planned obsolescence, and everybody who can read without moving his lips should
know it by now. We make good products, we induce people to buy them, and then
next year we deliberately introduce something that will make those products old
fashioned, out of date, obsolete.
The idea of making obsolescence the
cure for chronic overproduction and the cornerstone of a new consumption-led
prosperity was first fully articulated in investment banker Paul Mazur's American
Prosperity: Its Causes and Consequences (1928). The word “obsolescence”
appears 41 times in the book and “obsolete” another ten times. “Obsolescence is
a great force in the recreation of consumer markets,” observed Mazur, “and as
such will be an essential factor in the economic future.” Mazur’s friend,
advertising executive, J. George Frederick, adopted Mazur’s argument and prefixed
the uplifting adjective “progressive” to it in his article, "Is Progressive Obsolescence the Path Toward Increased Consumption," published
eight months after American Prosperity. Vance Packard’s The Waste
Makers (1960) decried planned obsolescence. Influenced by Packard’s book, Herbert
Marcuse cited planned obsolescence frequently as one of the mainstays of 20th
century capitalism.
In his 1971 Deutscher
Memorial Prize Lecture, Alienation and Social Control, István Mészáros referred to the concept as artificial
obsolescence, and that seems to me a more apt descriptor. Mészáros was awarded the prize for his 1970 book Marx’s
Theory of Alienation. Alienation is another recurring theme in both Social
Amnesia and The Culture of Narcissism, especially the former. But
Mészáros’s – and Marx’s – examination probes beyond the psychological symptoms
of alienation to its ground in the objectification of the labour process
in which the workers’ surplus labour time is appropriated by and enlarges the
capital that exercises power over them. Alienation, in this analysis, refers
not merely to a psychological symptom but to a real social relationship in
which the product of the labourers’ own actions are transformed into an alien
power that stands over and against them as capital.
In a sense, Lasch’s narcissism
and Jacoby’s amnesia are synonyms for Marx’s and Mészáros’s alienation
– albeit with subtle distinctions. In a passage, relating alienation to
consumerism, Lasch wrote, “the propaganda of consumption turns alienation
itself into a commodity. It addresses itself to the spiritual desolation
of modern life and proposes consumption as the cure.” Jacoby decried equally
the “reduction of the Marxist theory of alienation to a subjective condition by
liberal sociologists” and the counter-culture conceit of Theodore Roszak that
"[t]he revolution which will free us from alienation must be primarily
therapeutic in character."
Why artificial dementia?
Admittedly dementia, as a metaphor, can be viewed as yet another nuanced
synonym for alienation. But there are two main reasons for choosing dementia.
First, it refers to a degenerative condition, unlike the arrested development of
narcissism and the possibly reversable condition of amnesia. Second, a recent
“personal view” in The Lancet Healthy Longevity focused on the
relationship between clinical dementia and temporal inequity: “The
unequal distribution and control of time across individuals and groups, shaped
by structural and social conditions, constraining opportunities for
brain-health promoting activities.”
In his 1971 lecture, mentioned
above, Mészáros spoke briefly about the function of “artificial obsolescence”
(and other artificialities) as “an antidote to too much ‘disposable time’ – to
spreading knowledge and to increasing social consciousness…” In subsequent
articles and books, over the course of five decades, Mészáros wrote extensively
and passionately about the key role disposable time would have to play
in any transition away from capital’s increasingly destructive and wasteful
drive for solely profit-oriented “minimal time allowed in production.” “The
only conceivable way out of such contradictions from the standpoint of labour,”
he wrote in a 1988 article, “– namely, the general adoption and creative
utilization of disposable time as the orienting principle of societal
reproduction – is of course anathema to capital.” That is to say, a more just
and equal “distribution and control of time across individuals and groups”
advocated by The Lancet article’s authors would be anathema to
capital.
It is one thing to write the above
conclusion. It is another to demonstrate the analysis behind it. I have
reviewed István Mészáros writings on disposable time, some of which are clearer
than others. In my view, his best discussion occurs in a 1995 article, “The
Communitarian System and the Law of Value in Marx and Lukács” that is also
compiled in the book published the same year, Beyond Capital: Toward a
Theory of Transition (1995). The article is structured around a critique of
György Lukács’s 1968 book, The Process of
Democratization (originally published as Demokratisierung Heute und
Morgen). Lukács had been Mészáros’s mentor before 1956 when the latter left
Hungary after the suppressed uprising.
In The Process of
Democratization, Lukács criticized Stalin’s claims that the law of value, “is
a historical category and thus related to the existence of commodity
production. If the production of commodities ceases to exist, value in its
manifestations and the law of value likewise disappears.” Lukács countered that
position with a quote from Marx “that the share of each individual producer in
the means of subsistence is determined by his labour-time.” The rebuttal to Lukács
from Mészáros was not in any respect a defense of Stalin’s argument. He pointed
out that Marx had qualified the statement as assuming “merely for the sake
of a parallel with the production of commodities.” Mészáros relied on key
passages from the Grundrisse to argue that the law of value based on the
appropriation of labour time would be superseded in a post-capitalist economy
of time by the maximization of disposable time. There would still be an
“economy of time” but it would be an economy of qualitatively different times. An appendix to this post contains the passage where Mészáros makes his remarkable disposable
time analysis, which draws on notebook VII of the Grundrisse. In other
writings, he cites passages about disposable time from notebook IV. What is
remarkable about Mészáros’s faithful reading of those notebooks is that it
hasn’t become the standard interpretation of Marx since publication and
translations of the Grundrisse.
The use of a diagnostic term like
dementia as a metaphor carries with it the risk of amplifying the stigma
associated with the condition. This is another reason I chose artificial
as the modifier, rather than, say, social. Social dementia has a few
prior usages. Ruth Sanz Sabido used the term in Memories of the Spanish
Civil War: Conflict and Community in Rural Spain: “...this book suggests
the term 'social dementia,' a concept that highlights the negative and
'degenerative' consequences that the loss of social memory may inflict on a
particular group or community.” Sabido points out the difference of choice or
the lack of it “between forgetfulness in dementia sufferers, on the one hand,
and socio-politico-legal oblivion, on the other… a person does not choose to
suffer dementia, and has no control over the effects and reach of the
disease.”:
The matter becomes more convoluted
when we consider political and legal oblivion, which is a choice for those who
impose it, and is welcomed by those who agree with, or benefit from, the
erasure of the past. For those who do not support this form of suppression, but
are forced to forget their own history, there is no question of choice.
Svjetlana Nedimović has spoken, in
an interview, of the “engineering of social dementia” and elsewhere has written
about “the engineering of political dementia.” She also worried about the
potential misuse of clinical terms as sociological metaphors:
One cannot be too cautious when employing
medical terms in relation to the phenomena of social life. I do not, however,
suggest turning this metaphor into a diagnosis or concept. It is meant to help
visualise the effects upon society of barring ways into its past and denying
its experience. The metaphor conveniently, even if provocatively, links
technical and medical jargon, which indicates the intentional crafting of
desired outcomes, which then turn out to have semi-desired implications.
The notion of “semi-desired
implications” is suggestive. It is a way for officials to disown responsibility
for “unintended consequences” or “collateral damage” even in the event of those
consequences being readily foreseeable. The loss of social memory is the loss
of historical time. “Disposable time is the individuals’ actual historical
time,” Mészáros wrote in 2007, “by usurping the role of real wealth and
subverting the potential use to which it could be put, capital is the enemy of
historical time.”
Of course, artificial dementia
resonates with that other currently fashionable artificiality, known as
“intelligence.” To the extent that source data for large language models is contaminated
with politically-motivated erasure and falsehoods, the output will tend more
toward dementia than intelligence, making literal Nedimović’s metaphor of engineering
social or political dementia. To paraphrase Juvenal, “who will guard the data?”
But the motivation for the immense investments in AI is an even bigger revelation.
It is the planned obsolescence of the intellectual labour of planned
obsolescence. Where 19th century capitalism sought to minimize the
necessary labour time of productive labour, AI investment strives to minimize
the necessary labour time of control labour. There’s no question this
would be profitable for a single capital to do. But each capital views the
workers of all other capitals as consumers of its products:
To each capitalist, the total mass
of all workers [including PMC intellectual workers], with the exception of his own
workers, appear not as workers, but as consumers, possessors of exchange values
(wages), money, which they exchange for his commodity.
