Hyperconsumers
| 11:45 UK time, Monday, 1 May 2006
One of our guests this morning, Prof Sharon Beder, marking the traditional workers' holiday May 1st, said the work ethic was going to eat itself.
People are not getting the better lives they were promised in return for working ever harder.
Instead, they are realising they have been pressured by marketing and education systems into becoming hyperconsumers.
So they'll stop working.
There's a lot to argue about with this, and I hope you will.
The theory I rather like is the one which says work is itself a consumer product.
We identify ourselves and our self-worth with reference to our jobs.
Instead of working only to get enough to live on, we do really live to work.
That's why job titles matter.
And we don't compete for money for lifestyles - the lifestyles follow the money, because once you've increased your salary beyond what even the most profligate could spend on a day's food, shelter and entertainment, you have to find things to buy, to show you can.
So you end up with designer T-shirts at $2000.
Well it's a theory.
Comments
Sharon Beder is an idiot and Dan Damon's skeptical tone in the interview acknowledged as much.
The Puritan believed that in a world of sin work offers protection against temptation: the idle man's brain is the devil's workshop: his pleasures were sober: maximum work, minimum pleasure. Nathaniel Hawthorne, who understood the New England Puritan tradition well, probed its dilemmas, fears, and contradictions. At the other extreme, the hedonist believes that life ought to be a matter of happiness: minimum work, maximum pleasure. But even he has to put in some hours of work to sustain his lifestyle. I agree with Prof. Beder that in the last several decades, advertising has indeed been creating a need for goods and brands we could easily do without but which, starting as children, we are led to believe are indispensable. Then too without the religious sanctions so real to the Puritan, work--and the goods it can buy--becomes a secular discipline. In Victorian times work had already come to be seen as worship. The communes of the 1960s showed that some of the young, tiring of the cycle of work and possessions, opted out of it but they did not provide a lasting solution, for many tired of the communes in due course.
Comment I:
Who is Prof. Sharon Beder and why is she quoted on this subject ?
If people are being lead astray by 'education systems' maybe she is part of the problem.
With the exception of the most affluent, those that are able to become hyper consumers and purchase those $2,000 designer T-shirts, most people work because of the necessity to survive. If you looked at the household budgets of most working class families, I would imagine that housing, healthcare and food account for the bulk of their monthly expenses, with an occasional indulgent reward thrown in as a bonus. It’s doubtful that many people will just stop working when they’re faced with the consequence of not making their mortgage payment.
Only those at the top strata of society would be able to drop out of the current economic system because only they could afford the luxury of not working and still have their basic needs met.
I started to type a reply, but its late and I wasn't making sense. So instead I thought Id quote the wonderful Erich Fromm, who had this to say about work,
"In Medieval and Renaissance times, especially the 13th and 14th centuries, craftsmanship reached one of the peaks in the evolution of creative work. In such craftsmanship the process of creating the product being made is the center of interest. The worker controls his own working action and can use and develop his skills and capacities. "The craftsman's way of livelihood determines and infuses his entire mode of living."
After the industrial revolution began, "work, instead of being an activity satisfying in itself and pleasurable, became a duty and obsession. The more it was possible to gain riches by worka, the more it became a pure means to the aim of wealth and success." For most ordinary people, work became "nothing but forced labor."
Eric From was on the way to right but times have moved on even further, at least here in the US. Increasing automation has broken up jobs to the point that most are designed so that anyone can perform adequately after minimal training so is easily replaceable--insuring that they can't become so valuable that the employer has to pay them a living wage.
Another factor affecting this area is that because of the hyper consumerism, there is so much stuff around that a person can have most of the minor luxuries for little or nothing. Cars are frequently available for the taking, the cost of repairing them higher than simply buying another on the drip. Home entertainment, cell phones, clothes, furniture, etc., are all easily found for pennies on the dollar. Anyone with the energy can live by gathering this stuff and flogging it on EBay or other used markets.
It seems that the Job for life is long past as is any degree of craftsmanship or any consumers perceived desire for it!
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