The Affluent Society and Other Writings, 1952-1967 by John Kenneth Galbraith
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
I am definitely a fan of Galbraith…and I don’t say that about many authors. While not a complete collection of his writing, this is definitely a good selection of what he was about as an economist.
What I find fascinating is that The Affluent Society and The New Industrial State come from an American economist (or Canadian if you like) and yet support many of Marx’s conclusions about merchant ideology. The sense that merchant capital extended to producers and consumers alike (producers since the Dutch in the 1600s and then, to consumers after WW2, as state backed consumerism) guarantees the use value that makes production monetarily sound (completing the material dialectic of merchant capital) ex post facto is astounding. That Galbraith extends this idea by recognizing that technology is the key to capitalism, in terms of production and social disruption, something not yet recognized by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, David Ricardo or Marx is will worth the read. If communist minded individuals and Marxists alike read more of Marx and actually kept their minds open instead of being reactionary we might have a deeper understanding of our state backed capitalism.
While Galbriath does not advocate revolution, he definitely insists that we need to change our values if we want to survive in a degrading environment and do more with our lives than make the anonymous bureaucrats wealthy (technocrats of our technostructure as he calls them).
Despite this insistence that humanity use its powers for more than making wealth and endless production and increased poverty and degradation, Galbraith adds with this thought a heavy analysis of the inner workings of state and industry as a unity that transcends the explicated boundaries of American politics. He understands that we are not really free anymore; that our freedom is limited to our consumerist subjectivity. While this analysis does miss some of Marx’s social understandings (that a change in material relations means a change in societal arrangement) Galbraith does add a refreshing view of how economics and infact higher education is complacent in arguing for the status quo. For why should they bite the hand that feeds them?
Furthermore, as we specialize deeper and deeper into fields of study, we lose the ability to connect the more general dots. Our world becomes fragmented across many areas. Specialists cannot see where they are going, much like those economists who eschew math appear less rigorous. People doing specific tasks will more likely see their world through the filter of that task, and be unable to comprehend outside of it. As our complexity in our world rises with each year, it becomes less and less likely that there is anyone driving the wheel. This is how we can see the technostructure, as an faith that promotes itself so that we become less and less able to break from it as time goes on, as our specific interests (employment, leisure, study) becomes less and less able to identify the nature of our cage — as an over arching planning structure. Much like how the planning system in the Soviet state was run by anonymous bureaucrats in a state apparatus, our planning system is run by anonymous technocrats in various corporate chains backed by a state system.
I won’t continue on about how this is reflective in our worldview of modernism — our production of epistemes — but there is a direct link here, between how our knowledge is formed and our value system is driven by philosophical, educational and economic concerns for no other reason than to develop itself further, for us to be more completely mired in its logic and its mindless production of demand desires and status on various corporate and civil chains of our own unthinkable making.
We live on this Earth, and fulfill the needs of the very game we create in order to live together on this Earth without ever really looking up and acknowledging that we have created extreme wealth and extreme suffering with no end in sight… if only so that one can be satisfied at the expense of another, and for what? So we can die together and leave the world a slightly more ugly place?
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