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Wastage in Modern Economy Media and Wastage
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 July 2024
Extract
“Holidays are social life inside out.”
(Cl. Lévi-Strauss)
Some years ago, Vance Packard—neither wholeheartedly a sociologist nor economist, but a voice with a dazzling mastery of all that bears reference to the procedures and jargon of advertising—uttered a cry of alarm, applying himself to the task of taking to pieces a strongly developed socio-economic system: the system of wastage in our opulent societies, with American society topping the bill. In a prefatory image he said: “In a sense the American people are becoming a nation sitting astride a tiger. The Americans have to learn how to consume more and more, or else their magnificent economic machine will turn round on them and devour them.” The idea of consuming more and more involves both the incentive to and the organisation of wastage. The waste-makers, those who organise or create wastage, are as necessary to the American economy as the American economy is to them, thanks to an intimate and indispensable complicity. The super-abundant production of consumer goods calls for the development of a collective ethic of wastage, which, in return, provides for it. But deep down it is preparing its ruin, by the gradual exhaustion of natural resources.
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- Copyright © 1970 Fédération Internationale des Sociétés de Philosophie / International Federation of Philosophical Societies (FISP)
References
1 Marie Lucile de Gallatin, Les ordonnances somptuaires à Genève au XVIe siècle (Geneva, A. Julien Georg, 1938).
2 Edgar Morin, L'esprit du temps. Essai sur la culture de masse (Paris, Grasset, 1962).
3 E. Morin, op. cit.
4 E. Morin, op. cit.
5 E. Morin, op. cit.
6 E. Morin, op. cit.
7 "The pure economy," writes Jules Milhau, "is an economy without wastage, which can be logically constructed, just as a machine can be built without friction." (Essai sur la notion de gaspillage, 1942).
8 There is therefore no absolute surplus. Every "surplus" is defined by society, as is noted by W. Pierson (Trade and Market in Early Empires. Under the direction of K. Polanyi, Glencoe, 1957).
9 The ms. of this article was already complete when we were told of the coming publication in French translation of Veblen's masterpiece (Ed. Gallimard) with a substantial introduction by Raymond Aron, Professor at the Collège de France. We shall refer to this study later on.
10 Of course the origin of wastage is a problem. In a didactic scheme, Veblen envisages it after the satisfaction of the strict level of well-being. But numerous observations by ethnologists, historians, even pre-historians indicate that it is not forbidden to suggest that wastage, from the very beginning, envelops man's strict needs.
11 It is evident that the phenomena of war are included in this line of thought. They have been deliberately left aside, because of the limited nature of this article.
12 The Lonely Crowd.
13 Cl. Lévi-Strauss, La pensée sauvage (Paris, Plon, 1962).
14 It is known that economists concerned with consumption hold back the "demonstration effect"—the imitation of the sumptuary of the upper stratum— and the "Veblen effect": rejection by the upper stratum of goods imitated by lower strata. E.g.: private aircraft as opposed to pleasure cruises becoming mass leisure, etc. We know that the play of this social contradiction strengthens the "dialectic" of clothing fashion which is constantly discarding what it has just created, and is free to reintroduce old themes to achieve its variation. Various "cycles" have been specified by the American anthropologist, A. Kroeber.
15 The wastages of "competition" and mimesis in developing societies will be the object of a special study.
16 In the sense of contemporary economic works.
17 Including pageantry, holidays and lawful games.
18 Set apart, those regimes based on an ideology of austerity—statistically not very frequent in historical chronology (among others one calls to mind Calvinist and Anglican puritanism)—even if a "veiled sumptuary" element implied social distinction—and more exactly, Leninist austerity; but the thing that the creator of the Soviet state erased and blotted out in his lifetime has been restored a hundredfold by his "glorious" death: the monumental tomb, his body embalmed (to become imperishable), the ceremonial pomp of commemoration… Is this what he would have wanted? Nobody can say. It is however through the "sumptuary" element which he banished that his society pays homage to him. Besides this, diplomatic protocol reintroduced the sumptuary rule, and often even through the feminine medium. (Cf. Veblen.)
19 Particularly with regard to production, types of productivity, organisation of work, types of business organisation. See: Novicow, Les gaspillages dans les sociétés modernes (1899), F. Taylor, Scientific Management (1855).
20 Galbraith subtly remarks that A. Smith's whole discussion on the rarity of the diamond is invalid once the synthetic diamond is mass-produced (The Affluent Society). This in no way stops the real diamond from being a super-sumptuary island.
21 Cf. Lévi-Strauss, La Pensée sauvage cit.