Date: Tue, 29 Jul 1997 10:23:31 -0800 From: djones-AT-uclink.berkeley.edu (rakesh bhandari) Subject: M-TH: Baudrillard When I went shopping, I picked up Patrick Murray's ed. Reflections on Commercial Life: An Anthology of Classic Texts from Plato to the Present. The present ends with Baudrillard: "Baudrillard rejects the 'humanist' and utopian assumptions supporting Galbraith's conception that needs can be sorted into true and false (artificial), and he thinks Galbraith naive to want to wish away the 'logic of social differentiation' that makes consumption a ceaseless contest for rank. For a more compelling theory, Baudrillard turns to Marx and argues that consumer society represents a new stage of capital's domination. The sale of consumer goods is a necessary moment in the circulation of industrial capital; conversely, consumer goods in a capitalist society are offered for purchase only with a view to furthering the actual, if unspoken, goal of that society, namely, the boundless accumulation of capital. 'Individual' consumption, then belongs to a social activity that is constrained by that activity's goal...Baudrillard's point could be put this way: whereas industrialization involved real subsumption of production under capitalism, 'consumer society' amounts to a real subsumption of consumption under capital."p.448 By the way, yesterday's WSJ reports that along with govt and corporate debt, consumer debt in the US is now almost under control, down from 8% growth per yer to 6%. Perhaps Baudrillard can illuminate why consumers still continue to incur debt, no matter the interest rate charged--that is, why credit demand seems to remain inelastic, as they say. At the same time, there has been no little worry about the deleterious effects of America's "consumptionist binge" on savings and investment--specifically of the role of consumer credit in the stimulation of full capacity utilization at the expense of savings and long-term investment. rb --- from list marxism-thaxis-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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