File spoon-archives/marxism-thaxis.archive/marxism-thaxis_1997/marxism-thaxis.9707, message 75


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




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