by John de Graaf; David Wann; Thomas H Naylor; David Horsey; Vicki Robin
THE SPIRIT OF SAINT MONDAY
But with the Industrial Revolution, factory workers—driven into desolate, Dickensian industrial cities as the land they once farmed was enclosed for sheep raising— were working fourteen, sixteen, even eighteen hours a day. In 1812, one factory owner in Leeds, England, was described as humane and progressive because he wouldn’t hire children under ten years of age and limited children’s working hours to sixteen a day.
But factory workers did not readily comply with the new industrial discipline. Stripped of their old religious holidays, they invented a new one: Saint Monday. Hung over from Sunday nights at the tavern, they slept in late or failed to show up to work at all. Workers were paid on a piece-rate basis, and at first they only worked as long as they needed to subsist. If an employer paid them more as an incentive to work more, he soon found that his strategy backfired. As Max Weber put it, “The opportunity of earning more was less attractive than that of working less.”7
This was obviously a pre-affluenza situation.
Consequently, as Karl Marx repeatedly pointed out, employers sought to pay the lowest wages possible so that workers would have to keep working long hours simply to survive. But while such miserliness was rational behavior for individual employers, it undermined capitalist industry as a whole. Workers’ lack of purchasing power led to overproduction crises that periodically destroyed entire industries.
“In these crises,” Marx and Engels wrote in The Communist Manifesto of 1848, “a great part not only of the existing products but also of the previously created productive forces are periodically destroyed. . . . Society suddenly finds itself put back into a state of momentary barbarism. . . . And how does the bourgeoisie get over these crises? On the one hand, by enforced destruction of a mass of productive forces; on the other, by the conquest of new markets, and by the more thorough exploitation of old ones.”8
MARX ON AFFLUENZA
So just how is this “more thorough exploitation” accomplished? In effect, by exposing one’s potential customers to affluenza, though, of course, Marx never used the term. But in a brilliant passage from The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, worth quoting from at length, he describes the process. “Excess and immoderation” become the economy’s “true standard,” Marx wrote, as
the expansion of production and of needs becomes an ingenious and always calculating subservience to inhuman, depraved, unnatural and imaginary appetites. . . . Every product is a bait by means of which the individual tries to entice the essence of the other person, his money. Every real or potential need is a weakness which will draw the bird into the lime. . . . The entrepreneur accedes to the most depraved fancies of his neighbor, plays the role of pander between him and his needs, awakens unhealthy appetites in him, and watches for every weakness in order, later, to claim the remuneration for this labor of love.9
That passage, written 161 years ago, accurately describes much of modern advertising, which, indeed, stimulates “imaginary appetites,” consistently uses sex to sell products, and certainly, in cases such as the video game promotions described in chapter 7, “Dilated Pupils,” “accedes to the most depraved fancies.”
Ultimately, though, Marx believed that market expansion would always be inadequate and that overproduction crises could be prevented only if the workers themselves gained ownership of the factories and used the machinery for the benefit of all. That didn’t mean an ever-growing pie of material production simply shared more equitably. Marx’s goal was never a materialistic one. Indeed, he stressed that to simply increase the purchasing power of workers “would be nothing more than a better remuneration of slaves and would not restore, either to the worker or to the work, their human significance and worth.”10
WEALTH AS DISPOSABLE TIME
Neither would “an enforced equality of wages,” made law by a socialist government, lead to happiness, which, Marx believed, was to be found instead in our relationships with other people and in the development of our capacities for creative expression. “The wealthy man,” he wrote, “is one who needs a complex of human manifestations of life and whose own self-realization exists as an inner necessity.” He suggested that “too many useful goods create too many useless people.”11
Of course, Marx understood that human beings must have enough wholesome food, decent shelter, and protective clothing. Mass production, he believed, made it possible for everyone to achieve these ends. And to do so each person would have to perform a certain minimum amount of repetitive, noncreative labor. Marx called this time, which he and Engels estimated could be reduced (even in the mid-1800s) to as little as four hours a day, “the realm of necessity.”
The work time necessary to satisfy real material needs could be reduced further by increases in productivity, “but it always remains a realm of necessity. Beyond it begins that development of human power, which is its own end, the true realm of freedom,” when self-chosen activity prevails. Of this realm of freedom, Marx added, “the shortening of the working day is its basic prerequisite.”
“A nation is really rich if the working day is six hours rather than twelve,” Marx wrote, quoting approvingly the anonymous author of a British article written in 1821: “Wealth is liberty—liberty to seek recreation, liberty to enjoy life, liberty to improve the mind: it is disposable time and nothing more.”12
SIMPLY THOREAU
Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, an American movement offered a similar critique of industrialization and the acquisitiveness it engendered. The transcendentalists, as they called themselves, idealized the simple life close to nature, and they started intentional communities (none destined to last very long) such as Brook Farm and Fruitlands, based on their principles.
Better remembered, if similarly short-lived, was Henry David Thoreau’s 1845 sojourn to a one-room cabin he built on the shore of Walden Pond, near Boston. “Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity,” wrote Thoreau in Walden. “Most of the luxuries and many of the so-called comforts of life, are not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind.”13
In Life without Principle, Thoreau was even more damning of the acquisitive industrial personality, already in need of antibodies for affluenza. Like Marx, Thore-au believed that true wealth meant sufficient leisure for self-chosen creative activity, suggesting that half a day’s labor should be enough to procure real material necessities. “If I should sell both my forenoons and my afternoons to society as most appear to do, I am sure that for me there would be nothing left worth living for,” Thoreau wrote.
Let us consider the way in which we spend our lives. The world is a place of business. What an infinite bustle. . . . There is no sabbath. It would be glorious to see mankind at leisure for once. It is nothing but work, work, work. I cannot easily buy a blank book to write thoughts in; they are commonly ruled for dollars and cents. . . . I think there is nothing, not even crime, more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, ay, to life itself than this incessant business.14
“If a man should walk in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer, but if he spends his whole day as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making earth bald before her time, he is esteemed an industrious and enterprising citizen,”15 Thoreau wrote, in words all the more relevant today, when corporate speculators shear off entire forests of old-growth redwoods to pay for junk bonds.
For Marx, Thoreau, and many other oft-quoted, but more often ignored, philosophers of the mid-nineteenth century, industrial development could only be justified because, potentially, it shortened the time spent in drudgery, thereby giving people leisure time for self-chosen activity.
Given a choice between more time and more money, these philosophers chose the former. For precisely a century following Thoreau’s retreat to Walden, that choice, as our next chapter suggests, would engage Americans in a broad and energetic debate. Then, suddenly, it would be resolved—in favor of more money. But it would not be forgott
en.
CHAPTER 17
The road not taken
We want bread, but roses, too
[and time to smell them].
—Female textile workers in Lawrence,
Massachusetts, 1912
After the horrors of the Civil War, a new, quieter conflict, ultimately more powerful in its impact, emerged in the United States. Two roads, as Robert Frost put it in his lovely poem “The Road Not Taken,” presented themselves to Americans, and after a period of indecision that lasted nearly a century, we chose one of them, “and that has made all the difference.”
Nineteenth-century Americans still had more respect for thrift than for spendthrifts, and the word consumption meant something different then. As Jeremy Rifkin explains, “If you go back to Samuel Johnson’s dictionary of the English language, to consume meant to exhaust, to pillage, to lay waste, to destroy. In fact, even in our grandparents’ generation, when somebody had tuberculosis, they called it ‘consumption.’ So up until this century, to be a consumer was not to be a good thing; it was considered a bad thing.”1
Yet the factory system had made possible a tremendous efficiency in the time required to produce products. And herein lay the roots of the new conflict: what to do with all that time? One side suggested that we make more stuff; the other believed we should work less. Luxury or simplicity. Money or time.
THE RIGHT TO BE LAZY
Across the Atlantic, a similar argument was brewing. In 1883, while in a French prison, Paul Lafargue, a son-in-law of Karl Marx, wrote a provocative essay called “The Right to Be Lazy,” challenging the make more, have more ethic. Lafargue mocked industrialists who “go among the happy nations who are loafing in the sun” and “lay down railroads, erect factories and import the curse of work.”2
Lafargue deemed laziness “the mother of arts and noble virtues” and suggested that factories were so productive even then that only three hours a day of labor should be required to meet real needs. Like Marx, he pointed out that Catholic Church law had given workers many feast days honoring the saints when work was forbidden. It was no surprise, he suggested, that industrialists favored Protestantism (with its work ethic), which “dethroned the saints in heaven in order to abolish their feast days on earth.”
At the same time in England, William Morris, a poet, artist, essayist, and the designer of the Morris chair, claimed that under the factory system, “the huge mass of men are compelled by folly and greed to make harmful and useless things.”3 “An immensity of work” wrote Morris, was expended in making “everything in the shop windows which is embarrassing or superfluous.” “I beg of you,” Morris pleaded,
to think of the enormous mass of men who are occupied with this miserable trumpery, from the engineers who have had to make the machines for making them, down to the hapless clerks who sit day-long year after year in the horrible dens wherein the wholesale exchange of them is transacted, and the shopmen, who not daring to call their souls their own, retail them. . . to the idle public which doesn’t want them but buys them to be bored by them and sick to death of them.
“The good life of the future,” said Morris, would be totally unlike the life of the rich of his day. “Free men,” he maintained, “must live simple lives and have simple pleasures.” Morris defined a decent, wealthy life as requiring “a healthy body, an active mind, occupation fit for a healthy body and active mind, and a beautiful world to live in.”
THE SIMPLE LIFE
Back in the United States, new institutions like the department store helped promote a life of conspicuous consumption. “Urban department stores came in during the 1880s,” says historian Susan Strasser, “basically to create the sort of place where people go and lose themselves and meanwhile spend their money.”4 By the 1890s, wealthy Americans proudly displayed the material signs of their success, wearing affluenza on their sleeves, you might say. But not everyone was impressed.
“In the late nineteenth century, there was a major revival of American interest in simple living,” says historian David Shi. “Theodore Roosevelt was one of the foremost proponents of a simpler life for Americans during that period. Roosevelt was quite candid in saying that for all his support for American capitalism, he feared that if it were allowed to develop unleashed it would eventually create a corrupt civilization.”5 Shi provides other examples of this turn-of-the-century interest in simplicity in his wonderful book The Simple Life. Even America’s best-selling magazine, The Ladies’ Home Journal, promoted simplicity during that era.
THE SHORTER HOURS MOVEMENT
Organized labor, too, had not yet then accepted the definition of the good life as a goods life, in which the marker of progress was the making of stuff. Indeed, for more than half a century, the demand for shorter hours topped labor’s agenda. In 1886, hundreds of thousands of workers filled American cities, demanding that an eight-hour workday be made America’s legal standard. That didn’t happen until 1938, when the Wagner Labor Relations Act made the eight-hour day and forty-hour week the law of the land. And by then, labor leaders were fighting for a six-hour workday. It was needed, they argued, as much for spiritual as economic reasons.
“The human values of leisure are even greater than its economic significance,” wrote William Green, president of the American Federation of Labor, in 1926. Green claimed that modern work was “meaningless, repetitive, boring,” and offered “no satisfaction of intellectual needs.” Shorter working hours were necessary “for the higher development of spiritual and intellectual powers,” Green claimed. His vice president, Matthew Woll, charged that modern production ignored “the finer qualities of life. Unfortunately, our industrial life is dominated by the materialistic spirit of production [affluenza?], giving little attention to the development of the human body, the human mind or the spirit of life.”6
Juliet Stuart Poyntz, education director of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, declared that what workers wanted most of all was “time to be human.” “Workers,” she observed, “have declared that their lives are not to be bartered at any price.” “No wage, no matter how high” was more important than the time that workers needed.7
TIME TO KNOW GOD
Behind them, as Benjamin Hunnicutt of the University of Iowa points out in his book Work without End, rallied prominent religious leaders, who worried that workers had no time for reflection and spiritual matters, no “time to know God.” Jewish leaders challenged Saturday work as violating their Sabbath, and led the fight for a five-day work week. Catholic leaders backed Pope Leo XIII’s call (in his encyclical Rerum Novarum, 1891) for a “living wage” or family wage that would guarantee the breadwinner in working families sufficient income for a life of “frugal comfort.” But beyond that, they believed that more time was more important to workers than more money.
During the ’20s, Monsignor John Ryan, editor of the Catholic Charities Review, pointed to St. Augustine’s claim that natural law demanded a “maximum” standard of living as well as a minimum one. “The true and rational doctrine,” Ryan wrote, “is that when men have produced sufficient necessaries and reasonable comforts, they should spend what time is left in the cultivation of their intellects and wills, in the pursuit of the higher life.” They should, he said, “ask what is life for?”8 Jewish scholar Felix Cohen pointed out that in the biblical tradition, work was a curse visited upon Adam for his sin in Eden, and suggested that with the abolishment of wasteful and unnecessary production, it would soon be possible to reduce the workweek to ten hours!9
THE GOSPEL OF CONSUMPTION
But industrial leaders in the 1920s had their own religion, the gospel of consumption. A reduction in working hours, they believed, might bring the whole capitalist system to its knees. Increased leisure, Harvard economist Thomas Nixon Carver warned, was bad for business:
There is no reason for believing that more leisure would ever increase the desire for goods. It is quite possible that the leisure would be spent in the cultivation of the arts and gra
ces of life; in visiting museums, libraries and art galleries, or hikes, games and inexpensive amusements ...it would decrease the desire for material goods. If it should result in more gardening, more work around the home in making or repairing furniture, painting and repairing the house and other useful avocations, it would cut down the demand for the products of our wage paying industries.10
It would, you might say, reduce affluenza. He had a problem with that.
After the Model T began rolling from Henry Ford’s assembly lines in 1913, a cornucopia of material products followed. Businesses sought ways to sell them—and the economic gospel of consumption—giving rise to an advertising industry that looked—and still looks—to psychology for help in pushing products.
“Sell them their dreams,” a promoter told Philadelphia businessmen in 1923. “Sell them what they longed for and hoped for and almost despaired of having. Sell them hats by splashing sunlight across them. Sell them dreams—dreams of country clubs and proms and visions of what might happen if only. After all, people don’t buy things to have things. They buy hope—hope of what your merchandise will do for them. Sell them this hope and you won’t have to worry about selling them goods.”11
People’s wants, the captains of American industry declared, were insatiable, and business opportunities therefore boundless. During the ’20s, their gospel of wealth had plenty of believers. The world’s first mass-consumption society came in dancing the Charleston. Cash registers were ka-chinging, and the stock market soared— higher, higher, higher—as it did in the 1990s. There were those who thought it would never go down.