reshuffles its output and income but remains unaffected by the prevailing relations of production and impervious to the dominant interests, they fall prey to a naive rationalism which, by nurturing illusions, merely contributes to the maintenance of the status quo.8 Compared with this, the “contracting out” dictum—“we have … reached the frontier between economic and political theory; and we shall not cross it”—with which Professor Scitovsky a decade ago concluded his magnum opus,9 formulates a relatively tenable position.
For the crux of the problem is not even approached by the liberal critic. In the first place, he of all people, being a good Keynesian, cannot avoid inconsistency when he recommends the interference with or curtailment of corporate advertising and other sales activities. In this regard The Wall Street Journal and the “realistic” economists who share its views are surely on firmer ground. For all these “undesirable” business practices do in fact promote and increase sales, and do actually directly and indirectly help in propping up the level of income and employment.10 So also does the sale of ever more motor cars, even if they do strangle our cities and poison our atmosphere; and the production of armaments and the digging of shelters. None of these activities can be regarded as promoting the progress and happiness of the human race, although all of them constitute remedies against sagging production and increasing unemployment.11 And yet such is the dialectic of the historical process that within the framework of monopoly capitalism the most abominable, the most destructive features of the capitalist order become the very foundations of its continuing existence—just as slavery was the conditio sine qua non of its emergence.
The “realistic” conservative scores also over the liberal “do-gooder” in his general comprehension of the problem of consumer sovereignty. For in warning against exaggerating the impact of advertising, high-pressure salesmanship, and the like, on the preferences and choices of consumers, they occupy a position of formidable strength. Their statements that consumers like only what they care for and buy only what they wish to spend money on are obviously tautologies, but, being tautologies, they are equally obviously correct. From this, to be sure, it does not follow, as some business economists like to assert, that the barrage of advertising and salesmanship to which the consumer is continually exposed has no influence on the formation of his wants. But neither is it true that these business practices constitute the decisive factor in making the consumer want what he wants. Professor Henry C. Wallich comes closest to the spot where the dog is buried in his shrewd observation that “to argue that wants created by advertising are synthetic, are not genuine consumer wants is beside the point—it could be argued of all aspects of civilized existence.”12 This, to be sure, is overstating the case. Human wants are not all wholly “synthetic,” created by an almighty Madison Avenue (or “purified” and “ennobled” by a Madison Avenue “in reverse”: government regulatory boards and/or Distinguished Citizens Committees for the Promotion of Good Taste) : that view reflects the spirit of limitless manipulability of man which is so characteristic of the “men in gray flannel suits” who dominate the executive offices of corporations and the important bureaus of the government. But neither do all wants stem from man’s biotic urges or from a mythical eternally unchanging “human nature”: that concept is metaphysical obscurantism which flies in the face of all historical knowledge and experience. The truth is that wants of people are complex historical phenomena reflecting the dialectic interaction of their physiological requirements on the one hand, and the prevailing social and economic order on the other.13 The physiological requirements sometimes must be abstracted from for analytical purposes because they are relatively constant. And once this abstraction is explicitly made and firmly borne in mind, the make-up of human wants can (and must) be legitimately thought of as being “synthetic,” i.e., determined by the nature of the economic and social order under which people live. What Professor Wallich apparently fails to see is that the issue is not whether the prevailing social and economic order plays a prominent part in molding people’s “values,” volitions, and preferences. On this—Robinson Crusoe having finally departed from economics textbooks to his proper insular habitat—there is a nearly unanimous consensus among serious students of the problem. The issue is rather the kind of social and economic order that does the molding, the kind of “values,” volitions, and preferences which it instills into the people under its sway. What renders the social and economic order of monopoly capitalism so irrational and destructive, so crippling to the individual’s growth and happiness, is not that it influences, shapes, “synthesizes” the individual—as Professor Wallich suggests, every social and economic order does this—but rather the kind of influencing, shaping, and “synthesizing” which it perpetrates on its victims.
A clear understanding of this permits a further insight. The cancerous malaise of monopoly capitalism is not that it “happens” to squander a large part of its resources on the production of means of destruction, that it “happens” to allow corporations to engage in liminal and subliminal advertising, in peddling adulterated products, and in inundating human life with moronizing entertainment, commercialized religion, and debased “culture.” The cancerous malaise of the system which renders it a formidable obstacle to human advancement, is that all this is not an assortment of fortuitously appearing attributes of the capitalist order, but the very basis of its existence and viability. And such being the case, bigger and better Food and Drug Administrations, a comprehensive network of Distinguished Citizens Committees, and the like can merely spread a veil over the existing mess rather than clean up the mess itself. To use an earlier comparison once more: building sumptuous cemeteries and expensive monuments for the victims of war does not reduce their number. The best—and the worst—that such seemingly humanitarian efforts can accomplish is to dull people’s sensitivity to brutality and cruelty, to reduce their horror of war.
But to return to the starting point of this argument. Neither I nor any other Marxist writers with whose works I am familiar, have ever advocated the abolition of consumer sovereignty and its replacement by the orders of a commissar. The attribution of such an advocacy to socialists is simply one aspect of the ignorance and misrepresentation of Marxian thought that are studiously cultivated by the powers that be. The real problem is an entirely different one, namely, whether an economic and social order should be tolerated in which the individual, from the very cradle on, is so shaped, molded, and “adjusted” as to become an easy prey of profit-greedy capitalist enterprise and a smoothly functioning object of capitalist exploitation and degradation. The Marxian socialist is in no doubt about the answer. Holding that mankind has now reached a level of productivity and knowledge which make it possible to transcend this system and replace it by a better one, he believes that a society can be developed in which the individual would be formed, influenced, and educated not by a profit- and market-determined economy, not by the “values” of corporate presidents and the outpourings of their hired scribes, but by a system of rationally planned production for use, by a universe of human relations determined by and oriented toward solidarity, cooperation, and freedom. Indeed, only in such a society can there be sovereignty of the individual human being—not of the “consumer” or the “producer,” terms which in themselves reflect the lethal fragmentation of the human personality under capitalism. Only in such a society can the individual freely co-determine the amount of work done, the composition of output consumed, the nature of leisure activities engaged in—free from all the open and hidden persuaders whose motives are preservation of their privileges and maximization of their profits.
And to those of my critics who skeptically or “realistically” sneer and condescendingly remark that the image of such a society is nothing but a utopia, all I can answer is that if they are right, all of us—my critics and myself—are utopians. They because they believe that a social and economic order which they wish to preserve can be made to last forever by means of manipulative tricks and superficial reforms that fail even to touch its increasingly manifest irrationality, destructiveness, and inhumanity; I because I trust that mankind, which has already managed to sweep capitalism off the face of one third of the globe, will in the fullness of time complete this Herculean task and succeed in establishing a genuinely human society. Having to choose between these two utopias, I prefer the second, subscribing to the beautiful words of Simone de Beauvoir: “Socialist Europe, there are moments when I ask myself