every year.14
The increasing concentration of companies in most sectors of the economy increases the need for advertising. According to Robert McChesney, “Modern persuasion advertising blossomed as a function of less competitive markets where a handful of firms dominate output or sales. Advertising emerges front and center as a major way to increase or protect market share without engaging in destructive profit-damaging price competition.”15 The more similar the product, the more firms must spend on advertising to shape their brand image to emphasize differences, which are based on what the packaging looks like, which demographic it will appeal to, and the feelings and emotions it will generate in the consumer’s life. Of course, the more advertising there is, the more corporations have to advertise to make a potential consumer pay attention to their product.
The Internet has created a new phenomenon: it is now possible for telecommunications companies who provide access and other services to gather personal information from their subscribers and sell it to advertisers. The data they collect provides unique portraits of users’ online habits. The person’s taste, perceived needs, and desires are manipulated to sell more products, faster and more effectively. This amounts to the commodification of a person’s identity.
But where do the people who can afford it put all the stuff they buy? Living in larger houses with three-car garages helps, but it is the storage industry that has really benefitted from overconsumption. The Wall Street Journal describes one such company, Public Storage, as “the self-storage giant that on the surface appears boring but in reality has created a fantastic business housing all of the junk that Americans refuse to part with.”16
Just as Lebow suggested, people are encouraged to value relationships with things over their interactions with other people. Those things, the commodities that workers produce, dominate people’s reality. Navigating this reality becomes the purpose of life. The more things workers produce, the more ensnared and subservient they become to commodities. Marx characterized the phenomenon as “commodity fetishism,” finding an analogy in “the mist-enveloped regions of the religious world. In that world the productions of the human brain appear as independent beings endowed with life, and entering into relation both with one another and the human race. So it is in the world of commodities with the products of men’s hands.”17
The deepest issue is not that humans have an obsession with buying commodities, or even that we worship them. It is that we view commodities as if they are living and independent entities that form relationships with each other and with people.
Full Employment Is a Fantasy
“There is no provision that all those able and willing to work will always have a job,” observed Albert Einstein. “An ‘army of unemployed’ almost always exists. The worker is constantly in fear of losing his job.”18 Full employment rarely occurs in capitalist economies. After all, labor is just another commodity. When it’s in short supply, workers are able to demand better wages and working conditions, and that’s not good for business. The system functions best when there is a pool of workers who are normally excluded from full participation in the system—women, immigrants, and people of color—a reserve army of labor that can be called in when companies need more workers. Having a group of potential workers that can be mobilized if needed keeps a downward pressure on wages of the employed. Effective labor organizing is also undermined by the existence of a group of people always available to fill slots of employed workers.19
Workers and unions generally support economic growth because of the promise of the availability of jobs. A continuous supply of new jobs is needed to absorb labor displaced by automation (including robots and the algorithms that operate computers and robots), downsizing, and offshoring. The Great Recession officially ended in 2009, but since then layoffs and discharges from private-sector jobs in the United States have amounted to around 20 million workers per year.20 While most workers quickly find new jobs when the economy is healthy, a slowdown in growth makes it harder to replace those jobs that are lost through the normal functioning of the economic system.
Theoretically, a national government could function as the employer of last resort, providing jobs to those unable to find work.21 But this would go against the interests of capital in having easy-to-hire workers when needed. And it would mean raising taxes to pay for these government jobs, which is also against the interests of corporations as well as the “1 percent” of individual capitalists and other wealthy persons.
Growth of Monopoly Power
The trend within capitalism toward the centralization and concentration of capital into larger and larger units has reached a point where a few giant transnational corporations dominate most sectors of the economy. A handful of corporations—Monsanto, Dow-DuPont, Syngenta, BASF, and Bayer (which is trying to purchase Monsanto for $66 billion)—control over 75 percent of the global commercial seed markets.22 In 2007, in approximately 40 percent of industries, the four largest companies sold more than half of the goods. The four largest supermarket companies in the United States went from garnering 18 percent of sales in 1992 to 32 percent in 2007. This goes on for industry after industry and sector after sector. By 2014 the revenue of the 200 largest nonfinancial corporations in the United States was over one-third of the total revenue of all such corporations.23
In a 2015 article for the New York Review of Books titled “Challenging the Oligarchy,” economist Paul Krugman wrote:
It’s obvious to the naked eye that our economy consists much more of monopolies and oligopolists than it does of the atomistic, price-taking competitors economists often envision…. There’s also statistical evidence for a rising role of monopoly power. Recent work by Jason Furman, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, and Peter Orszag, former head of the Office of Management and Budget, shows a rising number of firms earning “super-normal” returns—that is, they have persistently high profit rates that don’t seem to be diminished by competition.24
Monopolies and oligopolies don’t compete by cutting prices; they compete primarily through advertising, continually bringing out new versions of a product, and other aspects of the sales effort. Less competition means profits above those normally expected, derived from dominating the particular market. “Today’s markets are characterized by the persistence of high monopoly profits,” says Joseph Stiglitz, former chief economist for the World Bank.25 “The real key to capitalist success,” says Stiglitz, “is to make sure there won’t ever be competition—or at least there won’t be competition for a long enough time that one can make a monopoly killing in the meanwhile.”26
Democracy Not Essential
The United States is a plutocracy; the wealthy elite—or ruling class—controls the government and its regulatory system. “Of the 1%, by the 1%, for the 1%,” is the way Stiglitz puts it.27 Capitalism does not require democracy in order to exist. It has functioned quite happily under dictatorships around the globe: under Franco in Spain, under Pinochet in Chile, and under the military juntas of Brazil and Argentina. Capitalism has thrived in contemporary Saudi Arabia, China, and so on. What capitalism requires is a state that sets rules, facilitates business success, and acts to protect and expand national business interests when domestic corporations operate in foreign countries.
In 2014, political scientists Martin Gilens of Princeton and Benjamin Page of Northwestern University conducted a study confirming that the economic elite, composed of superrich individuals and organizations representing business interests, “have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence. The results provide substantial support for theories of Economic Elite Domination and for theories of Biased Pluralism, but not for theories of Majoritarian Electoral Democracy or Majoritarian Pluralism.”28
In other words, the United States is governed by a plutocracy instead of the democracy that many still believe exists. With Donald Trump as President and Congress and the majority of state governments under Republican Party control, the elite—especially the fossil fuel and financial industries—are