blindpig
01-16-2010, 06:08 AM
Advertising Is a “Serious Health Threat”—to the Environment
Michael Löwy
[div class="excerpt"]
Climate change has brought the global environmental crisis to its crux. The primary point that must be noted is that the pace of climate change is accelerating much more rapidly than had been forecast. Accumulation of carbon dioxide, rising temperatures, melting of the polar ice caps and of the “eternal snows,” droughts, floods: all are speeding up and previous scientific analyses, the ink scarcely dry, turn out to have been too optimistic. More and more, in projections for the next one, two, or three decades, the highest estimates are becoming accepted minima. And to that must be added the all-too-little-studied amplifying factors that today pose the risk of a qualitative leap in the greenhouse effect leading to runaway global warming.
There are still some 400 billion tons of carbon dioxide confined in the permafrost, that frozen tundra that extends through Canada and Siberia. But how can the glaciers melt without the permafrost melting too? There are few depictions of the worst-case scenario, in which global temperatures rise by 5-6°C: scientists steer clear of painting catastrophic pictures. But we already know what looms: rising sea levels flooding, not only Dacca and other Asian coastal cities, but also London, Amsterdam, Venice, New York; desertification on an enormous scale; shortages of drinking water; repeated natural catastrophes. The list goes on. At a temperature 6°C higher, it becomes questionable whether the planet will still be habitable for our species. We have, alas, no other planet to move to.
Who is responsible for this situation, unheard of in human history? Scientists answer—humans. A true answer, but a bit incomplete. Humans have lived on earth for many millennia, but atmospheric carbon dioxide levels became dangerous only a few decades ago. In reality, the fault lies with the capitalist system—its absurd and irrational logic of unlimited expansion and capital accumulation; its obsessive drive to increase material production in pursuit of profits.
The narrow-minded rationality of the capitalist market, with its short-term calculus of profit and loss, is intrinsically contradictory to the rationality of the living environment, which operates in terms of long, natural cycles. It is not that “bad” ecocidal capitalists stand in the way of “good” green capitalists. It is the system itself, based on pitiless competition, demand for return on investment, and the search for quick profits that is the destroyer of ecological equilibrium.
In contradistinction to the fetishism of commodity production and the automatically self-adjusting economy propounded by neoliberal economics, what is at stake is the emergence of a “moral economics”—economic policies based on non-monetary and extra-economic criteria, as suggested by E.P. Thompson: in other words, the reintegration of economics into its environmental, social, and political integument. Partial reforms are totally insufficient. What is needed is to replace the micro-rationality of the profitability criterion with an environmental and social macro-rationality, which means that civilization will have to operate according to a different paradigm. This is impossible without a thoroughgoing transformation of technology aimed at replacement of current energy sources by non-polluting and renewable sources such as direct-solar and wind energy. The first question demanding an answer is, therefore, that of control over the means of production and, above all, over decisions on investment and choice of technologies, which must be seized from banks and other corporations, and made a function of the common good.
Of course, radical change involves consumption as well as production. Nevertheless, the problem of industrial capitalist civilization is not—as is often claimed by some environmentalists—“excessive consumption” by the masses, and the solution is not a general “limitation” of consumption, not even in the advanced capitalist countries. The problem is the prevailing type of consumption based on “false needs”: display, waste, fetishism of commodities. What is needed is production aimed at the satisfaction of genuine needs, beginning with those that might be called “biblical”: food, water, shelter, garments.
How can these real needs be distinguished from their artificial and meretricious counterparts? By the fact that the latter are produced by the system of mental manipulation called “advertising.” Contrary to the claim of free-market ideology, supply is not a response to demand. Capitalist firms usually create the demand for their products by various marketing techniques, advertising tricks, and planned obsolescence. Advertising plays an essential role in the production of consumerist demand by inventing false “needs” and by stimulating the formation of compulsive consumption habits, totally violating the conditions for maintenance of planetary ecological equilibrium. The criterion by which an authentic need is to be distinguished from an artificial one is whether it can be expected to persist without the benefit of advertising. How long would the consumption of Coca-Cola or Pepsi-Cola go on, if the persistent advertising campaigns for those products were terminated? Such examples could be indefinitely multiplied.
“Of course,” pessimists will reply, “but individuals are motivated by an infinity of desires and aspirations, and it is they that will have to be controlled and repressed.” Well, the hope for a paradigmatic change in civilization is indeed based on a wager, as propounded by Karl Marx, that, in a society freed from capitalism, “being” will be valued over “having”: that personal fulfillment will be achieved through cultural, athletic, erotic, political, artistic, and playful activities, rather than through the unlimited accumulation of property and of products. The sort of accumulation induced by the fetishistic consumption inherent in the capitalist system, by the dominant ideology, and by advertising—and having nothing to do with some “eternal human nature.”
As capitalism, especially in its current neoliberal and globalized form, seeks to commodify the world, to transform everything existing—earth, water, air, living creatures, the human body, human relationships, love, religion—into commodities, so advertising aims to sell those commodities by forcing living individuals to serve the commercial necessities of capital. Both capitalism as a whole and advertising as a key mechanism of its rule involve fetishization of consumption, the reduction of all values to cash, the unlimited accumulation of goods and of capital, and the mercantile culture of the “consumer society.” The sorts of rationality involved in the advertising system and the capitalist system are intimately linked, and both are intrinsically perverse.
http://www.monthlyreview.org/100101lowy.php[/quote]
more at link
Michael Löwy
[div class="excerpt"]
Climate change has brought the global environmental crisis to its crux. The primary point that must be noted is that the pace of climate change is accelerating much more rapidly than had been forecast. Accumulation of carbon dioxide, rising temperatures, melting of the polar ice caps and of the “eternal snows,” droughts, floods: all are speeding up and previous scientific analyses, the ink scarcely dry, turn out to have been too optimistic. More and more, in projections for the next one, two, or three decades, the highest estimates are becoming accepted minima. And to that must be added the all-too-little-studied amplifying factors that today pose the risk of a qualitative leap in the greenhouse effect leading to runaway global warming.
There are still some 400 billion tons of carbon dioxide confined in the permafrost, that frozen tundra that extends through Canada and Siberia. But how can the glaciers melt without the permafrost melting too? There are few depictions of the worst-case scenario, in which global temperatures rise by 5-6°C: scientists steer clear of painting catastrophic pictures. But we already know what looms: rising sea levels flooding, not only Dacca and other Asian coastal cities, but also London, Amsterdam, Venice, New York; desertification on an enormous scale; shortages of drinking water; repeated natural catastrophes. The list goes on. At a temperature 6°C higher, it becomes questionable whether the planet will still be habitable for our species. We have, alas, no other planet to move to.
Who is responsible for this situation, unheard of in human history? Scientists answer—humans. A true answer, but a bit incomplete. Humans have lived on earth for many millennia, but atmospheric carbon dioxide levels became dangerous only a few decades ago. In reality, the fault lies with the capitalist system—its absurd and irrational logic of unlimited expansion and capital accumulation; its obsessive drive to increase material production in pursuit of profits.
The narrow-minded rationality of the capitalist market, with its short-term calculus of profit and loss, is intrinsically contradictory to the rationality of the living environment, which operates in terms of long, natural cycles. It is not that “bad” ecocidal capitalists stand in the way of “good” green capitalists. It is the system itself, based on pitiless competition, demand for return on investment, and the search for quick profits that is the destroyer of ecological equilibrium.
In contradistinction to the fetishism of commodity production and the automatically self-adjusting economy propounded by neoliberal economics, what is at stake is the emergence of a “moral economics”—economic policies based on non-monetary and extra-economic criteria, as suggested by E.P. Thompson: in other words, the reintegration of economics into its environmental, social, and political integument. Partial reforms are totally insufficient. What is needed is to replace the micro-rationality of the profitability criterion with an environmental and social macro-rationality, which means that civilization will have to operate according to a different paradigm. This is impossible without a thoroughgoing transformation of technology aimed at replacement of current energy sources by non-polluting and renewable sources such as direct-solar and wind energy. The first question demanding an answer is, therefore, that of control over the means of production and, above all, over decisions on investment and choice of technologies, which must be seized from banks and other corporations, and made a function of the common good.
Of course, radical change involves consumption as well as production. Nevertheless, the problem of industrial capitalist civilization is not—as is often claimed by some environmentalists—“excessive consumption” by the masses, and the solution is not a general “limitation” of consumption, not even in the advanced capitalist countries. The problem is the prevailing type of consumption based on “false needs”: display, waste, fetishism of commodities. What is needed is production aimed at the satisfaction of genuine needs, beginning with those that might be called “biblical”: food, water, shelter, garments.
How can these real needs be distinguished from their artificial and meretricious counterparts? By the fact that the latter are produced by the system of mental manipulation called “advertising.” Contrary to the claim of free-market ideology, supply is not a response to demand. Capitalist firms usually create the demand for their products by various marketing techniques, advertising tricks, and planned obsolescence. Advertising plays an essential role in the production of consumerist demand by inventing false “needs” and by stimulating the formation of compulsive consumption habits, totally violating the conditions for maintenance of planetary ecological equilibrium. The criterion by which an authentic need is to be distinguished from an artificial one is whether it can be expected to persist without the benefit of advertising. How long would the consumption of Coca-Cola or Pepsi-Cola go on, if the persistent advertising campaigns for those products were terminated? Such examples could be indefinitely multiplied.
“Of course,” pessimists will reply, “but individuals are motivated by an infinity of desires and aspirations, and it is they that will have to be controlled and repressed.” Well, the hope for a paradigmatic change in civilization is indeed based on a wager, as propounded by Karl Marx, that, in a society freed from capitalism, “being” will be valued over “having”: that personal fulfillment will be achieved through cultural, athletic, erotic, political, artistic, and playful activities, rather than through the unlimited accumulation of property and of products. The sort of accumulation induced by the fetishistic consumption inherent in the capitalist system, by the dominant ideology, and by advertising—and having nothing to do with some “eternal human nature.”
As capitalism, especially in its current neoliberal and globalized form, seeks to commodify the world, to transform everything existing—earth, water, air, living creatures, the human body, human relationships, love, religion—into commodities, so advertising aims to sell those commodities by forcing living individuals to serve the commercial necessities of capital. Both capitalism as a whole and advertising as a key mechanism of its rule involve fetishization of consumption, the reduction of all values to cash, the unlimited accumulation of goods and of capital, and the mercantile culture of the “consumer society.” The sorts of rationality involved in the advertising system and the capitalist system are intimately linked, and both are intrinsically perverse.
http://www.monthlyreview.org/100101lowy.php[/quote]
more at link