American Notebook: From Surplus Value to the Mass Media

...To pay an extra 12 actual cents in order to save this forty ideal cents seems fitting to his concept of value...

...There is the root of the social problem...

...Nineteenth century capitalism exhausted the life of millions of workers...

...An injustice half-corrected results in no more than a new sense of injustice and suppressed violence in both parties, which is why revolutionary situations are meaningful and liberal situations are not, for liberal solutions end by compromising a society in the nausea of its past and so bog the mass-mind further into the institutionalization of social habits and methods for which no one has faith, and from which one cannot extract the psychic marrow of culture upon which everyone in a civilization must depend...

...for if the domination of leisure-time is more significant to the health of the economy than the exploitation of the working-time, the stability of the economy derives more from manipulating the psychic character of leisure than forcibly subjecting the working class to its productive role...

...Thus: General Motors, with its captive finance company, has a double incentive to maintain high automobile prices...

...twentieth century capitalism can well end by destroying the mind of civilized man...

...In 1929 GM profits before taxes came to 38.5 per cent...

...General Motors Acceptance Corporation, the largest auto finance company in America, returned a net profit of 17.6 per cent in 1957, which was had by charging automobile purchasers 11.2 per cent interest (though GMAC says its rates come to only six per cent...

...The pricing policy of this corporate giant, as described in the Subcommittee report, comes to the following: The first element in determining prices is an estimate for a 20 per cent profit after taxes, to which is added the cost of materials, labor, overhead, taxes and fixed costs, based on a "standard volume" of 80 per cent of production capacity...

...Of this, it is further estimated, between $300 and $400 went for labor, including the labor costs in purchased materials...

...Of course, he has been deprived of 10 actual cents—the extra comfort should have deprived him of no more than two of his actual cents...

...Such contradictions to this thesis as the spate of Do-It-Yourself hobbies, or magazine articles about the problem of what to do with leisure are of too serious a nature to dismiss with a remark—it can however be suggested that the general hypothesis may not be contradicted: the man who is bored with his leisure time, or so industrious as to work at handicrafts, can still resent those inroads upon his leisure which he has not chosen...

...The difference in price is certainly not to be found by the value of the container, nor in the additional cost of labor and machinery which is required to squeeze the oranges, since the process which produces frozen orange juice is if anything more complex—the oranges must first be squeezed and then frozen...

...No one can work his way through Das Kapital without etching on his mind forever the knowledge that profit must come from loss —the lost energy of one human being paying for the comfort of another...

...550 for overhead...

...But this is a figure for a relatively low production year...

...The report further shows that the cost of labor is not the primary factor in determining the cost of automobiles—despite current propaganda which would make eery rise in wages an inevitable step toward a rise in prices...

...While the cost of shipping whole oranges is greater, because of their bulk, than cans of frozen juice, it must be remembered that the largest expense in freight charges are loading and unloading, and the majority of freshly picked oranges have in any case to be shipped by freight to a freezer plant, converted, and shipped again...

...Today one can buy a can of frozen orange juice sufficient to make a quart for 30 cents...

...This kind of system is known in the United States as free enterprise...

...Here are a few of the facts it presents on General Motors, which controls 50 per cent of the American auto market: Average GM profits during the past ten years after taxes have come to a remarkable 25 per cent of net worth, almost 2Y2 times the average for manufacturing corporations in the United States...

...To take the matter into its real complexity, the conflicting anxieties of living in a war-and-pleasure-oriented environment opens most men and women to a daily spate of psychic havoc whose damages can be repaired only by the adequate exercise of a personal leisure appropriate to each, exactly that leisure which the war economy must impoverish...

...So soon, however, as the surplus labor of the proletariat comes to be replaced by the leisure-value given up by the consumer, the real expropriator of the wage-earner has to become the mass-media...

...It is estimated that the average wholesale factory sales prices of all GM automobile units in 1957 came to $2,213...

...Finally: the absence of price competition among the Big Three of auto...

...Through the post-war years, prosperity has been maintained in America by invading the wage-earner in his home...

...When the source of profit is extracted more and more (at one remove or another) from the consumer's at-home working-time, the consumer is paying a disproportionate amount for the desire to work a little less in his leisure-time...

...Nineteenth century capitalism could still find its profit in the factory...

...Over the economy as a whole, this particular germ of profit may still be miniscule, but it is not at all trivial once one includes the expenses of the war economy whose costs are paid by taxation, an indirect extraction of leisuretime from the general consumer, who then has noticeably less money in his leisure to pursue the sports, occupations, and amusements which will restore to his body the energy he has spent in labor...

...In 1955 the profit per unit came to $435 and the cost of labor about 30 per cent less than the profit...

...So the profit was extracted here from a disproportionate exploitation of the consumer's need to protect his pleasuretime rather than from an inadequate repayment to the worker for his labor...

...The 1950 figure is a trifle better than that for 1929—but the true magnitude of the comparison is realized only when one recalls that tax rates have gone up sharply since 1929...

...in 1957 GMAC brought in $47 millions profit...

...Since it would take three or •four minutes to turn frozen orange juice into drinkable orange juice, it may well be that a covert set of values in the consumer equates the saving of 3 or 4 minutes to a saving of thirty or forty ideal cents of his pleasuretime...

...312 for profit...

...IF THERE IS A FUTURE for the radical spirit, which often enough one can doubt, it can come only from a new revolutionary vision of society and its sicknesses, its strengths, its conflicts, contradictions and radiations, its selfcreated incapacity to solve its evasions of human justice...

...Let me start with a trivial discrepancy...

...in 1950, to 77.4 per cent...

...In 1957 GM's profit came to "only" 17 per cent, while in 1950 its profits reached 37.5 per cent...

...It is probable that the additional 12 or 13 cents of unnecessary price rise has been calculated in some such ratio as this: the consumer's private productive time is worth much more to him than his social working time, because his private productive time, that is the time necessary to perform his household functions, is time taken away from his leisure...

...GMAC is owned entirely by GM...

...If volume goes above that, profits go up...

...It is likely that the survival of capitalism is no longer possible without the creation in the consumer of a series of psychically disruptive needs which circle about such wants and emotions as the desire for excessive security, the alleviation of guilt, the lust for comfort and new commodity, and a consequent allegiance to the vast lie about the essential health of the State and the economy, an elaborated fiction whose bewildering interplay of real and false detail must devil the mass into a progressively more imperfect apperception of reality and thus drive them closer to apathy, violence, and psychosis...

...As long as new cars are selling in volume, the higher the price, the greater the finance charge, and hence the greater the profitability of GMAC...

...Printing Office, $1), a report of the Senate Subcommittee on Anti-Trust and Monopoly...

...If the origin of this secondary exploitation has come out of the proliferation of the machine with its consequent and relative reduction of the size of the proletariat and the amount of surplus value to be accumulated, the exploitation of mass-leisure has been accelerated by the relative contraction of the world market...

...By this logic, the root of capitalist exploitation has shifted from the proletariat-at-work to the mass-at-leisure who now may Iose so much as four or five ideal hours of extra leisure a day...

...But more...

...AT ANY RATE, if the hypothesis sketched here should prove to have any economic validity, the consequences are worth remarking...

...A week later Ford revised its prices upward, to match GM's prices...

...The Ford spokesman said that his company, in order to meet competition, had revised prices upward...

...To this vertical exploitation must now be added the horizontal exploitation of the mass by the State and by Monopoly, a secondary exploitation which is becoming more essential to a modern capitalist economy than the direct exploitation of the proletariat...

...The old exploitation was vertical— the poor supported the rich...

...Indeed it might be argued that the tendency to be attracted to private labor-saving devices is greatest in the man who doesn't know what to do with himself when he is at home...

...A carton of prepared orange juice, equal in quality, costs 45 cents...

...The factors are complex, but may reduce themselves as follows: The distributors for cartons of prepared orange juice are generally the milk companies who are saved most of the costs of local distribution by delivering the orange juice on their milk routes...

...If he earns $3.00 an hour by his labor, it is probable that he values his leisure time as worth ideally two or three times as much, let us say arbitrarily $6.00 an hour, or 10 cents a minute...

...Then came Chrysler, averaging its prices about $20 higher per equivalent model...

...In 1957 Ford announced its prices first, a 2.9 per cent increase over the previous year...

...What is most likely is that the price is arrived at by some kind of developed if more or less unconscious estimation by the entrepreneur of what it is worth to the consumer not to be bothered with opening a can, mixing the frozen muddle with three cans of water, and shaking...

...Of course orange juice which comes in quart cartons is more expensive to ship, but it is doubtful if this added cost could account for more than 2 or 3 cents in the price...

...1,000 for materials...

...when the worker was done, his body might be fatigued but his mind could look for a diversion which was relatively free of the industry for which he worked...

...Two weeks later GM announced an increase of 6.1 per cent...

...The methods by which giant corporations administer prices and destroy competition, have seldom been more vividly described than in Administered Prices—Automobiles (Govt...

...If this revolutionary vision is to be captured by any of us in a work of works, can one guess that this time it will explore not nearly so far into that jungle of political economy which Marx charted and so opened to rapid development, but rather will engage the empty skies, dead spaces, and sentimental cancers of that mass-media whose internal contradictions twist and quarter us between the lust of the economy charities for incurable disease, and all (which radiates a greed-to-consume reminder that the mass consumer is into us, with sex as the invisible sales-only on drunken furlough from the man) and the guilt of the economy ordering disciplines of church, F.B.I., which must chill us with authority, and War...

...if the process has become ten times more subtle, complex, and untraceable in the modern economy, and conceivably a hundred times more resistant to the careful analysis of the isolated radical, it is perhaps now necessary that some of us be so brash as to cut a trail of speculation across subjects as vast as the title of this piece...