CHAPTER 12

An ounce of prevention

The fear of affluenza, though never identified as such, has been part of the American tradition since colonists arrived here from Europe. It was a mixed bunch that risked life and livelihood to cross the Atlantic on small wooden ships. The first came seeking riches. The Spanish wanted gold; the French, furs. The Dutch sought new trade routes to the fabled Indies.

But among the early arrivals from England were refugees seeking to escape what they had come to view as a godless materialism rapidly taking root in Europe. “When the Puritans arrived in the New World, one of their major premises was their desire to try to create a Christian commonwealth that practiced simple living,” explains the historian David Shi.

In the Massachusetts Bay Colony, the Puritans adopted what were known as sumptuary laws, forbidding conspicuous displays of wealth. They required colonists to wear simple clothing, for example. But because they were never applied fairly, the laws failed to stem a growing trade in luxury goods arriving in the New World from Europe. Wealthier, politically powerful Puritans could effectively ignore the laws and wear whatever they chose, while their poorer brethren were punished for transgressions of the dress code. In effect, the sumptuary laws exacerbated visible class differences.

In Pennsylvania the Quakers, under the leadership of John Woolman, were more successful in their efforts to keep affluenza at bay. “My dear friends,” Woolman preached, “follow that exercise of simplicity, that plainness and frugality which true wisdom leads to.”¹ “Among Quakers,” writes the philosopher Jerome Segal, “the restrictions on display and consumption became more widely applicable. Most important, the pursuit of luxurious consumption was linked to a broad range of injustices and social problems, including alcoholism, poverty, slavery, and ill treatment of the Indians.”²

YANKEE DOODLE DANDIES—NOT!

In some respects, the American Revolution itself was a revolt against affluenza. The British colonial masters bled their American colonies in order to support a lifestyle of luxury approaching decadence. The English lords often spent half the day dressing, much of it on their ever-more-elaborate headpieces (this is the origin of the term bigwigs). Then they stuffed themselves on dinners that took hours to consume.

The American colonists, meanwhile, grew angry at the taxes imposed on them to keep British coffers full. But at the same time, colonial leaders were troubled by the unbridled pursuit of wealth on the part of some of their own countrymen. “Frugality, my dear, must be our refuge,” wrote John Adams to his wife, Abigail, during the revolution. “I hope the ladies are everyday diminishing their ornaments, and the gentlemen, too. Let us drink water and eat potatoes rather than submit to unrighteous domination.”³

At the end of the eighteenth century, as the world changed politically with the triumph of the American and French revolutions, it was also changing economically. The Industrial Revolution’s “dark, satanic mills” (in William Blake’s words) brought steam power and assembly-line techniques, making possible the production of textiles and other goods in a fraction of the time previously required. Benjamin Franklin argued that with such productive tools at humanity’s disposal, it was possible to reduce the labor time needed to produce all the “necessaries and comforts” of life to three or four hours a day.

But in fact, the opposite occurred. During the early Industrial Revolution, working hours were roughly doubled, rather than reduced. The medieval workday, scholars now estimate, averaged about nine hours; more in summer, fewer in winter.⁴ Moreover, the pace of work was quite slow, with frequent breaks for rest. And in some parts of Europe, workers enjoyed nearly 150 religious holidays, when they didn’t work at all. Pieter Breughel’s sixteenth-century paintings of peasants dancing, feasting, or napping in their wheat fields in the afternoon were accurate portrayals of the life he witnessed.

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 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.”⁵

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 (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.”⁶

MARX ON AFFLUENZA

So just how is this “more thorough exploitation” accomplished? In effect, by exposing one’s potential customers to affluenza. 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.⁷

That passage, written 169 years ago, accurately describes much of modern advertising, which, indeed, stimulates “imaginary appetites,” and consistently uses sex, fear, and personal anxieties to sell products. Ultimately, though, Marx believed that market expansion would always be inadequate and that overproduction crises could only be prevented 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.”⁸

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 further suggested that “too many useful goods create too many useless people.”⁹

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 Satisfaction of Enough in a nutshell

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.”¹⁰

In 1819, the Swiss economist Jean Charles de Sismondi expressed similar ideas, arguing that political and economic leaders focused too much on making humans rich and too little on making them happy. “The objective of government”, he wrote, “is, or ought to be, the happiness of men united in society.” One way to achieve this, he suggested, was to allow all workers, sharing as equally as possible in the fruits of their labor, “to have more leisure with less labor.”¹¹

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 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.”¹²

In Life without Principle, Thoreau was even more damning of the acquisitive industrial personality, already in need of antibodies for affluenza. Like Marx, Thoreau 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.¹³

“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,”¹⁴ 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 forgotten.