I haven't looked into it, but I would assume that it has something to do with alienation.
The United States hasn't changed in
base from the British Empire, the French Republic, or any other capitalist imperialist. However, one thing that it has done that the others had failed to do at this point was to suppress all alternatives to capitalist hegemony not only in an ideological, but in a material way.
This occurred in two ways. The first was the ability to create a complete surplus of goods the like of which the world had never seen before. While Europe and Japan were able to catch up with it, it was the Americans that had the industrial and ecological capacity to build such an apparatus; and with the flow of intellectuals from Europe coming in to help understand what to do with the massive surplus of goods, the system was set to deal with it as all capitalists had done and continue to do on a broader scale.
Paul Mazur of Lehman Brothers wrote:We must shift America from a needs, to a desires culture. People must be trained to desire, to want new things even before the old had been entirely consumed. We must shape a new mentality in America. Man's desires must overshadow his needs.
Again, this was not new in theory. Marx had anticipated such a situation:
Marx wrote:Let us suppose the most favorable case: if productive capital grows, the demand for labour grows. It therefore increases the price of labour-power, wages.
A house may be large or small; as long as the neighboring houses are likewise small, it satisfies all social requirement for a residence. But let there arise next to the little house a palace, and the little house shrinks to a hut. The little house now makes it clear that its inmate has no social position at all to maintain, or but a very insignificant one; and however high it may shoot up in the course of civilization, if the neighboring palace rises in equal or even in greater measure, the occupant of the relatively little house will always find himself more uncomfortable, more dissatisfied, more cramped within his four walls.
But it had never been done on such a massive scale before. I'll also note that this was not a healthy situation for a society in which everybody got more, simply that those that could afford it felt the need to get more.
The second portion of this was that industrial production was sophisticated enough a little after the war that it could effectively create personalized goods. You wouldn't need to get the same model of car at the same color, but now you could get any color with any number of customizations that were previously only something that the rich had been able to afford.
This goes deeper; maybe you're an Apple person, maybe you're a PC person. If you're, for instance, an Apple person, maybe you're an iOS or an OS X person. If you're any number of these things, you can change an almost infinite amount of things and tweaks so that you internalize the object. This is, of course, something for Apple which is known for having less customization than a PC. And, as I'm sure further comments may demonstrate, this is a kind of production that is very much personalized by the consumer.
But this personalization of lots of stuff in a way feeds into how we interact with the rest of the world. This has not varied at all since the conception of capitalism, even if we tweak these material factors:
Marx wrote:Just as private property is only the perceptible expression of the fact that man becomes objective for himself and at the same time becomes to himself a strange and inhuman object; just as it expresses the fact that the manifestation of his life is the alienation of his life, that his realisation is his loss of reality, is an alien reality: so, the positive transcendence of private property – i.e., the perceptible appropriation for and by man of the human essence and of human life, of objective man, of human achievements should not be conceived merely in the sense of immediate, one-sided enjoyment, merely in the sense of possessing, of having. Man appropriates his comprehensive essence in a comprehensive manner, that is to say, as a whole man. Each of his human relations to the world – seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, feeling, thinking, observing, experiencing, wanting, acting, loving – in short, all the organs of his individual being, like those organs which are directly social in their form, ||VII| are in their objective orientation, or in their orientation to the object, the appropriation of the object, the appropriation of human reality. Their orientation to the object is the manifestation of the human reality, [For this reason it is just as highly varied as the determinations of human essence and activities. – Note by Marx] it is human activity and human suffering, for suffering, humanly considered, is a kind of self-enjoyment of man.
Private property has made us so stupid and one-sided that an object is only ours when we have it – when it exists for us as capital, or when it is directly possessed, eaten, drunk, worn, inhabited, etc., – in short, when it is used by us. Although private property itself again conceives all these direct realisations of possession only as means of life, and the life which they serve as means is the life of private property – labour and conversion into capital.
In the place of all physical and mental senses there has therefore come the sheer estrangement of all these senses, the sense of having. The human being had to be reduced to this absolute poverty in order that he might yield his inner wealth to the outer world. [On the category of “having”, see Hess in the Philosophy of the Deed].
The abolition [Aufhebung] of private property is therefore the complete emancipation of all human senses and qualities, but it is this emancipation precisely because these senses and attributes have become, subjectively and objectively, human. The eye has become a human eye, just as its object has become a social, human object – an object made by man for man. The senses have therefore become directly in their practice theoreticians. They relate themselves to the thing for the sake of the thing, but the thing itself is an objective human relation to itself and to man, [In practice I can relate myself to a thing humanly only if the thing relates itself humanly to the human being. – Note by Marx] and vice versa. Need or enjoyment have consequently lost its egotistical nature, and nature has lost its mere utility by use becoming human use.
The alienation produced by capitalism and the notion of ownership only increases when this ownership becomes more prolific and more personalized. It specifically preys on the kind of alienation that Marx commented upon. Couple that with the loss of any other alternative.
In Marx's time, and into living memory, religion is what separated us from the godless commies. Marx explained that religion was a way to reconcile what alienation did to us along with our current condition. Though he is often quoted out of context, it is insightful:
Marx wrote:Religion is the general theory of this world, its encyclopaedic compendium, its logic in popular form, its spiritual point d’honneur, its enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its solemn complement, and its universal basis of consolation and justification. It is the fantastic realization of the human essence since the human essence has not acquired any true reality. The struggle against religion is, therefore, indirectly the struggle against that world whose spiritual aroma is religion.
Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.
The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo.
Though not Marxist, in
Civilization and its Discontents, Freud more or less comes to the same conclusion though also adds drugs, sex, and art as ways that people attempt to end the alienation that civilization (in Freud's case) forces upon them.
How do you reconcile this?
Traditionally with drugs. They make you okay with what you deal with the crises in which you are living. In much the same way it did in Soviet Russia when Lenin had to deal with the issue. Though anti-communists will try to make a hypocrite of Lenin in not promoting the production of alcohol, it is quite obvious that one should not waste food in a famine for alcohol, and
Lenin went so far as to look for alternatives to the creation of alcohol. For Lenin, the NEP and industrialization of the Soviet Union was going to lead to some of these same issues and this was natural enough.
That's getting off track though. To switch to today, the United States has far greater production, far greater personalization, far less religion, and a far less lucrative and recognized way to get into art and everything else.
As a result,
the US is the one place in the world where alcohol consumption is increasing. It also has other drug problems.
Further, this is aggravated by reactionary policies (as Dagoth Ur pointed out) financing themselves by saturating lower-class communities with drugs in history (
see 1800 when the US became an opium port by the British after the Opium War), [url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran–Contra_affair]recently[/url], and
currently.
The production is there, but more than anything the demand as a result of alienation is there. Specifically in the United States: "a motley rabble of saucy boys, negros and molattoes, Irish Teagues and outlandish jack tarrs," that happened to stumble into an industrial production unrivaled in the history of the world in production, use of the production, where capitalism has been turned on high.
But make no mistake, this is the same thing that's occurring all over the imperialist world. But like Americans always do, this is an excuse to talk about themselves and get on their knees and conspicuously beg forgiveness from the heavens. Something the British and the French aren't nearly as keen on doing.
Alis Volat Propriis; Tiocfaidh ár lá; Proletarier Aller Länder, Vereinigt Euch!
- By late
- By starman2003