'In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes': Why Popularity has become More Concentrated not Less

Reflecting on Warhol

Andy Warhol's prediction that everyone will be world-famous for fifteen minutes was intended to undermine the idea that anyone 'deserved' to be famous and highlight that with modern media a broader collection of people could be known by everyone (for only a little time, admittedly). This is related to the broader idea that globalisation and the end of the old media etc. would lead to more voices being heard and a decrease in the dominance of cultural conversations by a few individuals. I have highlighted before (in my post http://reciprocans-reciprocans.blogspot.com.au/2012/04/is-trade-in-ideas-free-interrogating.html) that the marketplace for ideas is fundamentally unfree and in this post I wish to examine whether the broader idea that we have a more pluralistic (or less 'concentrated' perhaps) culture is at all valid. I can't help myself, I'm addicted to a life of material

So this begs two questions: How do people get famous? And is this more or less concentrated than before?

I don't mean I want to examine the marketing of celebrity (which is detailed for those interested in a reasonably old Economist post: http://www.economist.com/node/4344144) nor do I want to get into a debate about the merits of Madonna or Lady Gaga etc (which I have previously defended at http://reciprocans-reciprocans.blogspot.com.au/2012/05/baby-im-your-biggest-fan-ill-follow-you.html), I mean the process by which the works, knowledge of their lives or writings of famous individuals spread in society.

I want to make two claims: really famous works (or the fame of celebrities) tend to spread at a slow rate until they reach a 'critical mass' at which point they spread exponentially (seemingly without effort) and that this and the processes of globalised capitalism make a 'winner take all' culture more pervasive (with qualifications) than before. 

Warhol may have been right that many people are famous for short periods, but it is still true that there are particular subjects whose fame does not fade as easily who still dominate our culture.

How Things Get Popular

Gabriel Rossman in his excellent book Climbing the Charts discusses how most ideas (or works etc.) either spread 'within' a social network (think of your friends recommending a song or a new cardigan) or 'from without' (e.g. promoting the Batman film with a huge advertising release). The latter type produces the more predictable pattern that the work will do huge business initially but then fade away quickly, for example with Twilight box office sales.

Charts courtesy of Sociological Images

Now, most works function like this- they have some initial scales (which are obviously scale variant) and then peter off. But some films or songs etc work in the first way- they become 'viral' which means that their sales are 'S-shaped', they are unpopular initially and then suddenly when they reach a critical mass of popularity, spike! As an example: the box office results for My Big Fat Greek Wedding:

This even applies to baby names, as you can see in the chart below, Isabella spiked as a social phenomenon from without whereas Madison spiked initially due to the movie Splash (released in 1984) and then became a runaway success until fading in the late 1990s.

Now, what does this all mean? Well, if you do get famous, with the exception for those whose 'fame' is the very brief glimpse on the nightly news- you tend to become famous for a longer period than Warhol's quip might suspect- see the Kardashians, for instance. Once you get people initially interested in a product, work etc. it can spread 'virally' throughout social networks till the popularity of that product, work etc. is self sustaining, at least for a time.

But, since I'm an economist at heart, what are the consequences then for the monetary side?

The Rise of Winner Takes All Markets

As Adorno puts it in The Culture Industry, previously you might've had a tenor for each major town and a group of tenors in a major city- but now, thanks to technology, everyone can listen to Pavarotti- who is almost certainly not so much better than other tenors that he deserves most of the attention/profit but might be a bit better and able to be marketed more easily. With the invention of the internet in particular, it is very easy now for the works of certain people to spread through the whole population without limitations on say actually being able to go to a concert hall or wait for a new print run of Harry Potter etc.

Now, this is obviously not entirely the case- 'within' trends do exist as I noted, as evidenced by the explosion of new acts and writers who have risen from the internet (for example Justin Bieber). But the idea that new technology was solely going to lead to pluralism or the demise of persistent celebrity is false- indeed popular Western acts like Madonna etc. have displaced some locally famous acts across the developed and developing world. As there is an ability to reach more people, the 'market' for fame and status can devolve into a 'winner takes all' market. In economics, you can have a market where scaling up actually increases the returns you make on an investment (as opposed to what you might think is more intuitive- where scaling up decreases efficiency). If this is the case, then superstars can basically extract a lot of profit when they get to a certain critical mass of popularity.

What are the limitations on this? Well, most new adaptions only get to a certain level of popularity before they peter out- with the exception of televisions, there is almost no technology owned by close to the whole population of the United States, for instance. Also, as we have seen time and time again (particularly with the youth), people will either intentionally or otherwise break the mould of the system- perhaps creating alternative or subculture communities as a consequence. 

Conclusion

The tide of any cultural change is hard to predict- who would have thought that 'Call me Maybe' would become so popular or that a book about a boy wizard who goes off to wizarding school would enthral a huge reading public? But the general outline of the complex and varied system that is 'culture' can be at least traced. Fame might be quicker to obtain now than before, but it still often lasts and can provide particularly high profits. In the end, some people are still famous for a lot longer than 15 minutes and most people are only noticed for fifteen seconds, at best.

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Dan Gibbons is a third year Bachelor of Commerce (Economics) student at the University of Melbourne. He has a forthcoming publication in Intergraph: A Journal of Dialogic Anthropology (about memory and nationalism) and is currently submitting papers on the rise of modern consumerism, the role of criminology theory in literary criticism and the institutional theory of nationalism. Dan is a keen debater and public speaker.

Communist Countries: Crisis, Contradiction and Collapse

Introduction: A Beautiful Idea, Really?

I've often had people claim to me that communism would be a great idea, if only human nature let it work. But I don't think that Marxist communism in particular would work on even a theoretical level- the idea of a 'dictatorship of the proletariat' ever seeding power is beyond comprehension. Were then communist systems always doomed to fail, or might they have survived if not for a few historical quirks?

Marx claimed in Das Kapital that “capitalist production begets, with the inexorability of a law of Nature, its own negation”. His argument was that because capitalist societies relied on social production to create wealth but private appropriation to obtain wealth, they were fated to collapse. However, communist systems also suffered systemic crises, from the failure of the New Economic Policy to the USSR’s fall. Indeed, communist systems suffered from the same internal contradiction as capitalist systems, notably an exclusive extractive class which took profits away from socially productive workers. Communist systems in fact fared worse than capitalist economies from this because they entrenched party apparatchiks at the head of their economies and lacked the 'creative destruction' of capitalism. As a consequence,   they suffered systemic crises, to which unlike capitalist democracies, they could not adapt. I want to make two points in this post: first, that the autocratic nature of communist parties lead to the creation of a new extractive class, that of autocratic party bureaucrats and second, that this internal contradiction lead to crises in communist nations, leading to their eventual collapse. Thus, it will be proven that not only did communist systems contain internal contradictions; they suffered worse from them than capitalist systems.

Party Bureaucrats: The World's Best Rent-Seekers

Communist systems lead to the substitution of Marx and Engel’s bourgeois class who aimed for the “accumulation of wealth in private hands” for a group of party bureaucrats who were equally extractive, thus leading to an inherent contradiction. Official Soviet propaganda espoused that the regime was leading the USSR to a “brilliant future… one of liberty, equality, fraternity, guaranteed employment”. However, because of the inherent vagueness in Marx’s idea of the “dictatorship of the proletariat” which he claimed would lead to the “abolition of all classes” after a transition phase of socialist rule, all communist systems in reality did not transition out of bureaucratic socialism. As Olson notes, under Stalin this meant that the party expropriated all natural resources and capital to add to its yield to its tax collections and also directly controlled consumption and investment for its own benefit. 

Party members were rewarded from this expropriation with special stores, health care facilities and vacation spas in return for loyalty to the party. CPSU members were paid 127 per cent of the average wage of a government worker and their pay was one third of the government administration budget. Further, there was systemic soliciting of in-kind payments and direct stealing. They also engaged in what Verdery terms “political capitalism”, that is bureaucrats used the shortages inherent to the system to make a profit from selling scarce goods. Party “apparatchiks” thus became the class of rent-seekers that Marx railed against because the command economy allowed them to do so. They constituted a class both in terms of political power, economic capital and the ability to consume both more goods and those of a higher quality. Communist systems became a form of what Clark and Wildavsky call “vulgar capitalism” or “profit-making without competition… based on corrupt personal relations”. Simultaneously, bureaucrats were rhetorically devoted to “large-scale heroic means of production”, production based around work done cooperatively. Therefore, so-called communist systems suffered from the same internal contradiction as capitalist systems: while production was (at least initially- black markets eventually flourished) social and cooperative, the accumulation of wealth was private and worked by class expropriation.

Tear Down That Wall!

Further, this inherent contradiction led to inevitable crises in communist systems, to which they could not adjust unlike capitalist systems, which led to their collapse.  Marx believed that the inherent contradiction in the expropriation of workers by the bourgeoisie would eventually lead to a decline in the “rate of exploitation” because “vampire-like, the capitalist only lives by sucking labor”. His argument was that eventually this would lead to recessions and the awakening of class-consciousness. This problem was also present in the Soviet Union, where the extraction of wealth by members of the CPSU helped to slow economic growth to the point where in 1967 the GNP of West Germany was larger than the entire Soviet Bloc. In particular as Maier outlines the extractive process of the communist system hampered the social production of the workers on which it depended. 

Somewhat fittingly, this led to the class conflict that Marx had predicted capitalism falling prey to, especially the rise of the Polish trade union Solidarity that was integral in the USSR’s collapse. This was worsened by the chronic shortages of basic goods which led to worse recessions than those experienced in capitalist systems. Capitalist systems did not suffer as badly because, as Marx was unable to foresee, the welfare state was developed, which redistributed profits to the working class because it was in the bourgeois political class’ interest to avoid class conflict. In contrast, the extractive behaviours of communist party members were only possible through continued coercion of those they were apparently serving. As soon as communist regimes faced crises they could not adapt except by further coercion and entrenchment of expropriation behaviours. Thus, as soon as communist regimes were opened to partial openness such as under Gorbachev’s glasnost in order to create more profits to expropriate, they began to collapse under the weight of their own internal contradictions. This has occurred not just in the Soviet Union, but also in the fall of Yugoslavia, the transformation of the People’s Republic of China and recent partial reforms in the collapsing Cuban economy. Thus, the inherent contradiction in communist systems and their inability to adapt to the crises resulting from it led to their eventual total collapse. 

Conclusion and Consequences

In conclusion, contrary to Marx’s predictions, this essay has shown that the autocratic nature of communist “dictatorships of the proletariat” created the same inherent contradiction between the social production and private extraction and accumulation of wealth inherent in capitalism. Further, it has shown that this led to crisis and eventual collapse of communist systems because the extractive class in the communist system could not allow for it to be adapted unlike the capitalist bourgeois class. Thus, Marx’s proposed solution to capitalism became self-defeating in practice for precisely the reasons Marx felt that capitalism would fail.

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Dan Gibbons is a third year Bachelor of Commerce (Economics) student at the University of Melbourne. He has a forthcoming publication in Intergraph: A Journal of Dialogic Anthropology (about memory and nationalism) and is currently submitting papers on the rise of modern consumerism, the role of criminology theory in literary criticism and the institutional theory of nationalism. Dan is a keen debater and public speaker.

China's 'Bread and Butter Question' and the New Scramble for Africa

This is an edited text of a paper submitted to 'Contribute' Magazine, the publication of UQ's United Nations Student Association

In January this year, an interesting guest attended the opening ceremony of the new African Union headquarters building in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia: Jia Qinglin, the fourth ranking member of the Politburo Standing Committee of the Communist Party of China. Amazingly, the entire US$200 million construction project (everything from raw materials to interior furnishings) was bankrolled by the Chinese government. This is a profound exemplification of the Sino-African union in the changing economic and political landscape of the twenty first century.

The isolationist foreign policy of the Middle Kingdom is no more. Indeed, since the economic reforms and Open Door Policy of Deng Xiaoping (1978), China has been at the forefront of the global economy and international trade. Since 1999, the ‘Go out Policy’ has become the primary framework defining China’s investment in, and exploitation of, expanding regional and international markets. As the example of the Chinese donation of the new African Union headquarters suggests, Africa has been the major focus of China in recent years. China needs the continent’s natural resources to augment its (already) unprecedented industrial growth. Channelled through its state-owned enterprises (and defined by a large migratory flows of Chinese nationals), Chinese capital has often crowded out any local or regional economic actors. Although the ‘Go out Policy’ has been at the fore of Chinese economic activities in Africa, the so-called peaceful rise (marked by soft power, non-interference and responsible world leadership) also characterises the Sino-African relationship. At the opening ceremony of the new African Union headquarters, China reaffirmed this commitment: Jia Qinglin remarked, “China will firmly support African countries in their efforts to uphold sovereignty and independence and to resolve African issues on their own.”

China has reignited the scramble for Africa and is seemingly reigning as the Rhodes Colossus. In recent years, it has been the largest single source of financial aid and foreign investment for Sub-Saharan Africa. Last year, trade amounted to US$120 billion, surpassing the United States and the European Union. This this comes at no coincidence, given China’s newfound status as the world’s largest energy user, according to the International Energy Agency. The resource extraction has been further complimented by a large inflow of Chinese nationals into the continent (with Chinese state owned enterprises now dominating the economic landscape). Sanou Mbaye, a former senior official of the African Development Bank, states, “more Chinese have come to Africa in the past ten years than Europeans in the past 400. First came Chinese from state-owned corporations, but more and more arrive solo or stay behind after finishing contract work.” The new Chinese entrepreneurial movement has excelled with government support. Notwithstanding the continental disincentives of civil wars, institutional corruption, political instability and (recently) the GFC, China has been capitalising on the lack of Western competition. Indeed, negotiations with African governments (particularly those with records of human rights abuse) have proven remarkably straight-forward for Chinese investors. Chinese investment is afforded protective security by African governments through legitimate reciprocal trade agreements, but also through corruption. Suffice to say, these cacophonous relations show no signs of quietening down. On the diplomatic front, China has more embassies and diplomatic postings in Africa than the United States and European Union combined. In 2000, the Forum on China–Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) was established and its 2006 ministerial meeting was the largest diplomatic forum in both modern Chinese and African history.

In the wake of the United States’ waning influence and Europe’s economic woes, many consider that the Middle Kingdom is heavily engaged in neo-imperialism throughout Africa’s postcolonial states. In 2006, then UK Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw, criticised China as neo-imperialist, remarking, “most of what China has been doing in Africa today is what we did in Africa 150 years ago.” In 2011, US Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, warned Africa of a “new colonialism”. Although not explicitly naming China, she did urge greater scrutiny of its investments in Africa. Nevertheless, the character of Sino-African relations is markedly different from that of the continent with European and American relationships. Now, it is investing in industry and infrastructure and importing resources and goods; though this largely centres upon the extraction of largely finite resources, China has also invested in telecommunications, financial services, and energy infrastructure. Sino-African relations are officially guided by the policy of ‘mutual benefits’ and bilateral economic cooperation. Drawing upon this policy’s profoundly positive developments, Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi recently stated, “The future prospects of the [Sino-African] partnership have never been brighter. China’s amazing re-emergence and its commitments for a win-win partnership with Africa is one of the reasons for the beginning of the African renaissance.”

In exchange for these developments, China has received large contracts from African governments and priority with respect to to the extraction of natural resources. In 2007, China signed a US$9 billion dollar mining agreement with the Democratic Republic of the Congo, constituting 68 per cent of the latter’s annual mining revenue. In return, the Congo received hospitals, schools and 6000 kilometres of railway and road infrastructure all financed by China. Without Chinese textile corporations, unemployment in the South African town of Newcastle would be over 80%. Workers are paid approximately US$200 per month, which is greater than in China, but still less than South Africa’s minimum wage. The local unions have tried to shut these textile factories down, but a majority of the workers consider a poorly paid job to be better than none at all. 

Whilst many Africans perceive the West’s demeanour as condescending, the Chinese ostensibly manage their relationship with Africa as a serious business partnership. As Faida Mitifu, the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s Ambassador to the United Nations said, “There are people who still consider Africans like children who can be easily manipulated. The good thing about the [Sino-African] partnership is that it’s sincere and give and take.” On the surface it does – in fact – seem that China is improving Africa’s wellbeing through its trade, investments and financial aid.

Whilst the official policy guiding Sino-African relations is of ‘mutual benefits,’ the primary rationale for Chinese involvement is out of economic necessity and hunger for resources. Consequently, whilst official government statements report on the positive friendship, there are widespread claims of human rights abuses, poor working conditions and environmental degradation leading to a wave of anti-Chinese sentiment and xenophobia on the continent. As evidenced by oil spills in Sudan and Gabon, weekly deaths in Zambia’s Chinese-controlled mines, slapdash construction in Guinea and endemic corruption in some African governments, China has inflicted substantial harm across the continent.

Amongst other continental statesmen, the Environment Minister of Zimbabwe has been an active critic of the Chinese, calling them “makorokoza”, a scornful local term for criminals. Thus, to avoid condemnation from African governments, the Chinese have engaged in bribery and coercion. Chinese managers have bribed government ministers and even taken some on ‘study tours’ to massage parlours in China. Obstructionist African midlevel officials are sacked and workers who assemble in groups are dispersed with rubber bullets. In the rare event that cases do end up in local courts, there have been reports that witnesses are intimidated and judges being paid off.

China has become just as embedded in the African continent as the minerals and oil that its state-owned companies are extracting. Whether through massive migration of Chinese nationals or the perpetual presence of state owned enterprises, China is seemingly, at least to some Western officials (such as Clinton and Straw) and local African populations, colonising the African continent. But this begs the proverbial question: is this really neo-imperialism and, akin to the Scramble for Africa of the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries? On balance, the answer is ‘no’; there is a lack of cogency between the plethora of Chinese corporations and the heterogeneity of Chinese private entrepreneurs. China is simply being a rational economic powerhouse and seizing the opportunity to exploit the resources and markets in Africa to fuel its own economy.

This points to an even more important question – is a Chinese monopoly on Africa’s natural, economic and political capital good for the world economy? Obviously a monopoly in any market is detrimental, but is China alone to blame for crowding out other regional and international actors? Arguably Western nations are equally if not more to blame – Europeans and Americans exploited the natural resources of the continent through imperialism and are responsible for the some of the most intense ethnic violence in history. Many Africans have felt that the West has abandoned their plight. Indeed since the 1980s, with increased civil wars and ethnic violence, and with the global financial crisis since 2008, there has been an apparent lack of political and corporate willingness in the West to invest in infrastructure and industry on the Africa continent.

Although China’s monopoly on African markets and industries may be regarded as a form of economic imperialism, it fundamentally differs from the character of historical European colonialism in Africa. The driving forces of European colonialism were administrative, political and cultural. European nations attempted to maintain cultural hegemony over African colonies, importing customs from food to sports and entrenching political and legal institutions. The British implanted the common law system and cricket in Kenya; the French implanted language and pastries in the Ivory Coast. Not bound by such administrative or cultural hegemony, the underlying motivations for Sino-African relations are marked by a deep paranoia over energy security by the Chinese government.

China has decidedly operated like a private corporation in a Western nation – prioritising profit and only caring about social responsibility and public administration when it serves a purpose. It has rationally sought to exploit African resources for its factories that are fuelling the global economy and making the cheap products that we in the West consume. Surging foreign direct investment from China has substantially affected Africa’s economic prospects and continental infrastructure networks. Indeed, according to Johnnie Carson, the United States Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs, “China is a very aggressive and pernicious economic competitor with no morals. China is not in Africa for altruistic reasons. China is in Africa for China primarily.” During the nineteenth century, the British Empire was widely regarded as a mercantile powerhouse ‘upon which the sun would never set’. Today, it is perhaps more appropriate to reason that ‘the sun never sets on Chinese investment’. Notwithstanding speculation as to the future character of its political hegemony in Africa, Beijing’s insatiable appetite for natural resources will define the growing presence of Chinese investment throughout the African continent.

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Tasman Bain is a second year Bachelor of Arts (Anthropology) and Bachelor of Social Science (International Development) Student at the University of Queensland. He is interested evolutionary anthropology, public economics and philosophy of science and enjoys endurance running, reading Douglas Adams, and playing the glockenspiel.

The 'Sole director of the fate of human beings'?: Revisiting the idea of markets as 'default'

Markets are often described by economists in an almost messianic way- as if they alone will solve all of the world's problems. Now, it is worth noting that markets do a great many things well- they can be great democratisers (in the sense that they in principle allow for a levelling of the playing field), they are often better at distributing resources than a centralised economic instruments and they are more free of rent-seeking and political influence than command economies. However, something they certainly are not is natural- they are like anything else institutions, Douglass North's 'rules of the game' or 'humanly devised constraints on action'.

Indeed, as Polanyi claimed what has really happened is a Market Society (for anyone interested in a more in-depth look at this idea I recommend Polanyi's The Great Transformation) has been created: a combination of market exchanges, industrial production and hedonistic consumption. In this blog post, I will briefly chart how this is different from the mainstream economic account of what market mechanisms are, before briefly posing some conclusions on how this might affect modern development policy (looking particularly at the experience of Russia in the early 90s). The key difference I posit is that along Polanyi's lines, markets are embedded in the social and cultural relations of a society, rather than existing as a separate mechanism alongside them as neoclassical economics assumes (actually neoclassical economists mostly just seem very disquieted whenever the word 'culture' is mentioned).

'The Invisible Hand': Modern Market Exchanges

Markets used to be largely places where often subsistence-based farmers, tradespeople or originally small-scale settlers or tribes would get items they needed but didn't have or couldn't produce from other people. They were often ad hoc, sometimes based on barter and very much not interconnected- prohibitions both religious and social against profit-making ('usury') were followed to various degrees. Modern capitalism changed all this. Modern market exchange is predicated on the idea that commodities have value because of the relationship between things, especially in terms of the translation into a monetary value. Trade is predicated on the substitutability of unlike goods and each participant having a different scale of values in order to produce mutually beneficial trades. Markets have to be embedded and naturalised within society, that is markets must have “institutedness”. As Polanyi observes, ‘free markets’ are instituted processes that must be articulated through social, legal and political strategies. 

This system of exchange is predicated on social acceptance, which is why Western development projects often include help setting up market economies, as a ‘charitable’ venture. Therefore, when confidence is lost in markets they cease to function and as a test of this hypothesis, the exchange system should also fail. This occurred amongst the Nentsy people of Northern Siberia when the bank accounts the Soviets had given them became valueless due to the depreciation in the value of the ruble in the early 1990s. As predicted, the herders switched from buying consumer goods off the Russians back to solely reindeer herding. 

Markets did not become successful because barter inherently transformed into modern capitalism- indeed as Polanyi notes, the really curious thing about laissez-faire capitalism is how planned it was- it needed helping although through establishing private property rights, creating and then dismantling large monopolies (like the East India Trading Company) and a change in attitudes to wealth accumulation, which brings us to consumption. 

'J'adore, Dior': Consumption Patterns and the Modern Corporation

Value in cultural terms is defined by how people expect the world and people in it to behave and how they judge that behaviour. The value of wealth accumulation has changed from the medieval view of public virtue arising from private virtue to the formal economists’ idea that public virtue can arise from private vice. Associated with this has been a popularisation of modern hedonism, characterized by the creation of cultural value in the self-conscious seeking of personal pleasure. These concepts have spread widely to the point where self-interest is taken for granted in most of modern Western society and through global media, much of the world. Consumer goods are in Western society associated with 'commodity aesthetics' in which people ascribe value solely on the basis of design or promotion. Companies have sought to create a 'hyperreality' (Baudrillard) or an aesthetic coating of the world that seeks to use images to generate a market-based society. Companies have also successfully in many cases proselytised to the developing world, for example a Power Rice Ad that was run in Papua New Guinea that was synchronised to the soundtrack recording of “Power to the People!” and featured a muscular man lifting the rice at a construction site. Foster also charts the rise of beauty contests and other competitions that serve to reinforce that cultural capital is to be gained through individual choices (see Materialising the Nation: Commodities, Consumption and Media in Papua New Guinea by Robert Foster). This is also related to what Jonathan Friedman calls homo consumens, "whose fragmented identity is constantly rearranged by the winds of fashion". But how is this all made?

'Work must not Cease’: Mass-Production'

Production is driven by the demands of the market, with an emphasis on creating surplus to trade with others and where the value is determined by what others will exchange for them. Perhaps the defining feature of the capitalist mode is its tendency to reproduce itself on an increasing scale. Production is also changed from previous reciprocal or household modes of production, because who makes the product is now irrelevant- i.e. all goods can at least hypothetically have their value translated into a monetary one (this is quite different to say the Kubo system where who gave you the pig is more important than the pig's 'worth' to you). Capitalism also means that production is no longer autonomous- capitalist production is the most interlinked of any economic system. Finally, high fidelity is ensured by industrialised production technologies, which can produce millions of copies of the same good (this is a key difference from say craft-based economies).

Moving from the Positive to the Normative: Some Policy Ideas

All of the claims I have made so far are what economists call 'positive', that is I've tried as hard as possible to make factual claims about what is not what should be (by hedonism for example, I do not mean a Catholicesque value judgment, I just mean the pursuit of individual pleasure). Now I will try and draw some tentative policy conclusions from what I've written.

The first is that we should not expect markets in the third world to just spontaneously exist- governance needs to get better before the 3rd world can open up to trade more fully and before those countries can actually prosper. In particular, Chicago School style 'shock therapy' is an appalling idea because weak economies with markets that are barely embedded in society will just collapse- witness Russia in the early 1990s. There is a role in international NGOs and other aid providers to tie further aid to institutional improvements- also Western governments should help here rather than just prescribing more of the 'Washington Consensus'.

The second is that the continued survival of markets means that institutions in every country have to be kept strong- there is a role for government policy in other words to stop the collapse in social relations that Polanyi discusses (though I obviously disagree with Polanyi's solution, which is to transition to either socialism or economic democracy).

The last is that while international finance and other forms of globalisation are breaking down national boundaries, there will be a continued role for nation states in the future to regulate these issues and that they will require a truly international response.

I would also make the empirical observation that economics needs to study these issues more- it should not be left to sociologists and anthropologists to fix up huge gaps in modern economic theory.

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Dan Gibbons is a third year Bachelor of Commerce (Economics) student at the University of Melbourne. He has a forthcoming publication in Intergraph: A Journal of Dialogic Anthropology (about memory and nationalism) and is currently submitting papers on the rise of modern consumerism, the role of criminology theory in literary criticism and the institutional theory of nationalism. Dan is a keen debater and public speaker.

'You've Got a Friend in Me, When the Road Looks Rough Ahead': On Patterns of Friendship

Introduction: 'I get by with a little help from my friends'

Humans are deeply unusual creatures- we are the only species to form 'long-standing, non-reproductive unions'- that is, we have friends! From C.S. Lewis and J.R.R Tolkien to Boswell and Samuel Johnson to Gertrude Stein and Ernest Hemingway to even fictional friendships like that of Achilles and Patroclus- friendships are some of the most important relationships we have. Indeed, a decline in friendships in the United States (an American Sociological Review study found the number of people with at least one close confidant has dropped from 80% to 57% from 1985 to 2004) has been linked to an increase in psychological disorders. But why do we have friends at all? And perhaps more interestingly: who are we likely to be friends with?

I will trace evidence that cooperation is important in human societies and that this likely explains the psychological rewards of friendship. I will also explore new evidence that even in tribal societies we tend to befriend people who cooperate similar amounts to us, have similar genes to us (even among non-relations) and are physically and socially similar.

'Lean on Me, When You're Not Strong': The Evolution of Human Cooperation

There is strong evidence from chimps on the antecedents of friendships- for chimps non-reproductive connections provide a form of direct reciprocity- support in a fight, borrowing valuable tools, food in time of scarcity (this has been particularly documented by Pruetz and Lindshield). While these aren't exactly friendships as we'd categorise them- they are based too much in reciprocal giving and taking- they do provide clues on why friendships make evolutionary sense.

Further, it has been documented in primates that those who have a better ability to form coalitions have an evolutionary advantage over their competitors- which has been posed as a possible explanation- the logic being that many of the same characteristics (a giving nature etc.) are the same as we prize in friends and potential members of an alliance.

Baboons who form strong non-reproductive bonds also have better immune function and energy savings, which have been explained as being relieved of the burden of being continuously vigilant of potential challenges and attacks and the potential reduced sense of vulnerability.

As Bowles and Gintis (who on a side note wrote papers for MLK Jr.'s Poor People's March back in the day) document in The Cooperative Species, the relatively warlike nature of the hunter-gatherer existence and the rapid extinction of many groups precipitated the genetic and cultural evolution of social emotions such as shame and guilt because they conferred an advantage on any member of a relatively cooperative group. It is theorised that these emotions provided the jump from so called 'contingent cooperation' (think: if you buy coffee for your co-workers, then you expect them to buy you coffee back at a relatively fixed point in the future) and true friendship.

But can we thus shed any light on who we become friends with?

'Don't walk in front of me; I may not follow. Just walk beside me and be my friend': Who are we more likely to be friends with?

Friendship is obviously a culturally contingent phenomenon- witness the breakdown in affectionate male friendships in particularly Anglo-American society that occurred after the Oscar Wilde trial (and from which the Anglo-American world has never really recovered- men used to walk arm in arm in Hyde Park- would many straight men ever do that again?). However, studies have shown amongst groups as diverse as Americans and the Hadza people of north-central Tanzania that there a few common threads amongst those who we choose to be friends with. Broadly speaking, interpersonal similarity is the strongest predictor: we are rarely friends with those who are completely dissimilar to us (except in the case that through repeated interaction we grow to like them).

Much like Erving Goffman's 'matching hypothesis' for couples, there is evidence that people often pick people of similar 'worth' as defined by different cultural characteristics e.g. looks, intelligence, interests etc. Apicella et al found that the strongest predictors of what they call 'social assortativity' (a measure of the regularity of interactions based on the idea that we tend to interact more with our friends) is highest amongst those who cooperate in similar amounts (this is unsurprising- we like friends who are friendly!). A similar result has also been found for US students and Honduran adult villagers- meaning it is likely to be robust to cultural variation. Physical similarities are also prized amongst the Hadza -- after all foraging is labour intensive and if you've got friends who can physically help more, they are going to be contributing more to your life or group. This may also explain why it has been observed that even in modern society we tend to group with people of reasonably similar physical attractiveness to us- although this is obviously also socially attuned- more attractive people are also more popular. Similar positions in a social group are also a strong predictor of friendship- they both bring people together more often and increase the desire for continued social interaction. 

There is also interesting new evidence that people may befriend those with similar genotypes- in particular a study by James Fowler found that whether a person carries DRD2 (which has been linked to alcoholism) and CYP2A6 (which has been linked to openness) is strongly linked to whether they befriend another person with or without those genes, even accounting for social proximity. This of course is particularly bad news for alcoholics, it turns out that not only are they more likely to be genetically predisposed to drink to excess, they may be genetically predisposed to be friends with others who are also predisposed as such. But it provides an interesting broader point- is friendship also for the benefit of the genes? If we follow a Dawkins logic, some of the purpose of friendship may actually be to benefit our genes. It should also be noted that the Fowler study found that 4 other genes were not linked to friendship- so this question needs further exploration. 

Some Further Questions

Obviously this is an area where many new discoveries are being made- studies of the evolution of cooperation more broadly are on the frontier of science after having been largely ignored by evolutionary biology for so long. But there is interesting evidence that far from just being social constructs, friendships were evolutionary advantageous to humans as a form of reciprocity, social association and possibly even genetic association. None of this of course is to downplay how important and varied friendships really are- it just asks an interesting question: how was I able to feel this way towards others in the first place?

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Dan Gibbons is a third year Bachelor of Commerce (Economics) student at the University of Melbourne. He has a forthcoming publication in Intergraph: A Journal of Dialogic Anthropology (about memory and nationalism) and is currently submitting papers on the rise of modern consumerism, the role of criminology theory in literary criticism and the institutional theory of nationalism. Dan is a keen debater and public speaker.

'Baby I'm Your Biggest Fan, I'll Follow You Until You Love Me': Why pop culture isn't 'low culture'

Popular culture, in particular pop music is attacked from the right and the left- by the former for attacking 'traditional values' and the latter for embracing what Theodor Adorno termed the 'culture industry' (think EMI, the Murdoch Group, Disney etc.). It is also generally attacked by a lot of bourgeoisie, hipsters and other intelligentsia for lacking 'substance'- a charge I'm certainly guilty of making in the past.

It is often ignored by academics (though this trend is changing)- which is deeply silly, because in examining popular culture we learn a lot more than by reading texts (some of which I certainly enjoy) which no one else reads. It is wrong to cast aspersions on all pop culture as 'valueless' and to treat it as an undifferentiated mass- both the music, books etc and the reactions to them are often as heterogenous and interesting as their alternatives.

I want to make to contend that the label of 'low culture' indicates more about those who wield this distinction than those any medium that fits into either category. I'd like to deconstruct two main arguments about the distinction between 'high' and 'low' culture: 1) whether pop culture is 'contentless' and 2) whether commercialisation has somehow 'cheapened' culture or enslaved us (the argument about whether the culture industry has captured as all has some merit I think- with qualifications).

'So, Call me Maybe': Is all pop culture free of 'content' and what is 'content', anyway?

It is often claimed (perhaps fairly in the case of say Rebecca Black's 'Friday'), that pop culture lacks 'content' (Theodor Adorno in particular in The Culture Industry- claims that modern society had invented the concept of a contentless 'free time' and 'leisure' in order to tie entertainment to the culture industry).

The first issue with this is that the word 'content' is a loaded one- for instance in what way does Beethoven's 9th Symphony contain more 'content' than say Lady GaGa's 'Alejandro'? One could claim that the 9th Symphony has stood the test of time and that is certainly true (but how can we tell what of modern culture will last? My guess is that it won't be an indie band, though). However, much of what we now think are classics were once 'pop culture' and some classics we might even consider crude and relatively 'content-free' now. I am thinking of many of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales in particular- they are more vulgar than most modern fiction, not to mention that The Prioress' Tale is one of the more anti-Semitic texts in existence. If we take 'content' as requiring 'skill', this is a problematic test as skill is both subjective and that which we now value isn't necessarily the most ornate- it is mostly just what previous generations valued (who says objectively for example that Shakespeare was a more skilful playwright than Marlowe?).

The second issue with this charge is that even if we take a less vague definition of culture- say 'emotional range' or 'thematic range', then pop culture can live up to this test. It is first worth noting that the judgment of the present will make little difference to what is remembered later- the Impressionists were considered vulgar in their day and Ernest Meissonier was considered the height of French art, yet who is remembered now? Conversely, popular culture of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries has notable range- from the almost mythological Lord of the Rings to the wizarding world of Harry Potter, from the kitschy pleasures of Glee to the geeky Big Bang Theory, from the haunting satire of American Beauty to the classic romance of Casablanca and from the iconic Elvis to the rather controversially Grammy Award-winning Arcade Fire.

The key problem though is that the charge of 'lacking content' really indicates something about those who say it. Most people who reflexively claim to hate anything popular actually look down upon either the masses as commercial slaves or the masses as cultural proletariat. Disliking anything popular has become the social equivalent of sumptuary laws- one thing for a 'higher' class of connoisseur, another for the rest. I would not claim that certain aspects of popular culture can be without harm- it can be sexist, racist, voyeuristic and deeply glib at times (and I think a lot of it is terrible- but probably much of most media forms is terrible- you have to churn through a lot of any sort of music, literature or art etc. to get to a few gems, look at poetry). But it should not be dismissed out of hand just because it is popular. And these charges are not exactly new- ballads, the pop music of the Middle Ages, were accused by authorities of 'debasing' those who heard them (and indeed they were often deliciously subversive of chivalric or social norms).

But does the commercialisation charge have any weight, then? This brings us to whether culture has been 'cheapened'.

'We are Living in a Material World, And I am a Material Girl': Are we the slaves of industry? Has Culture been Cheapened?

Adorno saw all mass culture as creating false needs, of supplanting the 'true needs' of freedom, creativity and genuine happiness. The issue with this theory is that for the longest time, humans have turned to others to produce entertainment for them that merely entertained- from ancient Greek theatre to modern television. Indeed, very little of modern culture is as debauched as the ancient Bacchanalia!

A more serious inditement might be that the 'culture industry' of which Adorno speaks has taken control of our culture- which carries weight given the influence of News Corp. and all its subsidiaries- Murdoch's tendrils run deep.

However, while corporations have certainly used cultural media to make a profit they are not the only source of culture and various sub-cultures and counter-cultures demonstrate that hegemony can be resisted (e.g. gay subcultures, the Beatniks, mods etc.).

Certainly, modern pop culture is displacing many traditional cultures, which is a cause for concern throughout many societies. Further, even in Western societies it may be causing culture to be homogenised, an accumulation of American tastes and values. These are serious concerns- but rarely actually addresses by those who raise them. I have no comprehensive solution to note here, save that there may be a role for governments and other organisations to foster language and other cultural customs especially for indigenous groups- provided those customs do not actually harm the participants (practices which oppress women or minorities should not be encouraged, no matter their importance to anyone's culture).

On cheapness, I would argue that culture is as 'cheap' as it has always been- mostly people look for the same sorts of things from their entertainment- as Sherman Young points out in The Book is Dead: Long Live the Book, the idea that there was ever a vast, educated reading public reading literary classics is a fallacy.

'Don't You Step On My Blue Suede Shoes': Some Conclusions

Pop culture can be as terrible as any art form, but it is wrong to hate something just because it is popular. So dislike Lady GaGa if you think she is derivative or dislike sex-positive feminism (I think you're missing out on how fun her music is but whatever), dislike Britney if you think her music doesn't mean anything to you, dislike Game of Thrones if you think it is too violent or bad fantasy, dislike Glee if you think it is poor quality music (again missing its kitschy fun appeal, but again whatever) and dislike Lord of the Rings if you think it is too long-winded. But don't hate anything just because it is mainstream, especially not if you consider the mainstream 'below' you. I certainly know I've been guilty of this in the past, but it is a poor error to make.

Now certainly there are some questions that should be considered:

1. How much do corporations really control modern culture and is this actually new?

2. How much does modern culture alienate minorities, the poor etc.?

3. Is pop culture any more derivative than other art forms?

etc.

But none of these take away from my key point- pop culture is an important part of our society and doesn't deserve to be reflexively looked down upon or ignored by the chattering classes.

And who knows, if you're like me up until recently and you'd ignored large swathes of pop culture- maybe you'll actually find a lot of it deliciously fun.

For those who are interested, some interesting texts on this subject are:

- Theodor Adorno's The Culture Industry

- Ross King's The Judgment of Paris (on the rise of the Impressionists)

- Ken Gelder's Popular Fiction: The Logics and Practice of a Literary Field

- Hannah Arendt's The Crisis in Culture

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Dan Gibbons is a third year Bachelor of Commerce (Economics) student at the University of Melbourne. He has a forthcoming publication in Intergraph: A Journal of Dialogic Anthropology (about memory and nationalism) and is currently submitting papers on the rise of modern consumerism, the role of criminology theory in literary criticism and the institutional theory of nationalism. Dan is a keen debater and public speaker.

Memory and Feasibility: Why Ethnic Conflicts Happen

Janjaweed Militiamen 

Ethnic rivalries have spawned some of the most vicious conflicts of our time- the Wars of Yugoslav Succession, the Rwandan Genocide and the Second Congo War (the most deadly conflict since the end of World War II) being some of the deadliest. There have been many theories on why they happen from Robert Kaplan's idea of 'ancient hatreds' to instrumentalist accounts of ethnic groups vying for power. 

Recently, there has been an increasing recognition that both ethnic identity and nationalism are reasonably modern and very malleable. As such research into ethnic conflict has proceeded along two lines: an 'identity' stream associated with sociological ideas such as memory, the construction of identity/barriers to identity etc. and a 'feasibility' stream associated with conflict studies which looks at whether parties have the resources to commit to such conflicts. 

I want to unpack some key ideas from both lines of study, before drawing some very tentative conclusions.

'Every Foetus is a Croat': Ethno-national Identities as a Source of Conflict

I use ethnicity here to mean any group of people who identify with each other as having a common heritage, with barriers to group entry meaning anyone cannot just declare themselves a member of that group (heritages are often deeply fictitious but often involve shared myths, language, customs etc.). In ethnic conflict, the key aim of the actors who are driving for ethnic conflict (e.g. Milosevic, Tudjman etc) is to both legitimate their own violent actions and delegitimise ethnic 'others'. In constructing a frame of mind for collective action I theorise that there are three components (after Gamson): injustice, identity and agency.

Injustice

Injustice is constructed by reframing collective memory to make past events into reasons to hate the 'others', either by playing up differences or blaming events on others (e.g. Milosevic blaming bad financial circumstances on Bosnians and bringing back images of World War II Croatian-aligned fascists etc). This triggers what cognitive psychologists call “hot cognition” where language or symbols trigger an emotional response via a series of associations. I would like to note I do not mean 'collective memory' in the sense used by Carl Jung to refer to a collective unconscious- what I mean here is the social framework through which ethnically conscious individuals can organise their identity.

Milosevic Addressing the National Assembly

As previously noted in a post about the Marketplace for Ideas, Price in his ‘Market for Loyalties’ propounded the strategy of attempting to monopolise the construction of collective memory by dominating media discourses, where a government may use “regulation of communications to organise a cartel of imagery”. It has often been a strategy of national governments in particular (but also other groups e.g. the Interahamwe in Rwanda) to monopolise the media in order to induce a sort of 'war psychosis' whereby a group will feel they are surrounded by enemies who are trying to wipe them out. 

Identity

Actors may also seek to emphasise ethnic difference, for example by forms of 'state chauvinism', including enshrining a national religion or language, or as suggested by this section's title, banning abortion to create more "fighting Croats". Often, previous economic differences are emphasised e.g. between the Tutsis and Hutus in Rwanda. For example, the Croatian government actively tried to turn Croatians on their neighbours, especially in areas outside of the Croatian republic proper, which had historically been harmonious.

Agency

Stressing agency is also a vital factor. Governments or rebel groups often imply a sense of being able to solve the ‘problem’ as a group and deny the “immutability of some undesirable situation” (Gamson). They seek to construct the collective memory to express the embodiment of individual agency only through the collective of the nation. Appeals to collective solidarity are particularly common, for example Serb People’s Council calls on the Serb people to resist the terror of the Ustashoid government” and “Protecting Serbs from the vampirical Ustashe” (Ustashe being the Croatian World War II Nazi-aligned government).

In all, ethnic difference is clearly an important factor and is often constructed around injustice, identity and agency. Interestingly, in a 2009 study by Collier it was found that ethnic polarisation was the only socio-political variable found to be a predictor of civil conflicts of any kind.

'A Spiral of Silence': Feasibility and Conflict

 However, this isn't a complete explanation for why ethnic conflict goes on- it does little to discuss what the incentives of certain groups to actually declare war might be. So, I am going to borrow from a broader series of studies on civil conflict to discuss how feasibility, that is having the resources to actually fight a war is important to understanding even ethnic conflicts. 

In Collier's study five feasibility factors are particularly important to triggering conflict: terrain, foreign support and an abundance of young males and resources. 

Terrain

Terrain tends to be more relevant when the conflict is between a civil insurgency and the government who are both ethnically different (e.g. Kurds v Turkish government) rather than the government or some other group slaughtering innocent civilians. In those cases, mountains and forests are relatively good predictors of all kinds of civil conflict as they make guerilla warfare significantly easier. 

Foreign Support

Foreign support comes in all different sources- sometimes ethnic actors are backed by foreign governments for ideological or realpolitik reasons, diasporas are a key to funding many ethnic military groups or armies (particularly the Jewish and until recently Tamil diasporas) and other organisations (often religious). 

It is particularly important in terms of conflict-specific capital e.g. weapons stocks to fight the war and keep military forces equipped.

Young Males

Particularly in impoverished countries, young men are often either the main source of productive labour or the main source of soldiers. Hence, when returns to labour are low, this increases their drive to be soldiers in a conflict (this is also a partial explanation for the relationship between economic conditions and the incidence of ethnic conflict).

Poverty and inequality both induce disadvantaged young males to fight against those they see as 'oppressors'. Further, there are many opportunists who seek financial rewards in such conflicts- one side or another may be the only way of providing for a family- particularly if the conflict itself is making other economic activity too risky.

Overwhelming support also leads to what the title of this section refers to, which is the idea that a strong ability to enforce an opinion may suppress a minority viewpoint or one held by a weaker group because any individuals in that group or minority will not speak out. This was particularly used by ETA to convince wavering Basques to support their cause.

Resource Curse Redux

Resources cause all kinds of curses, but in this case there are two particularly important ones: military financing and increased motive. Resources obviously provide a way of getting military capital- particularly if countries are able to trade petroleum for guns and other hardware, often in violation of sanctions. It also changes the motives of ethnic insurgents in particular- if an ethnic group can control the country it now has more to gain economically.

Thus, feasibility is an important component to any conflict, even ethnic ones.

Some Tentative Conclusions

Ethnic conflict is obviously a very complex issue- it goes beyond any 'ancient hatreds' Kaplan chooses to dream up and is rooted in issues of history, identity and feasibility of conflict. In particular, I have examined how groups construct ethnic (and often ethno-national) differences to legitimise conflict and how feasibility plays an important role in sparking and enabling conflict.

How do we go forward? Other nations should be careful in how they deal with ethnic conflict. For example, in the Yugoslav case it was almost certainly a mistake to give the nations a right to self-determination as this led to the collapse of a previously multi-ethnic state into warring ethnic factions- more work should have been done to keep a post-Communist Yugoslavia together. Preventative diplomacy may help in some cases, but it is my personal belief that military intervention may often be necessary where practical (justified under either R2P if you so choose or UNSC sanction). Enforcing sanctions is vital, particularly on military equipment (though this is difficult if the supplier is the PRC or Russia). In some cases, states may want to fund or support pro-democracy movements (though this comes with its own problems- are they tainted by Western funding?). More generally, Western nations in particular need to be more proactive at dealing with conflict and not sitting back and watch it pan out and either intervening at the last minute or not at all.

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Dan Gibbons is a third year Bachelor of Commerce (Economics) student at the University of Melbourne. He has a forthcoming publication in Intergraph: A Journal of Dialogic Anthropology (about memory and nationalism) and is currently submitting papers on the rise of modern consumerism, the role of criminology theory in literary criticism and the institutional theory of nationalism. Dan is a keen debater and public speaker.

If You've Got It, Flaunt It: The Rise and Rise of Consumerism

What is consumerism?

I take consumerism to mean the 'expression of the apparently ubiquitous act of consumption' (Miles), which particularly occurs in capitalist economies. Consumerism has become the dominant mode of identity in modern ‘globalised’ culture-- from the mods of 1960s England to the cosplayers of modern Japan, “without consumer goods, acts of self-definition in this culture would be impossible” (McCracken). Understanding why it is so successful is vital in a world where final consumption accounts for 61% of world economic activity. 

I should note that this piece assumes no negative or positive outcomes from consumerism- there have been a mixture of both (envrionmentalism vs. new identities and empowerment) but seeks rather to explain why it has been so successful. 

What are the current approaches?

There are three primary explanations so far proffered: those of cultural anthropology, social anthropology and neoclassical economics. 

Cultural anthropologists have proposed that consumerism is an outgrowth of a 'consumer society', that is products confer a 'moral' authority to those who have them because proper use of objects indicates that a person knows how the world works. Cultural explanations often err in assuming that culture is a static object rather than a field of connections, which often means they are of limited use by themselves.

Social anthropologists have proposed that consumerism is largely used as a way of purchasing recognition in particular groups (students, hipsters, mods etc) and part of the acts of mutual recognition and association. The problem with this approach is that it neglects how social attitudes are actually formed and makes Durkheim's mistake in assuming that groups agree on a 'totality' of beliefs and practices. 

Neoclassical economists have proposed that rational actors will always act as if 'more is better' and in essence that consumerism is just a particular manifestation of this desire. The first flaw is that this may not apply culturally, for instance certain societies such as the Tzeltal directly limit wealth by making wealthy individuals have expensive feasts for the whole village and even in our own society there are social and cultural limits on excessive consumption. 

A Memetic Explanation: What is a Meme? Why is Consumerism a Meme? 

Memes are a concept of Richard Dawkins' that are best defined as “elements of a culture … passed from one individual to another by imitation” (Blackmore). Memes are selected for or against, because of the nature of humans as imitators or the memes themselves and their groupings. 

I argue that consumerism is a meme because it succeeds by spreading through people imitating others' choices, either because of what they see in advertising, their peer group, observing others etc. The consumerist meme has flourished because companies shaping culture and promoting social reinforcement now define economic value and this system of value is propagated by the production of consumer goods and a pervasive system of market exchange. 

I will explain consumerism along three axes: consumption, production and exchange.

‘I do love new clothes’: Consumption Patterns and the Modern Corporation

The meme of consumerism has sought to manipulate the environment in which it exists culturally to make it more favourable to itself by changing attitudes to wealth and consumption.

The value of wealth accumulation has changed from the medieval view of public virtue arising from private virtue to the economic idea that public virtue can arise from private vice. In the 20th century in particular there has also been a popularisation of modern hedonism, characterised by the creation of cultural value in the self-conscious seeking of personal pleasure. These concepts have spread widely to the point where self-interest is taken for granted in most of modern Western society and through global media, much of the world. Daniel Miller, for example has documented how contact with the West has made this idea spread to Trinidad, where independence signaled the potential for new wealth and thus new possibilities, which an oil boom helped perpetuated. The existence of a normative type of wealth accumulation, centered around elaborate ornamentation is evidence of a changed material culture.  

Companies have also sought to associate “sign values” with consumer goods through “commodity aesthetics” in which people ascribe value solely on the basis of design or promotion. This is an outgrowth of what Marx called “commodity fetishism” or the mystification of human relations resulting from market trade. 

Further, the idea of fashionability where “to be and not to be in fashion are nowdays important components of choice” (Ilmonen), allows for a strict dichotomy between those who consume what the group consumes and those who break the bonds of commonality. This relates to what Jonathan Friedman calls “homo consumens, whose fragmented identity is constantly rearranged by the winds of fashion”, which he explains by examining how Swedish culture has come to privilege the modern.

But this does not explain how consumer products are effective meme vehicles, so we move to production.

'Work must not Cease’: Consumer Goods as effective Meme Vehicles

Any meme needs to be transmitted and its vehicle thus needs to have three characteristics: high copying-fidelity or the ability to be copied accurately, high fecundity or the ability to make many copies and a level of longevity adapted to its environment (Blackmore 58). 

High copying-fidelity is ensured by industrialised production technologies, which can produce millions of copies of the same good. This form of production also relies on disembedding production from social relations, for example the Kubo system where they own the means to complete production but do not own products because consumption is immediate could not sustain consumerism alone. Without the disembedding, fidelity is impossible because goods have different sign-values due to their relations to a specific person’s labour. 

High fecundity is perhaps the chief feature of the production of consumer goods, which often leads to overproduction when more supply is produced than consumers demand.

The longevity of consumer goods can be selected for the producer’s benefit due to planned obsolescence or the building in of faults so products can only be kept for a certain period.

But this does not explain how consumer products are sold successfully, so we move to exchange.

‘The Invisible Hand’: Consumerism and Market Exchange

Market exchange is predicated on the idea that commodities have value because of the relationship between things, especially in terms of the translation into a monetary value. Trade is predicated on the substitutability of unlike goods and each participant having a different scale of values in order to produce mutually beneficial trades. For consumerism to work, markets have to be efficient at allowing a relatively free flow of goods. To do this, markets have to be embedded and naturalised within society, because as Polanyi observes, ‘free markets’ are instituted processes that must be articulated through social, legal and political strategies. Markets also act as a distribution network for consumer goods and help to coordinate economic action.

This system of exchange is predicated on social acceptance, which is why Western development projects often include help setting up market economies, as a ‘charitable’ venture. Therefore, when confidence is lost in markets they cease to function and consumerism should also fail. This occurred amongst the Nentsy people of Northern Siberia when the bank accounts the Soviets had given them became valueless due to the depreciation in the value of the ruble in the early 1990s. As predicted, the herders switched from buying consumer goods off the Russians back to solely reindeer herding.  

Conclusion

Companies have manipulated cultural and social capital to propagate the meme of consumerism through changing the worth of wealth accumulation and the nature of identity itself. The consumerist meme is able to spread because it has an effective vehicle in the consumer good and associated production processes and an effective distribution network in the form of the ‘free’ market. The memetic approach builds on all three of the current approaches within a coherent theoretical framework. It shows that the success of consumerism should not be taken for granted-- it has been a product of complex social, political and cultural processes.

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Dan Gibbons is a third year Bachelor of Commerce (Economics) student at the University of Melbourne. He has a forthcoming publication in Intergraph: A Journal of Dialogic Anthropology (about memory and nationalism) and is currently submitting papers on the rise of modern consumerism, the role of criminology theory in literary criticism and the institutional theory of nationalism. Dan is a keen debater and public speaker.