Sociological Images

Cross-posted at Reports from the Economic Front.

At one time, the conventional wisdom was that capitalism was a means to an end, the end being a better standard of living.  Now it appears that capitalism has become the end itself, and to sustain a healthy capitalism workers will have to make sacrifices.    Case in point: the minimum wage. 

On January 1st, the minimum wage increased in Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Montana, Ohio, Oregon, Vermont and Washington. These eight states all have laws which require them to automatically increase their respective minimum wages by the rate of inflation (called “indexing”). Nevada also indexes its minimum wage but its increase takes place in July.

The state of Washington has the highest state minimum hourly wage at $9.04.  Oregon has the second highest at $8.80.

Eighteen states plus the District of Columbia have minimum wages above the federal minimum wage which remains at $7.25 per hour.  A full-time worker making the federal minimum wage earns just $15,000 a year.

There are those who argue against state laws requiring an inflation adjustment to the minimum wage.  Their most common argument is that such government mandated increases are a threat to business profitability and the health of our capitalist, free-market economy. Putting capitalism first, as I suggest in my opening line, actually means that those arguing against increasing the minimum wage are really arguing for the necessity of a declining real wage.  The minimum wage has not kept up with inflation and increases are needed just to keep workers from falling further behind.  For example, Oregon’s January 2012 increase to $8.80 from $8.50 still leaves the real inflation-adjusted Oregon minimum wage below what it was in 1976.  In 2011 dollars, Oregon’s 1976 minimum wage was $9.09.

The chart below highlights the real decline in the federal minimum wage. The blue line shows the actual or nominal dollar value of the federal minimum wage; increases are the result of a vote by Congress.  The red line shows the real value of the minimum wage in 2010 dollars.  In real terms the federal minimum wage remains considerably below its value in the 1970s.

A second common argument against inflation adjusted increases in the minimum wage is that it is just a training wage for young teens and therefore not important to family survival.  This argument misses the mark for several reasons, the most important being that, as the chart below shows, 80% of minimum wage workers in the eight states with mandated increases are over the age of 20, and more than 75% work more than 20 hours per week (just over half work full-time). In fact, according to an Economic Policy Institute study of national data, families with a minimum-wage worker rely on their earnings for nearly half the family income.

For the last week of December, we’re re-posting some of our favorite posts from 2011.

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In this 26-minute talk, philosopher Gerald Allan Cohen offers a wonderfully eloquent critique of capitalism. His critique revolves around common defenses. He suggests that even the existence of people who have earned their riches legitimately and through their own wit and work do not justify a system of private property. He contests the idea that we are all better off under capitalism compared to other economic systems, suggesting that capitalism retards the human potential of workers nefariously and by design. And he disagrees with the claim that economic inequality is inevitable. Economic inequality, he contends, will someday be seen as an injustice. Capitalism was an important stage, he concludes, and one that we need to outgrow.

I recommend that everyone take a listen, though I’ll admit it starts off kind of goofy:

Part I:

Part II:

Thanks to Chris Bertam at Crooked Timber for putting these videos up.

In an earlier post we reviewed research by epidemiologists Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett showing that income inequality contributes to a whole host of negative outcomes, including higher rates of mental illness, drug use, obesity, infant death, imprisonment, and interpersonal trust.

In the four-minute video below, Kate Pickett argues that once societies develop the capacity to enable status-based consumption (as opposed to survival-oriented consumption),  status-consciousness among humans exacerbates inequality.  Meanwhile, being status-conscious in a highly unequal society creates stress, and all kinds of other negative outcomes, among those who are judged less-than.

See Dr. Pickett, also, on why raising the average national income in developed countries doesn’t make people happier or enable them to live longer. And see more about income inequality and national well-being at Equality Trust.

This picture captures in a moment what Dove’s Evolution video took over a minute to convey — the media images and fashion icons that we aspire to emulate are constructions.  Like billboard signs and magazine editorials, the pictures are manipulations that distort our sense of normal bodies.

We are trapped in a narcissistic world of images, where we must self-surveil our bodies with beauty as one of our primary goals.  We invest in and manipulate our bodies and engage in body regimes to cultivate our physiques, often towards unattainable goals of perfection.  We become subjects (in the Foucauldian sense) to our own projects of becoming, as we police ourselves and internalize a normalizing gaze.  The only way to achieve these kinds of bodies, like Barbie’s proportions in this image, is through dramatic, invasive cosmetic procedures.  Yet, we still labor over our bodies, continually trying to shape it in accords of dominant ideals.  We have forgotten (or simply ignored) that these kinds of bodies are fantastical images.

It’s that time of year when we savage the world with our unbridled consumerism. If it’s not a Black Friday stampede at Target, it’s a news story of a shopper who camped out in front of a Best Buy for over a week to score some discounted gadgets. Everywhere you turn consumers are whipped into a frenzy, children’s eyes are glazed over as they think of what gifts they’ll open, and romantic partners are stressed over what they will give their loved one to demonstrate the depths of their love.

When consumerism is exaggerated, as it is this time of year, it’s easier to see the cultural scripts and rituals that surround it. These cultural scripts tell us:

1. How to feel when we come into a lot of money or even just get a good deal
2. How to act when we receive a gift
3. And how to impute love from inanimate objects.

1. The Rapturous Consumer Windfall

Next to presentations of sex and bad karaoke there is arguably no other scenario played out on television ad nauseam more than the consumer windfall. Turn on your TV right now, and find an advertisement or game show and you will almost certainly see someone falling to their knees, eyes full of tears, as they praise the gods of capitalism for blessing them.  Bob Barker (er, Drew Carey) play the role of Benny Hinn in this consumer revival smashing their open palms on the foreheads of game show contestants as they exclaim, “The. Price. Is. RIGHT!” (Watch at 0:51):*

Television advertising is a wellspring for this type of consumer exaltation. The best example of this consumer rapture is the @ChristmasChamp campaign from Target. Watch the video below and you tell me; is this woman having a consumer-gasm or what?**

Maybe it’s just me, but this ritualized consumer rapture gives me the heebie geebies.

2. The “Show Us What You Got” Photo

Leaning on the arm of your parent’s love, seat slightly sauced, your aunt turns to you and says lovingly, “oh show me what Santa brought you!” After you halfheartedly motion to the pile of loot on the floor she puts her glass down, grabs the family Polaroid and says, “Let’s take a photo to send to [fill in name of absentee relative].”

If we were to flip through your family photo albums I bet we’d find page after page of people cheesing with their unwrapped gifts held head level. This obligatory photo is the classic post gift exchange cultural script. Somehow a gift is only properly received when there is a photo to document it.

From my point of view, it is strange that we take photos of the things we receive during holidays which are tangible and will be around well after the event. But many of us don’t take photos of the moments with our loved ones that won’t linger and fill up our closets.

3. The Hand Dance of Love

Does he love you? Does your hand show it? The holiday season is a time when many will pop the question and boy do advertisers know it. While the issues surrounding jewelry ads are well documented on this site, I’d like to talk about the hand dance women are socialized to do after their love has been verified by an appropriately large shiny rock.

After a woman says “yes,” she walks around with one arm sticking out like a zombie for the next few months doing the hand dance. This cultural script dictates that women flaunt their recently acquired diamond ring and then all women in their surround give their requisite “Oh, that is GORGEOUS!” There is a sad sizing up that goes on here, where women are shamed or praised for the size of ring bestowed upon them.

In Conclusion

Most of these cultural scripts and rituals go unnoticed or at the very least unquestioned. These acts are the mechanisms through which we objectify the social world and alienate ourselves from our loved ones. So this year why not participate in Buy Nothing Day and double down on some quality time with your loved ones.

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* We should acknowledge that sometimes the people who are receiving these windfalls are desperate and totally deserving. I don’t want to shame or cast dispersions on anyone in this situation, but these are exceptions to the rule.

** Forgive me for sexualizing this, but I mean come on, that’s an apt description. While we are at it, this ad is chock full of sociology. We have an “empowered woman” who uses her power to consume; it’s the classic redirection of feminist energies into consumer. This woman, who appears to be the epitome of the middle class, white, privileged consumer, is flexing her muscles, exerting her power, and being aggressive enough to make Betty Friedan blush… ’cept she is using her power to purchase consumer goods from a capitalist system that creates and maintains her oppression. Maybe it’s just me, but I think feminist scholars would have a (justified) objection if I called this “champ” a feminist. I dunno.

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Nathan Palmer is a faculty member at Georgia Southern University, editor-in-chief of SociologyInFocus.com, and the founder of SociologySource.com.

In Capital, Karl Marx discusses how the products we buy are separated from any recognition of the people who produced them. If I want to buy a TV, I’m unlikely to be involved in any kind of interaction with the people who made it. I don’t see the factory where they worked, I don’t have any idea what the conditions were like, I have no specific idea where it was made, outside of “Made in  _____” written on the box. Instead, I exchange money for the TV at a store that almost certainly had nothing to do with manufacturing the TV; no one at Best Buy or Wal-Mart could tell me any more about the specific conditions of production than what I can figure out from reading the package.

Marx referred to this as commodity fetishism. The social relations embedded in products — the fact that someone made that TV, under particular conditions, making a certain amount of money for their labor while producing profit for their employer — are obscured and workers become invisible. Instead, we focus on how much we pay for it, and which store charges the least. Marx argues that relationships between workers, employers, and consumers are presented to us simply as relationships between things; we exchange paper money (an abstract measure of our labor) for commodities, and we rarely pause to think about how the price of a TV is determined by the worth placed on workers in a particular place at a particular time.

Social activists concerned with working conditions, environmental impacts, and a range of other concerns often push back against commodity fetishism, attempting to make the social relations of production visible to consumers again. Craig Martin of Religion Bulletin provided an example from South Africa’s Apartheid Museum. This poster, produced during the struggle against apartheid, calls for a boycott on South African fruit (UPDATE: A reader found a larger image so you can see more detail; via):

The visual of workers soldiers superimposed on the fruit, with workers and protesters in the background, and the phrase “Every bite buys a bullet!”, remind consumers that items they buy having meaning for the world around them, and that they aren’t just exchanging money at a grocery store in return for that fruit; they are buying into a system of production that provides profits for a racist government, which uses those profits to buy military supplies used to enforce its brutal, unequal racist policies.

As Martin says,

In Capital Marx says that commodity fetishism presents relations between men as relations between things — and this poster is a powerful example of an attempt to demystify commodities and reveal that they are in fact relations between human beings.

Cross-posted at Reports from the Economic Front.

Although Republicans and President Obama are said to disagree about economic policies, there is one initiative that they both enthusiastically support: free trade agreements.  President Obama single-handily resurrected the free trade agreements with Korea, Panama, and Colombia from political oblivion; they were ratified by the U.S. Congress in October.

Now he is eagerly pursuing a new multilateral agreement known as the Trans-Pacific Free Trade Agreement (involving Australia, Brunei Darussalam, Chile, Malaysia, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, Vietnam, and the U.S.).  Significantly, as Public Citizen reports, “a leaked document revealed that the Obama administration signed a special pact to keep all documents relating to the Trans-Pacific Free Trade Agreement negotiations secret.” 
One might ask why the leaders of so many countries are anxious to sign such agreements, agreements which not only lower tariffs but also strip away the powers of governments to regulate international investment, production, and capital flows.

One answer is the enormous economic power of transnational corporations (TNCs), the main beneficiaries of these agreements. According to the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development:

TNCs worldwide, in their operations both at home and abroad, generated value added of approximately $16 trillion in 2010, accounting for more than a quarter of global GDP. In 2010, foreign affiliates accounted for more than one-tenth of global GDP and one-third of world exports.

The largest transnational corporations are from developed capitalist countries.  These corporations also tend to be among the largest and most powerful firms in their respective home countries.  At the same time, as the table below shows, their international operations now account for a majority of their assets, sales, and employment.  Looking at all TNCs, the United Nations reports that the value added by their foreign affiliates generated approximately 40% of their total value added in 2010, up from 35% in 2005.

The estimates of TNC production cited above, although impressive, actually understate transnational control over global economic activity.  At one time, TNCs only engaged in international production through establishment of foreign affiliates.  In some cases, the parent company and its foreign affiliates operated relatively independently, each serving a different market.

Now, transnational corporations generally rely on complex cross border production networks that involve the linking of production across many countries, with final sales often taking place in still other countries. Most importantly, these networks often include “independent” partner firms that undertake various activities according to an overall transnational corporate strategy.  While some of the partner firms may themselves be transnational corporations, many are not, which means that TNC controlled activity is greater than the combined activities of parent and affiliate firms.

Transnational corporations use a variety of so-called “non-equity modes” (NEMs) of control to direct the operations of their partner firms, with contract manufacturing and service outsourcing among the most important. Cross border activity involving NEM relationships is conservatively estimated to have generated over $2 trillion of sales in 2010.  The United Nations reports that some 18–21 million workers are directly employed in firms operating under NEM arrangements. Around 80 per cent of NEM-generated employment is in developing and transition economies.

As the following figure reveals, cross border production activity anchored by NEM relations now dominates a number of key export industries.  For example, NEM production now accounts for more than 50% of all toy, footwear, garment and electronics exports.

The production of the iPhone offers one of the best examples of the logic and operation of these transnational corporate controlled cross border production networks.  As the Asian Development Bank explains:

iPhones are designed and marketed by Apple, one of the most innovative U.S. companies. Apart from its software and product design, the production of iPhones primarily takes place outside the US. Manufacturing iPhones involves nine companies, which are located in the PRC, the Republic of Korea (hereafter Korea), Japan, Germany, and the US. The major producers and suppliers of iPhone parts and components include Toshiba, Samsung, Infineon, Broadcom, Numunyx, Murata, Dialog Semiconductor, Cirrius Logic, etc. All iPhone components produced by these companies are shipped to Foxconn, a company from Taipei,China located in Shenzhen, PRC, for assembly into final products and then exported to the US and the rest of the world.

Not surprisingly, the division of profits, as shown below, reflects the overall hierarchy that structures this and other cross border production networks.

The importance of cross border production networks to transnational corporate profitability helps to explain why these corporations are such strong supporters of free trade agreements.  And, although I have focused on manufacturers, transnational retailers which sell the products produced by these networks and financial service companies which underwrite both the production and consumption of these products are also major beneficiaries and therefore powerful advocates.

The operation of these networks, the majority of which are centered in East Asia, have greatly contributed to the growth of global imbalances, marked by East Asian trade surpluses and U.S. trade deficits.  These imbalances were papered over, and global capitalist accumulation sustained only because of the debt-driven housing bubble which financed U.S. consumption.

The collapse of the bubble has led many analysts to call for a rebalancing of Asian and U.S. economies. However, rather than address this need, governments throughout the world, responding to dominant capitalist interests, continue to pursue new free trade agreements, a pursuit that if successful will only intensify existing economic and social problems and make needed changes harder to achieve.