American Society and Surplus

How the Affluent and the Lower-Income Consume Surplus Production

Mar 5, 2007 Henry Berry

All social levels of the United States participate in the consumption of the surplus production of capitalism Marx predicted would destroy Western culture.

There is a strange, but undeniable connection between the effects of central spending habits of the affluent and those who are in the lower income levels. This implies that there is an identity between the origins and intentions of such spending habits.

Those with lower incomes cannot afford the SUVs, vacations, large houses, home additions, and spacious yards of the affluent. But they can afford lots of cheap food, junk food. The "outsized" portions of junk food are to those with lower incomes what the SUVs, expansive homes, etc., are to the affluent. Similarly to how the affluent spend in ways to create more space for themselves by bigger cars and homes, the lower-income spend in ways to create more space for themselves by creating bigger selves, literally. The affluent represent the American dream of boundlessness and excess by purchasing space; while in their own way, this is what the lower-income are doing by unrestrainedly enlarging the space the take up.

Such strategies self-importantly pursued by the affluent and largely unconsciously and often guiltily pursued by the lower-income are not simply an acting out of the bedrock American presumption that one has the right to pursue one's compulsions and desires to the fullest extent possible. The overt, ostentatious way of the better off and the elliptic, subconscious way of the less well off of acting out this primal American belief are socially acceptable. Historically, as in the Russian Revolution for instance, the lower classes have simply taken over the space of the higher socioeconomic classes. Or the higher, stronger classes have repressed the lower, weaker classes such as peasants or colonials to take over their space, sometimes by massacre or driving them away. Compared with such plentiful examples from history, the American way of pursuing the inveterate desire for more space is seen as benign, ingenious, and desirable. Each individual is able to insinuate himself or herself into available space according to his or her particular means and opportunities.

This American social process of continually aggrandizing space largely resolves while at the same time it mutates Karl Marx's tenet about capitalism's growing problem of "surplus production." Marx made this prediction in the mid 1800s as great, unprecedented, quantities and varieties of goods were being produced in the factories and shops of the early Machine Age.

Surplus production is being absorbed by multifaceted steps into space; for example, skyscrapers in earlier modernism, and the waves of disposable goods in postmodernism. The global economy and the proliferation of images are latter-day dimensions of this. Consumer behavior in the U.S. domestic economy is the primary way such surplus is dealt with so it does not become troublesome and burdensome as Marx theorized it would. The affluent in their way consume excess production not only by acquisition of more and more perishable and transitory goods and services but also by the occupation of more space by having bigger and bigger cars and homes requiring the consumption of goods and services for longer-lasting ends. The way the lower-income take part in the consumption of excess production is literally by consumption of bigger amounts of excess food production. In the United States' economy, all classes according to their means and pleasures are involved in the consumption of excess goods and services. The psychology, energies, and skills of democracy's capitalist economy by such factors as advertising and distribution have kept excess production from becoming a problem in ways in which the thoroughgoing materialist Marx never could have foreseen.

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