Thursday, 14 March 2013

America and 'The New Industrial State' - Seminar Paper


The 1950’s first saw America achieve a level of prosperity they had never known before, as other parts of the world struggled to rebuild from the devastation of WWII, citizens of the United States saw their standard of living surpass what previous generations had only dreamed about. 
Max Weber, a German sociologist was the first to look at bureaucracy, according to him bureaucracy was the most efficient form of an organisation. The organisation had to have a well-defined line of authority, clear rules and regulations which had to be strictly followed.  The largest growth of the bureaucracy in American history began in 1933; Roosevelt’s New Deal meant a bigger government, since agencies were needed to administer his many programmes. When America entered into the Second World War in 1941, the needs of the war elevated the number of federal agencies and employees even more.
Weber laid down certain features that he felt the most efficient bureaucratic organisations should possess, including precision, speed, unambiguity, knowledge and strict subordination as well as talking about charisma as a source of bureaucratic power, traits seen in modern day president Barack Obama. The main source of power is a legal action which provides authority and a constant reference to other lawyer’s that implement the system of rules in the bureaucracy. America is a bureaucratic country, dominated by lawyers who are the ones dividing and sorting out the rules and regulations; they are at the top of the hierarchy.  
Before America prospered, it was hit hard with the Great Depression during the late 1930’s. A severe economic depression effected countries world-wide, originating in the U.S after the fall in stock prices that began around September 4th, 1929. The situation soon deteriorated when the stock market crashed in October, leaving devastating effects in countries both rich and poor. Personal income, tax revenue, profits and prices all dropped, whilst international trades plunged by more than 50%. Unemployment in the U.S rose to 25%, and in some countries rose as high as 33%. Cities were hit hard, especially those that relied on heavy industry. Construction was virtually halted, farming and rural areas suffered a 60% decrease in crop prices and areas dependent on primary sector industries such as cash cropping, mining and logging suffered the most.
The great depression ended American Capitalism. For more than a decade, America’s free market economy failed to operate at a level that allowed most Americans to attain economic success. The fact that the economic collapse had been caused not by want but by material abundance with the problem being that there was too much of everything, there was too much supply and not enough demand.
According to Karl Marx, the crisis of Capitalism will inevitably lead to the fall of Western Civilisation. There is a constant struggle for humans to survive as we use up our resources to their maximum limit; we as individuals are constantly competing with one another due to economic production. The 60’s and 70’s are a prime example, whereby the economic boom led to high levels of inflation, causing mass unemployment. Marx believed that money became the state intervention of mans “true” nature, forcing him to become alienated as the rise in monetary value reduced the right of human freedom. 
Marx’s theory describes two elements that led to the exploitation of the working class; Forces (raw materials, technology, and labour) and Relations of Production (ownership). Similar to David Ricardo he believed a products value was dependent on the amount of labour power invested in it, as the value increased, the workers wage decreased. Marx called for the abolition of the financial system for fair labour and stated that a Proletarian Revolution was inevitable in order to achieve a Communist State. 
The U.S’s entry into the war in 1941 finally eliminated the last effects from the depression and brought the U.S unemployment rate down below 10%.  As the depression wore on, President Roosevelt tried public works, farm subsidies and other devices to restart the U.S economy, but never completely gave up trying to balance the budget. According to the Keynesians, this improved the economy, but they believed Roosevelt never spent enough to bring the economy out of recession until the start of WWII.  In the U.S massive war spending doubled economic growth rates, either masking the effects or essentially ending the depression. Many economists believe that the government spending on the war caused or at least accelerated recovery from the depression as it helped in reducing unemployment, the war provided jobs for men whom went into the army which allowed women to take over and work back at home in the jobs that were left. 
British economist John Keynes argued that lower aggregate expenditures in the economy contributed to a massive decline in income and to employment that was well below average. In such a situation, the economy reached equilibrium at low levels of economic activity and high unemployment. His basic idea was simple; to keep people fully employed, the government would have to run deficits when the economy started to slow, as the private sector would not invest enough to keep production at the normal level and bring the economy out of recession. Keynesian economist’s called on governments during times of economic crisis to pick up the slack by increasing government spending and/or cutting taxes. 
Keynes was writing during the 1930’s when America was going through a “deflationary gap”, of which there were more goods than money. Resources appeared to be limitless which led to advancements in mechanised agriculture. With new invention came new investment, he believed that money had the power to affect human behaviour. Keynes believed in a problem free society. He believed that every need should be satisfied and problems such as war, famine and disease dealt with. The new industrial state machine or system satisfies anything that can be seen as a human need, making us richer than anyone from previous years due to the way we live in modern day times.
Individual families used to own factories and coal mines instead of large factories that are attached to bureaucracies and controlled by the government. There is mass unemployment as everything nowadays is made cheaply and it is hard to gain a mass profit. Everything used to be made my hand whereas today it is produced by machines or for extremely low wages by citizens in third world countries.  Karl Marx’s views in economy failed as he didn’t cover much political philosophy, he wrote classically, influenced by Adam Smith about the free market and efficiency, he analysed the declining rate of profit due to an increased source of efficiency, lower wages  and how to make them more efficient which is the stage factories are at now. 
Wages have now been pushed down by competition as people working for a low wage know that people from other countries will come in and do the job for even less. Eventually everyone will become so poor producing and making the clothing that they will not be able to afford to buy their own products and the system will crash. In modern day times, systems are in place for more efficiency; minimum wages are now being fought over by immigrants, the British will work for £3, the Polish for £2 and the Viennese for £1 and so on. 
Keynes believes the answer to this problem is to go to these places, Poland and Vietnam and keep the money there and not allow their citizens to come to where the money is. This will stop the crisis by allowing people to have credit or to use government spending to buy the things needed which will defer the problem.  This will solve problems of over population and the fight for jobs. The government spending can defer the problem but it doesn’t ultimately solve the problem, Keynes says to forever defer the problem just print more money however he didn’t take into account the problem of inflation which can still be controlled. 
The Keynesian consensus was attacked from both the left and the right; the far left consisted of Heidegger and Sartre who saw American civilisation as bureaucratic, technological, militaristic and nihilistic. They saw America as a country ruled by lawyers, ever advancing with machines replacing people in manufacturing products, as well as militaristic, spending vast amounts of money on the military, for example the whole of California could not function without military funding as it is made up of communication, computers and extremely technical military programming paid for by the U.S deficit. Heidegger and Satre also saw how prevalent nihilism is in Western civilisation. The most obvious form being religion as nobody really believes in the scriptures anymore yet they say they believe in it because it’s convenient for them. They both believe American civilisation is bound for disintegration, most probably violent. 
Heidegger claims that western civilisation is doomed. It is a death machine with no vision or future, no project or genuine culture. America cannot produce any symphonic music nor beautiful art, only trash; literal trash such as waste material and cultural trash such as pop music and Hollywood movies. 
Some conspiricists believe that America is run by people from the elites, they are all the same sharing the same outlook, education, training and with the same answer to the economic crisis, to increase public spending and infrastructure work but tell the public that they’re reducing it. They believe the public will not be able to work out what’s going on and will carry on with their normal everyday lives. The last thing the elites want is a democracy. 
The prevalence of conspiracy theories have a grain of truth in terms of their being interlocking bureaucracies with interlocking complex relationships with newspapers and the television, a ‘false reality’ with a ‘false consciousness’. 
The legacy of George Orwell, who wrote 1984 which conveyed the concepts of mind control  as well as the actuality of attempted mind control by Goebbels (Poland and Germany) and the reality of systematic false consciousness by Stalin who became ‘dizzy with success’. Hence studies of the media who interpret hermeneutic (secret meanings) readings of media, with Freudian aspects of mind control, mass manipulation of emotion and “id” – the desire. Television is seen to be the drug of the nation. 
The right hand side, consisting of Hayek was the first to critique the orthodox of Keynesian methods; he believed that things start to go wrong with Kant and after Nietzsche it’s a disaster, he claims that we need to go back to the American Revolution and the 18th century. 
The nationalist right is subsumed into militarism and becomes scarcely credible in the modern bureaucratic civilization. Spengler, Hitler etc. are now very pessimistic, the west now completely domed and beyond redemption. Spengler claimed that he believed Hitler was the last chance to bring back the enlightenment. They lost this opportunity because of America. 
The economy overall grew by 37% during the 1950s and at the end of the 1950’s the median American family had 30% more purchasing power than at the beginning. Inflation which had wreaked havoc on the economy immediately after WWII, was minimal, in part because of Eisenhower’s persistent efforts to balance the federal budget. 
Dwight David ‘Ike’ Eisenhower, the 34th president of America  founded the right combination of low taxes, balanced budgets and public spending that allowed the economy to tick along at a steady pace. He benefitted from steady growth in spending on new homes and consumer goods as citizens turned away from older notions of thrift and began to buy on credit. Eisenhower pursued his goal of achieving a balanced federal budget; he used his credentials as an experienced military leader to reassure the nation that the defence budget did not need to be increased as much as some Democrats were clamouring for in order to counter the Soviet threat. Even though Eisenhower was favourable of low taxes, he dug in his heels and fought against tax cuts whenever they threated to plunge the government into debt. 
Many factors came together to produce the Fifties boom. One being, The G.I Bill which gave military veterans affordable access to a college education. This added a productive pool of high-educated employees to the work force at a time American businesses were willing to pay handsomely for engineering and management skills. Cheap oil from domestic wells helped keep the engines of the industry running, alongside advances in science and technology which spurred productivity. At the same time, competitors in Europe and Asia were still recovering from being bombed during WWII. 
Keynes during the 1950s was a God, in the early stages of the Keynesian revolution it saw the neoclassical understanding of employment replaced with Keynes view that demand, and not supply, is the driving factor determining the levels of employment. This provided Keynes and his supporters with a theoretical basis to argue that governments should intervene to alleviate severe unemployment. His Economic philosophy was that “money matters”. The economy should remain in a stable state of ‘equilibrium’ whereby the amount of money should match the amount of goods. A products value increase as the money supply pumped into the economy decreases; however this leads to a negative economic growth. 
“The New Industrial State” was first published in 1967, written by American economist John Kenneth Galbraith he redefined America's perception of itself in one of his most successful and identified works. His work examines and explores from the 1950’s onwards the economics of production and the effects on the development of the state, how the United States is no longer a free-enterprise society, but a structured state controlled by the largest companies. Galbraith also discusses other themes surrounding the issues of product, capitalist societies and of businesses and corporations. 
Advertising is the means by which these companies manage demand and create consumer "need" where none previously existed. Multinational corporations are the continuation of this power system on an international level. The goal of these companies is not the betterment of society, but immortality through an uninterrupted stream of earnings. The New Industrial State's purpose was not to catalyse a political movement but to describe the economy as it was, to deflate faith in the omnipotent and benevolent market and to foster understanding of a world dominated by large industrial firms, by the planning system and the "technostructure". 
Galbraith writes about how the use of risks within traditional small businesses become less relevant compared to the rise and continuous growth of large corporations in the industrial region. He goes on to state that the advantages of the large associations have in securing longer contracts with labourers and suppliers reduce the relevance of risk taken by smaller businesses becomes practically ineffective in their way of gaining supply and demand. He also writes that the influence of politics is another key factor in securing stable situations and conditions which are ideal for the continuous growth and planning in the markets of production. 
Despite some sectors of the economy still dominated by small firms, Galbraith argues that long-term planning needed for produce involves advanced technology which includes the theory of risk. One result of this is that competition is no longer a relevant explanation of the industrial sector because the overwhelming power of advertising from larger corporations is more significant and appealing to the produce of the smaller businesses. 
He goes on to argue throughout the book that the industrial system is controlled by the structure of the industry rather than the actual share- holders of the respective companies. The structure itself is not there to create or increase the profit made but rather to maintain the stability and life of the corporations, and to a further extent to gradually increase its stature over a larger scale, expanding where they see fit. 
A central theory of the book is the revised sequence. The main idea of the economy is that markets that are in competitions which one another are, at the end of the day, controlled by their customers and the will of their customers. This is referred to as the ‘Accepted Sequence’ whereas the revised sequence is the opposite in contrast, where companies use advertising to gain control over their customers. 
The “Accepted Sequence” that the customers have control and gain control over the company by requesting what they want to see done. 
“The mature corporation has readily at hand the means for controlling the prices at which it sells as well as those at which it buys. Similarly, it has a means for managing what the consumer buys at the prices which it controls.” – Galbraith goes on further to talk about the planning and that the use of technology is the main reason for the planning process. He also states that the time committed to the planning and technology, as well as the decreased effectiveness of the market for products and skills contributes to the long-term planning of the techno structure of the company. 
Markets within the system compete to attract the most amounts of consumers; however consumers compete to get the best from their chosen or designated market. The companies fight for the economy and use advertising to obtain the most economic profit from their consumers in what we call the Revised Sequence. However, the Accepted sequence is different and responds significantly to the requests and desires of their consumers. Consumers control firms in the accepted sequence, but due to the backlog and power of their economic state, maybe it is the larger companies who have a stronger techno structure to progress and expand.

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