Critiques of ideology, myths and beliefs

1. Critiques of ideology, myths and beliefs

2. Thorstein Veblen (1857-1929) The Leisure Class and Conspicuous Consumption (24)

3. The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions(1899) • An early critique of consumerism; also a critique of utilitarianism • Economic life is notdriven by notions of utility, but by social vestiges from pre-historic times (e.g., honor) • There’s always been a division of labor - along status lines • high-status groups monopolized war and hunting • low-status groups tasked with farming & cooking • “Primitive” cultures featured status rankings for tribes • Conquerors gave menial, labor-intensive jobs to subjugated people, while retaining warlike and violent work • Members of inferior groups emulated those of higher-status

4. Leisure class • Leisure class:emerging ruling class that benefits most from a capitalist economic system built on “waste” • When they “worked” it was largely symbolic and peripheral • Leisure class retained its position through coercion, direct & indirect, e.g., • reserved for itself the honorof warfare, often prevented lower classes from owning weapons or learning how to fight • fostered sense of dependency among rest of the tribe on the leisure class due to fear of hostilities from other tribes or, as religions began to form, hostility of imagined deities • Veblen characterizesthe first priests and religious leaders as members of the leisure class

5. Conspicuous consumption & conspicuous leisure • conspicuous consumption: the use of money or other resources to display a higher social status, e.g., • “Veblen goods” refers to commodities for which people's demand increases as their price increases, since greater price confers greater status, instead of decreasing according to the law of demand – handbags, watches, etc. • conspicuous leisure: time given to certain pursuits in return for higher status, e.g., • to be a “gentleman” one must study things like the fine arts & philosophy, which have little economic value in themselves but display freedom from economic necessity

6. Leisure class & conspicuous consumption • Members of all classes “waste” both time & money as means to improve self-esteem & elevate status • “Parasitic” business leaders “sabotaged” the industrial system in their personal quest for profit • Modern-day conflict is between: • “business” - those who make money • “industry” (those who make things)

7. Social implications • Subjugation of women • “Trophy wife” shows off a man’s success like barbarians’ “trophies of war” • By not allowing his wife to work outside the home, a man could show off her conspicuous leisure as proof of his status and spend money on his wife through conspicuous consumption • Growth of sports such as football • Used to display conspicuous leisure • Religion as an expression of both conspicuous leisure and conspicuous consumption • From an economic point of view, churches are a waste of building space, the clergy a group paid to do nothing “useful” • Manners and etiquette become practices of conspicuous leisure with no practical value

8. Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937) Hegemony and the Ruling Ideas

9. Hegemony • Hegemony refers to ideological domination over subordinate classes • Bourgeoisie maintained dominance not primarily through coercion or force but through spontaneous consent of the ruled

10. Ideological superstructure has two levels • political society: “the State;” the police, the army, legal system, etc., which dominates directly and coercively • civil society: the family, the education system, trade unions, etc., where leadership is constituted through ideology or by means of consent

11. Why did Europe’s working class act against its own class interests by supporting fascism? • Proletariat adopts as its own the values, beliefs& attitudes that serve the interests of the ruling class • It’s socialized – esp. through educational system – into accepting bourgeois ideology as an unquestioned commonsense view of the world and their place in it

12. Counter-hegemony is required to spark unified popular revolt • Counter-hegemony or “organic” consciousness would unmask the real sources of workers’ oppression and articulate the real interests and needs of the masses • Praxis: connects theoretical insights to active attempts to create amore just society

13. Double standards on Debt? “At the same time, there is something profoundly deceptive going on here. All these moral dramas start from the assumption that personal debt is ultimately a matter of self-indulgence, a sin against one’s loved ones—and therefore that redemption must necessarily be a matter of ascetic self-denial. What’s being shunted out of sight here is first of all the fact that everyone is now in debt (US household debt is now estimated at on average 130% of income), and that very little of this debt was accrued by those determined to find money to bet on horses or toss away on fripperies. Insofar as it was borrowed for what economists like to call discretionary spending, it was mainly to be given to children, to share with friends, or otherwise to be able to build and maintain relations with other human beings that are based on something other than sheer material calculation. One must go into debt to achieve a life that goes in any way beyond sheer survival.” (Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years, Melville Press, 2011, p. 379)