Capitalism: a world of starving people, but they're clean shaven

Source: Business Week

Capitalism is an unplanned system. Production workers, consumers, scientists, financial experts don’t’ meet on committees in each workplace, in every industry and each locale to decide what is needed, how much is needed and where resources are best allotted for the benefit of all. Production is determined by market forces which leads to overproduction in some periods and underproduction in others, and the goal of production is surplus value, value produced over and above what the capitalist lays out for Labor power.

While there is no central planning to capitalist production, they do try and can gauge to some extent what the market can accommodate and what it can’t. They also create needs for commodities that can boost profits, commodities like deodorants for example that rely on billions of dollars of advertising aimed at convincing us we smell bad and won’t get the girl, or boy, if we don’t buy them.

This blog always points out that we don’t elect the men and women that make the decisions in society. For the most part, we don’t even know them. They sit on the boards of major corporations that have tentacles in every corner of the globe. One example is Proctor and Gamble.

P&G is one of the world’s largest corporations with $78.9 billion in revenue and 4.2 billion customers in 2010. Sixty percent of P&G’s sales come from outside the US, a warning to the “buy American” advocates of the potential dangers of the protectionist argument as a way of overcoming the inherent tendency for capitalism to overproduce.

In this week’s issue of Bloomberg Business Week an article about P&G describes clearly how they attempt to plan to an extent the allocation of resources in the global market place and manipulate the market and human behavior in the process. It reveals how they push society in a certain direction.

BW describes how once a week, P&G CEO Bob McDonald and other executives get together “around a football-shaped table at company headquarters in Cincinnati. He and his team gaze up at a 360-degree digital map of the world and plot their next moves.”

McDonald, BW points out, is a graduate of West Point military academy, which is a very useful background for a corporate CEO engaged in the most vicious and extensive war of all wars, the highly competitive and ruthless struggle for profit and market domination.

These weekly discussions would be occurring throughout the corporate world as the global capitalists map out their strategy for world domination and hopefully drive their competitors from the marketplace. This is actually what the global workers' organizations, Unions and political parties should be doing, coordinating activity, strikes and disputes and developing global strategies and tactics for building and strengthening the working class movement internationally; challenging racism, sexism and other divisions that brutalize sections of our class and weaken us all. This is the alternative to workers joining with our own “national” capitalists and companies by helping them compete with their rivals either by offering them concessions or protectionist measures that cause division between workers internationally.

The capitalist class uses technology to assist it to gauge public sentiment and the mood. P&G’s computerized marketing information systems, “can crunch up to 10,000 scenarios simultaneously and predict, say, whether premium priced diapers will be a bust in Morocco or the impact a toothpaste promotion could have in Brazil.” BW adds.

Corporations have to do this for fear of extinction. Capitalism is a competitive system, a permanent state of war. Because of its size, P&G “needs a massive flow of new sales” in order to meet its 4% sales growth rate it expects this year BW points out. In order to do that it has to create markets for its products.

The nation state, even one with a huge domestic market like America’s is not enough to supply profitable demand for the productive forces of today. The power of the productive forces is so great that only a world economy can suffice and that is reaching its limits, remember, capitalists don’t set the productive forces in motion in order to provide societies needs, if that was the case, there would be no hunger, no poverty because capitalism possesses the resources to eliminate these. Capitalists produce in order to extract surplus value from Labor power which is the source of their profits.

For example, A major area of interest to the P&G gang sat around that table in Cincinnati is India. By “pushing consumption of P&G products” in places like China, India, Indonesia and Sub-Saharan Africa to the level the company has achieved in Mexico would bring in an extra $60 billion annual sales revenue.

In India, for example, P&G has to get Indian men to quit going to barbers and shave at home using P&G razors. The company bought Gillette in 2005 for $57 billion and Gillette accounts for 10% of P&G’s revenue. Only 50% of Indian men shave at home, marketing efforts show and P&G sees a lucrative deal if it plays its cards right. The company, through get-togethers round the table in Cincinnati no doubt, has initiated a major campaign with the acronym WALS. This campaign, Women Against Lazy Stubble, features P&G surveys that “prove” Indian women prefer clean shaven men and in an ad on Indian TV women kidnap men in the streets and shave them, with a Gillette Mach3. the ad closes with the WALS symbol with a razor protruding from it.

I am sure that “lazy stubble” is in the top five concerns of Sub-Saharan Africans, I mean, they don’t have much else to worry about do they?

Capitalism was a historical step forward for humanity in the sense that it increased the productivity of Labor. Capitalism has developed the productive forces to such a degree that the basic necessities of life, access to fresh water, health care, food, shelter can easily be provided for all humanity. But the developments that allowed capitalism to do this, the nation state freedom from feudal property relations etc. that restrained capitalist development, are not simply an obstacle to human progress but a violent suppressor of it. Death from disease and starvation in Africa and other parts of the world are a not natural disaster but a inherent product of the so-called free market, the ownership of the productive forces by private individuals for their personal gain for the accumulation of the wealth produced.

As a result of the historic crisis of the system that broke in to the open in 2007, we see unprecedented attacks in the advanced capitalist economies with the bankruptcy of entire nations and more to come. Eastern Europe is a mess as the poorer countries that exported workers who sent remittances back home are being starved for funds as these workers return. Despite the increase of billionaires in India there are literally millions on the verge of starvation. The economic growth in China is unsustainable and a huge crisis will erupt there at some point as it wrestles to deal with a huge pool of surplus Labor that will inevitably lead to further unrest. There have been huge demos in Hong Kong of late and major strikes in factories on the mainland.

We will see more unrest in Europe and Latin America. A leftist government recently elected in Peru is giving international investors the jitters. And of course, there is the Arab spring. There’s a lot to be optimistic about but we cannot change this situation without learning from our enemies and sitting round that table to determine how the world and the resources we have at our command should be used in the interests of all people in harmony with our environment, the technology is there that makes this a real possibility.

In the meantime, and in the absence of a leadership of the working class willing to take these steps, things will not proceed in a straight line but through periods of crisis, steps forward and steps back. If we leave it up to P&G and their fellow travelers, we are looking at a future of increased poverty and loss of life due to the lack of basic necessities.

But we’ll all be clean shaven.