Why Are We Bombarded With Advertisements?

Richard Mellor

AFSCME Local 444, retired

GED/HEO

 

Another useful introduction by Martin Wolff, to the workings of the so-called free market and why, for the capitalist, the obsession with selling the commodity, or replacing existing commodities that have not lost their use value, (he gives a fridge as an example) is a life and death process for them.

 

I hope working people might take time off from watching sports, the depressing news reports of mass killings, or reading the Bible or Koran, exciting as those books can be at times, and consider what is being said here about the material world in which we live.

 

Wolff talks about how we, as consumers, are inundated with advertising. In the US this is more than any other capitalist country. This is noticeable if one travels to other places, something US workers are not known for particularly, but it’s certainly clear for immigrants who have lived elsewhere.

 

If we take the drug industry for example, we can’t watch a TV show or movie without ads for prescription drugs, often to treat diseases or syndromes (like excessive baldness, restless leg syndrome etc.) we have never heard of. We are told we might have it by an actor wearing a white coat and that we should ask our doctor if it “will work for me”. I have a doctor friend who told me a patient asked her about an ailment she thought she had that the doctor never heard of before. The patient had heard about it on TV. The type of drug advertised depends on the show your watching. If you’re a certain age the drug will be for ailments that effect that age group, if you’re young and athletic, another ailment and a different drug would apply.

 

The US drug industry spends billions of dollars advertising their product. In the UK and many other countries it is illegal to advertise prescription drugs in this way. They are not as "free" as the US you see.

 

Professor Wolff doesn’t go in to it in this video but we should ask ourselves why this obsession with consumption, with selling products? He does say that it is the competition for profits, in a capitalist economic system, it’s a life and death struggle between producers for who can sell the most and who can drive their competitors from the marketplace. It’s the way the world works in this system.

 

But what is the actual source of this profit? The selling of the commodity, assuming it has a buyer, realizes a profit for the capitalist and Wolff does say that not being able to sell their product is a nightmare for them, but the profit itself already exists within the commodity before it is sold. But without the sale it’s trapped there. The sale releases it for the capitalist who owns the product that the workers have produced.

 

The profit is created through the labor process itself and that part of the labor process we call “work”. The capitalist may provide the raw materials and machines needed to produce a fridge say, then they buy the use of the worker over a period of time, or labor power that is needed to make the fridge. The end product, the fridge, contains the raw materials in their new form, steel and other elements used, as well the labor time (the worker’s life activity) involved in the transformation.

 

The trick is that the capitalist pays the worker (wages) for the use of their life activity in transforming raw materials in to a fridge less than the value of the finished product in the marketplace. Workers may produce the value of their wages in 5 hours, but through their control of the state and production itself, the capitalist employs the workers for 8. We are not sent home when the value of commodities we produce equal our remuneration. So in this example, the finished products contain 5 hours of paid labor and three hours for which the capitalist paid nothing. It is the use of labor power, our ability to work that is the source of the capitalist’s profit. Workers produce more than they are paid for. It’s called surplus value and the capitalist owns it.

This has many, many consequences. One of them is the fierce resistance the capitalist has over shortening the working day with no cut in pay; to do so cuts in to his cash. The struggle over paid and unpaid labor or labor time, is what labor disputes and strikes are all about. It is a struggle between classes with different roles in the production of needs, those that do the actual work and those that don’t.

 

Professor Wolff touches on other by-products of this arrangement. The poisoning of our environment is another, war is another as capitalists compete in the struggle for control over the world’s resources. The stress and alienation over being bombarded with ads and pressure to buy objects that we are told will improve our appearance, make us popular (One advert I see repeatedly on my phone tells young men that the “sneaker makes the man”.) has a devastating effect when we realize it doesn’t work. The mass killings in the US are all a result of the sickness and alienation of capitalist society. But we are not taught about living in a social system and that systems can be changed. The only time systems are central in the mass media is when they want to demonize socialism or communism.

 

I am not a gun freak but it is not simply a gun problem either and we should not fall prey to thinking banning guns would solve it. Those that defend the right to own guns are right about this.

 

Despite all the propaganda and the advertising worshiping consumption and individualism, humans lean toward collectivism and solidarity with each other, we are gregarious creatures and have advanced in history this way. I remember a poll, I think it was a global poll that asked women what they wanted most in a partner. Despite all the ads telling us what car we should drive to attract the best mate, what we must buy, wear, spray on our hair, bodies and other places, the overwhelming choice was kindness.

 

Kindness though is dangerous for those who seek wealth on the backs of others. It breeds solidarity; not good for profits. The US capitalist class that slaughtered some 3 million Vietnamese people in the quest for markets, learned through that experience not to show the reality of what war means on television. We used to see it on our news in the evening. They don’t do that anymore because the lesson of Vietnam was Americans and people throughout the world were moved by the scenes, it does not promote the popularity of war but the horrors of it.

 

We are all human.