Like the other Pelican books I have recently read The Affluent Society and America's receding future Bannock while writing 40 years ago seems, depressingly, to be describing contemporary problems.
Throughout this essay on the problems that are created by the dominance of giant corporations he makes reference to examples, and in particular to General Motors is the archetype of a permanent corporation. While the financial crisis of 2009 including the bankruptcy of General Motors might at first raise question about permanence very few giants were allowed to fall and most of the assets of those that did fall have been shared among their rivals and so only added to the process of concentration which Bannock sees as such a problem. All of the bad practices he attributes to these giants are only made worse by their recognition that they are too bad to fail - market capitalism only really exists if the entities within the market can fail without threatening the system as a whole. He also gives examples of M&S as a large company that didn't display the undesirable character of a 'mature corporation' - one of the pieces of evidence was the fact than M&S did not advertise very much, each time I read this I heard "This is not just..." in my head and smiled that some things at least had changed.
Bannock has faith in the ability of the competitive market to delivery in the consumers interest but sees an emerging problem when a market is dominated by 3 or 4 corporations as there is a lose of competition, and for him the motor industry was first market to reach this fully developed state. The problem in this state is that rather than competing to meet the consumers need the corporations instead focus on creating consumer desire for their products - roles are reversed we, the consumer, in fact provide the service of buying stuff.
He also focuses on the fantasy of 'innovation' - his example is the yearly style changes for cars, ours would be the latest mobile of i-pod - in both cases it has a new shape but what is under the bonnet hasn't changed - and the plague of built in obeisance, (How many people have found their mobile breaks just in time for them to need an upgrade and lock them in to another years contract with the network?). Real advances in technology come from outside the big corporate machines - eg how long would we have gone on buying shiny new vacuum cleaners that did a bad job without Dyson?
The analysis is good - but it is hard to see the remedy in Bannock's essay, and even harder now as we have spend 40 years traveling in the wrong direction - particularly as it is so hard for a consumer to avoid these massive firms, even when you think you are dealing with an independent you will often find in the tangle web of corporate ownership your money is in fact ending up in the same pockets as it would have done with the big brand you were avoiding.
No comments:
Post a Comment