michael daswson book

[MICHAEL YATES]

I attended a lecture this evening at Portland State University by Michael Dawson who spoke about his book "The Consumer Trap: Big Business Marketing in American Life" (Univ. of Illinois Press).  Michael has developed a very powerful analysis of the political economy of mass marketing, based in part upon an examination of (for the most part as yet unexamined) business archives at Duke University and the Smithsonian Institute, as well as upon the insights of the monopoly capital school of radical thought developed by Paul Sweezy and others associated with Monthly Review magazine (MR will soon be publishing a review of Michael's book).   Through business combination (allowed by new laws which allowed it), large corporations gained enough market control to  put an end to destructive price competition, greatly increasing their profits.  This did not signal an end to competition, but  competition increasingly took the form of the sales effort.  The question became how could the corporations get people to continuously increase their expenditures on the corporations' products.   High profits gave the corporations the money to systematize (in fact, to create) their management, to devote funds to figuring out what were the best ways to organize their enterprises.  The key figure in modern management is Frederick Taylor.  We usually think of Taylor in terms of the reorganization of the workplace so that management can exert maximum control over the labor process.  Taylor used a three-part process to gain this control:  gathering together all of the relevant knowledge of a work process, utilizing this knowledge to reorganize the labor process under managerial control, and establishing detailed work orders for workers to carry out to produce the output.    Taylor's disciples early on figured out that Taylor's principles could be applied to the selling of the product as well as to its production.  It is Michael Dawson's achievement to show that corporations did just this, to elucidate how they did it, to tell us what are the social impacts of the Taylorization of consumption, and to suggest ways in which we might combat this assault on our freedom.   At the end of the talk, I bought a copy of Michael's book.  I plain to read it soon as that I can gain a full understanding of his ideas, something not possible from a short lecture.  I urge others  to buy his book and study it carefully.   Michael Yates