A Point of View 1

them to continue buying commodities time and again through the simple expedient of ensuring that those things do not actually last as long as they could. This is what is known as ‘built-in obsolescence’, and it is a feature of all sorts of products, from cars to the simple light bulb. Similarly, the general shoddiness of so many manufactured goods, for example, houses (particularly in the cynically termed ‘social housing’ market), which stems from a desire to cut costs to the bone, likewise results in a shortened period of use. The outcome in both cases is more waste and customer dissatisfaction. Waste in this context has to do with rendering a product unserviceable and therefore needing to be disposed of far sooner than otherwise would be the case. There are many other ways in which capitalism is wasteful: Take, for example, the tendency to ‘modulise’ parts. What I mean by this is that instead of selling a replacement item on its own, manufacturers will sometimes only sell the item as part of a bigger unit or a batch. Whilst this may sometimes make replacing the item easier, it is just as likely to be motivated by the manufacturer’s desire to fleece the customer out of more money. Insofar as the part is specific to a particular make of the product, the manufacturer will almost have a free rein to indulge in this practice. But this is virtually insignificant compared to the waste inherent in a system in which each of the millions of companies or corporations around the world competes with numerous others in producing particular goods and services for a particular market. Why is this wasteful? Well, just consider for a moment the sheer amount of duplication inherent in this set up: You might get dozens of companies producing a particular good or service within a specific locale, each with its own premises, workforce, management structure, and so on. Each will have a number of administrative and financial operations to execute over and above productive operations, which simply would not occur in a socialist/communist society, such as holding shareholder meetings, carrying out financial audits, running pay departments, operating security measures, and implementing marketing strategies. The latter is particularly noteworthy: Big companies, like Coca Cola and Pepsi Cola spend literally billions of dollars trying to outdo each other in the marketplace, and have vast marketing departments dedicated to this aim. On the subject of duplication, it may also be instructive to consider the outcome of a previous Conservative government’s demented attempts to make the National Health Service in the UK more ‘efficient’ a few years ago, by breaking it up into hundreds of self-governing trusts. The upshot was a vast increase in administrative staff by comparison with clinical staff, as each trust had to have it’s own finance department, its own ‘estates’ department, its own pay department, and so on – verily, the economics of the madhouse! In capitalism, it is often the case that having numerous companies compete to sell particular products is often far more then market can bear. Thus it may be that a sizeable number of these companies will be operating below capacity some of the time. Indeed, a few may find themselves going to the wall, squeezed out by the big players. The under-utilisation or non-utilisation of resources in this respect amounts to waste. So does the fact many of the smaller companies, generally burdened with  proportionately higher expenses on such things as heating and electricity and having to purchase services that might otherwise be obtained ‘in-house’, lack ‘economies of scale’. The fact, too, that competing products are sometimes shipped from great distances is yet another instance of waste, as well as being environmentally damaging. Is it really necessary to have New Zealand butter stacked alongside English butter in UK supermarkets, considering that the European Community once had to scale down it’s notorious ‘butter mountain’. This ‘butter mountain’ actually exemplifies another appalling sort of waste found in capitalism: the waste generated by overproduction. Just as the market may determine that the very factories, offices, mines and farms are no longer economically viable and have to be  taken out of commission, it may also determine that the products and services flowing from these facilities are ‘surplus to requirements’ and need to be junked. We see this in the periodic trade cycles that beset capitalism, which essentially occur because capitalism has overreached itself. There are yet other ways in which waste can be generated. For example, companies will often do all they can to enhance the cosmetic appearance and thus the ‘saleability’ of their products without necessarily improving the quality of the latter, and this can result in profligate amounts of waste. Tristram Stuart, in his recent book, ‘Waste, uncovering The Global

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