Enrichment

A Critique of Commodities

Luc Boltanski, Arnaud Esquerre, Catherine Porter

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781509528745
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book offers a major new account of modern capitalism and of the ways in which value and wealth are created today. Boltanski and Esquerre argue that capitalism in the West has recently undergone a fundamental transformation characterized by de-industrialization, on the one hand, and, on the other, by the increased exploitation of certain resources that, while not entirely new, have taken on unprecedented importance. It is this new form of exploitation that has given rise to what they call the 'enrichment economy'. The enrichment economy is based less on the production of new objects and more on the enrichment of things and places that already exist. It has grown out of a combination of many different activities and phenomena, all of which involve, in their varying ways, the exploitation of the past. The enrichment economy draws upon the trade in things that are intended above all for the wealthy, thus providing a supplementary source of enrichment for the wealthy people who deal in these things and exacerbating income inequality. As opportunities to profit from the exploitation of industrial labour began to diminish, capitalism shifted its focus to expand the range of things that could be exploited. This gave rise to a plurality of different forms for making things valuable – valuing objects in terms of their properties is only one such form. The form that plays a central role in the enrichment economy is what the authors call the 'collection form', which values objects based on the gap they fill in a collection. This valuation process relies on the creation of narratives which enrich commodities. This wide-ranging and highly original work makes a major contribution to our understanding of contemporary societies and of how capitalism is changing today. It will be of great value to students and scholars in sociology, political economy and cultural studies, as well as to anyone interested in the social and economic transformations shaping our world.

Part I
Destruction and Creation of Wealth

1
The Age of the Enrichment Economy

The deindustrialization of Western Europe

In the last quarter of the twentieth century, in Western societies, mass production was no longer viewed as the only way – perhaps not even as the principal way – to maximize profits and accumulate wealth. For capitalism, too, the extension beyond mass production proved to be a necessity imposed by the requirement of profit as the possibilities opened up by that form of production, initially considered virtually infinite, seemed to reach their limits. While the standard form was not abandoned, the extension of capitalism entailed financialization and – in the realm of the production and/or commercialization of objects – the redrawing of geopolitical maps. Certain “emerging” countries took over responsibility for mass production as the primary path to enrichment (the accumulation of wealth), while some countries that had been among the powerhouses of world capitalism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries concentrated on finance and on developing high-tech goods in order to retain power – from a distance – over the manufacturing of the most common goods, insofar as these were products derived from technological innovations. However, the latter countries also turned toward a much more intensive commodification of domains that had long remained more or less on the margins of capitalism.

The geographic expansion of capitalism redistributed – toward countries in which the labor force was abundant and ill-organized and in which wages were therefore low – a number of standard production sites, although the conception and sales of the objects produced remained for the most part under the control of companies headquartered in Western countries, which were still at the heart of world capitalism. Among other effects, these transfers accelerated the deindustrialization of Western Europe. Deindustrialization in the first decade of the twenty-first century is a well-studied phenomenon affecting Western economies, France’s in particular.¹ Industrial employment reached a peak in 1974, with more than 5,900,000 salaried workers. In the early 2010s, this sector lost a little more than 40 percent of its personnel. During the same period, what statisticians define more broadly as the “productive sphere” decreased from 48 percent of all jobs to 35 percent.² This drop affected almost all areas: mining, metallurgy, machinery, ship-building, textiles, and so on, excluding only certain high-tech sectors such as aeronautics and the nuclear, pharmaceutical, and weapons industries.³ The sectors that included intermediate goods and common consumer products were particularly affected. Their decline, which began as early as the 1960s and 1970s in the textile and leather-working areas, went on to affect manufacturing as a whole.

By “deindustrialization,” however, we do not mean the shift to a “post-industrial” society that was often predicted by sociologists in the 1960s.⁴ That prophecy has not been fulfilled on a global scale. On the one hand, many domains that had long remained on the margins of the industrial world – such as small businesses, education, health, and personal services – are run today (even those that do not depend on the private sector but are under state control) according to management methods that originated in the major worldwide companies and are subject to accounting norms developed in industry, a development that has been facilitated by the spread of computer technologies. But, above all, European societies make more use than ever of products of industrial origin – mobile phones, for example, or personal computers – that now count among the most common household appliances. The commodities in circulation are more numerous than ever before, but they are manufactured elsewhere. During the same period, in France, internal consumption almost doubled in global added value, as did commercial services, while the industrial sector declined by nearly two-thirds. Among economists, the explanations for this process of deindustrialization have been subject to intense debate. It is hard to determine how much importance to attribute, on the one hand, to the outsourcing of certain functions that had long been assumed by companies but were not directly productive and, on the other hand, to the increase in labor productivity. But it is quite probable that the most important factor is the importation of objects manufactured in countries with cheaper labor (depending on the sector, from 9 percent to 80 percent of the manufactured items sold in France are imported)⁵ and in which the workforce is neither well organized nor well protected. This is especially the case in Far Eastern countries such as China and Vietnam, but also in post-communist Eastern European countries, for example in Slovenia, Romania, and Bulgaria.

Industrial delocalization has been inscribed in the history of Western capitalism during the last fifty years, and it undoubtedly constitutes one of the paths adopted for getting out of the crisis that capitalism underwent from the mid-1960s to the mid-1980s, roughly speaking. Often analyzed in terms of a decline in productivity and an excess in productive capacities with respect to the demand among those who can afford to buy, and the resulting steady erosion in profits from the production of manufactured goods,⁶ the delocalization movement also has political roots. For the big companies, it has been a way to escape from the fiscal constraints of nation-states, and it has also constituted a response to the mobilization of the European proletariat, particularly during the decade following the upheavals of May 1968. One of the consequences of this process, but perhaps also one of its unacknowledged objectives, has been to pacify or even suppress a working class that, in the 1960s and 1970s, had proved particularly combative, especially in France and Italy. Nevertheless, the delocalization movement could not have occurred at the same pace or to the same degree without the measures of financial deregulation adopted in the 1970s and 1980s, measures that favored transfers of capital from the old industrial countries toward the so-called emerging countries, thus stimulating the creation, in countries with low wage scales, of subcontracting firms that were largely dependent on orders from companies based in the major European or North American cities.

Old and new sites of prosperity

In France, the loss of industrial jobs chiefly affected areas in which industry was the main source of wealth, thus especially the northern and northeastern regions,⁷ precisely the areas in which, as numerous studies attempting to connect regional geography, economics, and political science have shown, the extreme right is achieving its best electoral results. Still, other regions where industry had played a less important role at the beginning of the period in question have become wealthy even though they have not escaped deindustrialization. This phenomenon is all the more troubling in that it is found in many rural regions that had already suffered from a weakening of the agricultural sector during the 1960s: the collapse of small farming had also led to the decline of small and medium-sized cities, leading to virtual desertification in some areas. But it is as though these regions had profited from the increased commodification of domains previously deemed marginal, as if they had reoriented themselves toward exploitation of new strata of resources: to their benefit, a number of objects, places, and even experiences that had for a long time played only a background role with respect to the primordial interests of capitalism were transformed into sources of potential wealth.

Economic geography does not allow a direct approach to this second movement because, in the absence of categories dedicated to the analysis of the process, it cannot turn to statistical data as solidly established as those for industry. Nevertheless, the field has a particularly relevant contribution to make to our research. As has been shown by Vincent Hecquet, who began with a statistical approach, and Laurent Davezies,⁸ who focused on geography, the wealth of the various regions in France does not depend exclusively on the degree of development of the productive sphere – far from it; thus “the new economic geography” can separate “the territories’ contribution to growth” from “the territories’ social development.”⁹ The decline of the industrial regions in fact contrasts sharply with the growing prosperity of regions situated especially along the coasts, in the west or in the south, where population growth has been pronounced and employment and wages have increased. These regions, with greater and greater commercial activity, are developing on a basis that, if we adopt the classification used by geographers, is not “productive” but “residential.”¹⁰ These same regions include a great many retirees (49 percent of all retirees in France) who are by and large better off financially than the average,¹¹ large numbers of vacation homes (66 percent), intermittent or “shuttle” residents who work and live part of the time in large cities in France or elsewhere, and a number of persons who are unemployed and/or dependent on social services who find “odd jobs” in these areas, jobs roughly equivalent to work in private homes. According to Hecquet, Davezies, and others, these are “dynamic non-commercial territories” characterized by what they identify as “development without growth” based on “residential economies.” In these territories, which are among the most “dynamic” and most “attractive” in France (encompassing 44 percent of the population) and which offer “residential advantages,” tourism and the restaurant business are developing along with the maintenance of real-estate stock that had been in decline until recently. In the rural areas of these Atlantic and Mediterranean regions, the arrival of new residents has led to a significant increase in construction.¹² Whereas the employment base is shrinking in the industrial regions, the development of these “residential” territories is creating many new jobs in domestic service, including manual laborers, but “in local sectors oriented toward local demands (sectors that are tied by and large to specific locales).”¹³

Movements of this sort have stimulated the coalescence and deployment of forms of valorization that, although they were not unknown and not negligible, had remained in an embryonic state, since they had not been sufficiently integrated into business practices. The enrichment economy is one component of a social world struggling with a form of capitalism that we characterize as integral, in the sense that various ways of creating value are integrated within it. In this social world, buying and selling mass-produced objects, and especially artifacts that incorporate a high level of technology, have continued to have primacy, for objects of this type account for the vast majority of commercial exchanges. But there are many indications attesting to the fact that commodif...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• Acknowledgments
• Translator’s note
• Foreword by Charles Sabel
• Introduction
• Part I Destruction and Creation of Wealth
• Part II Prices and Forms of Valuation
• Part III Commodity Structures
• Part IV Who Profits from the Past
• Conclusion: Action and Structures
• Appendix
• References
• Index
• End User License Agreement