It thereby comes to pass that while population is packed ever more closely together in the urban environment, the atomization of social life proceeds apace. In its most fundamental aspect, this often noticed phenomenon can be explained only by the development of market relations as the substitute for individual and community relations. The social structure, built upon the market, is such that relations between individuals and social groups do not take place directly, as cooperative human encounters, but through the market as relations of purchase and sale. Thus the more social life becomes a dense and close network of interlocked activities in which people are totally interdependent, the more atomized they become and the more their contacts with one another separate them instead of bringing them closer. This is true, for related reasons, also of family life. Apart from its biological functions, the family has served as a key institution of social life, production, and consumption. Of these three, capitalism leaves only the last, and that in attenuated form, since even as a consuming unit the family tends to break up into component parts that carry on consumption separately. The function of the family as a cooperative enterprise pursuing the joint production of a way of life is brought to an end, and with this its other functions are progressively weakened.
This process is but one side of a more complex equation: As the social and family life of the community are weakened, new branches of production are brought into being to fill the resulting gap; and as new services and commodities provide substitutes for human relations in the form of market relations social and family life are further weakened. Thus it is a process that involves economic and social changes on the one side, and profound changes in psychological and affective patterns on the other.
The movement of capitalist society in this direction is bound up, on the economic side, with the capitalist drive to innovate new products, new services, new industries. The surplus produced first of all in the manufacturing industries in the form of concentrations of wealth is matched on the side of labor by the relative decline in demand for workers in those same industries as they are mechanized. The ample streams of capital meet the “freed" labor in the marketplace upon the ground of new products and industries. This results first of all in the conversion into a commodity of every product of human labor, so that goods-producing labor is carried on in none but its capitalist form. Then new commodities are brought into being that match the conditions of life of the urban dweller, and are put into circulation in the forms dictated by the capitalist organization of society. Thus a plentiful supply of printed matter becomes a vehicle for corporate marketing, as do scientific marvels of the twentieth century such as radio and television. The automobile is developed as an immensely profitable form of transportation which in the end destroys the more practical forms of transportation in the interest of profit. Like machinery in the factory, the machinery of society becomes a pillory instead of a convenience, and a substitute for, instead of an aid to, competence.
In a society where labor power is purchased and sold, working time becomes sharply and antagonistically divided from nonworking time, and the worker places an extraordinary value upon this “free” time, while on-the-job time is regarded as lost or wasted. Work ceases to be a natural function and becomes an extorted activity, and the antagonism to it expresses itself in a drive for the shortening of hours on the one side, and the popularity of labor-saving devices for the home, which the market hastens to supply, on the other. But the atrophy of community and the sharp division from the natural environment leaves a void when it comes to the “free” hours. Thus the filling of the time away from the job also becomes dependent upon the market, which develops to an enormous degree those passive amusements, entertainments, and spectacles that suit the restricted circumstances of the city and are offered as substitutes for life itself. Since they become the means of filling all the hours of “free" time, they flow profusely from corporate institutions which have transformed every means of entertainment and “sport" into a production process for the enlargement of capital.\* By their very profusion, they cannot help but tend to a standard of mediocrity and vulgarity which debases popular taste, a result which is further guaranteed by the fact that the mass market has a powerful lowest-common-denominator effect because of the search for maximum profit. So enterprising is capital that even where the effort is made by one or another section of the population to find a way to nature, sport, or art through personal activity and amateur or “underground" innovation, these activities are rapidly incorporated into the market so far as is possible.
The ebbing of family facilities, and of family, community, and neighborly feelings upon which the performance of many social functions formerly depended, leaves a void. As the family members, more of them now at work away from the home, become less and less able to care for each other in time of need, and as the ties of neighborhood, community, and friendship are reinterpreted on a narrower scale to exclude onerous responsibilities, the care of humans for each other becomes increasingly institutionalized. At the same time, the human detritus of the urban civilization increases, not just because the aged population, its life prolonged by the progress of medicine, grows ever larger; those who need care include childrennot only those who cannot “function” smoothly but even the “normal" ones whose only defect is their tender age. Whole new strata of the helpless and dependent are created, or familiar old ones enlarged enormously: the proportion of “mentally ill" or "deficient," the “criminals," the pauperized layers at the bottom of society, all representing varieties of crumbling under the pressures of capitalist urbanism and the conditions of capitalist employment or unemployment. In addition, the pressures of urban life grow more intense and it becomes harder to care for any who need care in the conditions of the jungle of the cities. Since no care is forthcoming from an atomized community, and since the family cannot bear all such encumbrances if it is to strip for action in order to survive and “succeed” in the market society, the care of all these layers becomes institutionalized, often in the most barbarous and oppressive forms. Thus understood, the massive growth of institutions stretching all the way from schools and hospitals on the one side to prisons and madhouses on the other represents not just the progress of medicine, education, or crime prevention, but the clearing of the marketplace of all but the “economically active" and "functioning" members of society, generally at public expense and at a handsome profit to the manufacturing and service corporations who sometimes own and invariably supply these institutions.
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Labor and Monopoly Capital
The Universal Market
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\* A story datelined Los Angeles in the New York Times of February 20, 1973, tells of a car-smashing derby attended by almost 24,000 persons: “Around a centerpiece of wrecked automobiles, a Cadillac Eldorado bearing a red sign: See Parnelli Jones destroy this car,'a Rolls Royce Silver Shadow, a Lincoln Continental Mark IV and some \$50,000 worth of other late-model cars bashed each other into junk here yesterday. Billed as the 'world's richest demolition derby,' it ended in a limping, sputtering confrontation between a battered Ford LTD and a Mercury station wagon. . . .
“I figure it's a little like the last of the Roman Empire,’George Daines said as he bought tickets (at \$8 for adults and \$4 for children) for himself and his son. I wanted to be here to watch the last of the American empire.'