Time for Things Labor, Leisure, and the Rise of Mass Consumption

The emergence of an environmental interpretation of the problem with planned obsolescence was accompanied by a shift in the center of gravity of perceived responsibility for the practice, away from business and toward consumers. While corporations were still targets for criticism, the environmental call to action was largely addressed to individual consumers. Los Angeles Times columnist Richard Bufman, writing in 1971, demanded that consumers “think before we consume. Think of the consequences and demand an end to planned obsolescence. Demand better engineered things, better crafted things and husband them carefully until they really wear out, not just until the style changes.”95 In summing up the new current of opinion, according to which waste is a byproduct of mercurial consumer taste, Mike Geist, of PR and marketing firm, Geist and Geist, commented that “planned obsolescence is just plain waste, and waste is no longer in fashion.”96

The articulation of the issue of planned obsolescence to concerns about the environment could be interpreted as just reflecting growing consciousness about environmental issues. However, it is perhaps significant that the shift in criticism of planned obsolescence from the economic unfairness of the practice, to its environmental consequences, took place just as the Fordist framework of industrial capitalism was beginning to fall apart. Against the backdrop of the mid-century Fordism, planned obsolescence was seen as problematic primarily because it represented a reneging of obligations of business to consumers, in a corporatist context in which labor and business were locked in a loose compact to share the proceeds of economic growth. But, as historians have shown, the politics of consumption in America changed over the course of the twentieth century. Up until the mid-century period, consumption was thought about in terms that were closely tied to moral and political economy, involving the issue of the just and fair distribution of “purchasing power.” As the century wore on, however, consumption increasingly became framed in terms of individual rights and preferences (L. Cohen 2003; Jacobs 2005). If this account is correct, the weakening grounds of the older moral economy opened up space for environmental concerns about obsolescence and consumer waste to move to the forefront, formulating a critique of planned obsolescence from a quite diferent angle. (I will return to this topic in the discussion section, at the end of this chapter.)

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1. Obsolescence and Waste

The evolution of the debate about planned obsolescence is reflected in the way in which diferent conceptions of waste get expressed in discussions about the issue. The interpretation of product obsolescence as primarily an environmental concern rather than as a matter of fair exchange and economic justice, involved a shift between two distinct conceptions of waste: waste as the abstract product of calculations about fair or optimally eficient uses of resources and waste as an objectionable material byproduct.

In Stuart Chase’s influential discussion of the economics of waste, written in the early part of the century, waste was conceived of as, in essence, ineficiency (Chase 1925). Chase, an engineer by training, and consumer advocate by vocation, thought of waste primarily as nonproductive labor and ineficient use of resources. He condemned as wasteful labor spent on wars, on the making of luxury goods, and the idle “manpower” of “both the idle rich and the wandering hobo.” Waste was a result of the ineficient exploitation of natural resources and production not being suficiently directed by “the technical arts.” There was no nature-preserving environmentalism in Chase’s account. He complained that that “for every reclaimed ton [of natural resources] a ton and more has been needlessly and irretrievably lost” (Chase 1925, p. 2). Within this framework, waste was not a useless or toxic byproduct but rather was a result of suboptimal use of resources. It could be figured counterfactually, by estimating how much more eficiently a given task could have been accomplished, and therefore how much could have been saved. The specific amount of wastefulness in any given goal-directed action can, on this view, be calculated by subtracting the resources required at optimal eficiency to accomplish the goal from those actually used. This concern with eficiency and waste encompassed not just production but also household consumption. The consumer movement, in which Chase was an important figure, was very much allied to the home economics movement in encouraging households to regiment themselves in an optimally eficient manner.

The understanding of waste as ineficiency informs the early attacks on planned obsolescence, only with squandered potential use value standing in for wasted resources as the object of the calculation. For example, “death dates” were regarded as wasteful to the extent that more durability, hence more use value, could have been designed into a product with no significant change in other product characteristics (including price). The counterfactual calculation of waste produced by planned material obsolescence thus measures a quantity of hypothetical use value illegitimately withheld from the consumer. The same is true for style obsolescence. When, under the nefarious influence of marketing, consumers replace perfectly functional products for seemingly superficial reasons, some amount of “true” use value is in efect being withheld from them. For rather than replacing a perfectly good product with a functionally equivalent new one, they could instead have acquired a product with use value along some new dimension. Planned obsolescence was thus wasteful of people’s hard-earned wages and, therefore, of their labor.

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But the moral outrage at the wastefulness of planned obsolescence in the 1950s and 1960s did not just reflect a general revulsion at ineficient use of resources but reflected also an interpretation of planned obsolescence as a concerted attack by big business on the purchasing power of the wage—causing wage earners to, in efect, get an insuficient return for their labor. The duty of business, in the mass consumer economy, to provide consumers with reasonable and fair durations of use in the commodities sold to them, was of a piece with the obligation of business to share the benefits of increasing productivity with its workforce. In reneging on its obligation to consumers, by employing planned obsolescence, and thereby in efect diminishing the purchasing power of the wage, big business reneged on its obligation to reward workers for their contribution to increasing productivity, by increasing real wages.

When, in the early 1970s, planned obsolescence was taken up in the context of concerns about the environment, waste changed from being the product of a counterfactual calculation—of how much more use value could have been realized in the design of a given product—to being an actual substance, a toxic excrescence of industrial society. Waste went from being an abstraction, based on unrealized potential use value, tied to the technocratic pursuit of optimal eficiency and to the ethics of fair economic exchange, to being a material efluence, a physical impinging of society on nature, and a collective sin for which every member of society bears some responsibility. Within the critical discourse about planned obsolescence, the objective of waste reduction therefore changed from the maximization of the use value in commodities to the minimization of environmentally damaging negative externalities.

1. Obsolescence Obsolete?

Just as the environmental critique of planned obsolescence was gathering force, the paradigmatic form of planned obsolescence—style obsolescence in the auto industry—began to wane. The move away from the rather rigid policy of annually revamping automobile models was driven in part by largescale economic changes that caused a slow-down in the rate of productivity improvement, and a consequent squeeze on profit (Glyn 1991, 2006). The result was that less capital was available for the costly retooling required for yearly model changes. Special tooling costs were estimated to have amounted to \$100 million dollars between 1964 and 1965 for Ford alone. By the early 1970s, yearly changes of model had become prohibitively expensive for car manufacturers.

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The new situation did not go without comment in the press. “The trend seems clear,” noted one reporter, “planned obsolescence in the domestic auto industry is dying—but it’s dying slowly.”97 A Los Angeles Times piece in 1970 announced the death of the theretofore ubiquitous three-year product cycle in the auto industry. The dawning of a new, post-obsolescence era for auto manufacturers was also reported in The Wall Street Journal: “The most hallowed of Detroit traditions is planned obsolescence, which began at GM back in the 1920s and has been a cornerstone of automotive making ever since. Auto makers aren’t planning to abandon the concept entirely under their new strategy, but they do plan to stretch out considerably the time between model changes.”98 Some auto makers chose to represent a necessity, imposed by unsustainably high retooling costs, as a virtue. “For those of you who are concerned about planned obsolescence,” Ford announced in 1974, “the Maverick [one of its car models] next year will be unchanged.”99 But there was also some ambivalence about the decline of style obsolescence, because the practice of annual model change was associated with the postwar period of great afluence and growing productivity. One journalist lamented that “annual model change, which Detroit once held sacred to the good life, [is] fading away,” suggesting that with it would go the stability of the industrial economy.100

In part this move away from the practice of planned obsolescence was in response to increasing competition from European car manufacturers, many of which still employed Ford’s old design philosophy, centered on value and durability, only, at least so the advertising copy went, spruced up with a dash of “timeless” European style. Robert Anderson, a former top executive at Chrysler, commented on this cause of the decline of planned obsolescence: “You can buy a VW for \$1700 and you are assured of being regarded as a sharp, brilliant, prudent guy for not spending money on an American car with planned obsolescence.”101 A 1970 article about trends in marketing noted a related change in advertising, which it characterized (in reference to a Volkswagen ad campaign) as the ascent of the theme of substance, or “steak,” over style, or “sizzle.”102

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There also emerged a current of opinion in the early 1970s that consumers had, as a result of bitter experience, become much savvier, having over time developed a resistance to the marketing tricks of big business. In 1974, for example, Melville J. Ulmer, a marketing expert, reviewing a book about growing consumer resistance entitled The Day the Pigs Refused to be Driven to Market, opined that consumers had wised up to the mid-century marketing repertoire of selling techniques, including planned obsolescence. If this assessment is accurate, then the rather mechanical marketing ploy of changing models every year might have become too transparent as a ruse to continue to persuade consumers to trade in last year’s model for a new one. Style changes, in order to do their marketing work, would consequently have to be more subtly indexical of added value, or else more organically connected to the drift of aesthetic taste. Perhaps the sense that people were becoming more knowledgeable and sophisticated presaged the turn in advertising to the use of irony, which presupposes a knowing consumer, wise to the ways of cruder sales pitches.

The waning of planned obsolescence did not, however, mean a return to the simple, functional principles of Fordist product design, exemplified by the model T. Systematic style obsolescence was now a permanent feature of the consumer economy, only implemented in a less regular and formulaic fashion than had been the case in the automobile industry. Moreover, technical obsolescence increased toward the end of the century, with consumer products ever more dependent on fast-changing technology. This produced, as Giles Slade (2006) chillingly charts, a problem of so-called e-waste of horrific and growing proportions. What did ebb, however, is the particular set of concerns about planned obsolescence that had been expressed in the middle years of the century. It is rare in the contemporary world to encounter the opinion, which was common in the 1950s and 1960s, that product changes per se exert an almost coercive efect on the consumer. Nor are rants about built-in product “death dates” to be found nearly as frequently in public discourse. The question arises, therefore, of why these concerns lost much of their force toward the end of the twentieth century. And, indeed, why did they emerge as and when they did earlier in the century?

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In the next two chapter sections, drawing on matters discussed earlier in the book, I consider on a more general and theoretical level the significance of the controversy around planned obsolescence. The sections explore two distinct but related themes. The first, which has been touched on throughout this chapter, is the possible connections between the concern about planned obsolescence and the moral foundations of mid-century corporatist capitalism. The second is what the controversy reveals about the relationship between aesthetics and use value.

1. Planned Obsolescence and the Moral Economy of Mid-century Corporatist Capitalism

There are a number of plausible explanations for the decline in the concern about planned obsolescence from its peak in the 1960s. Although the auto industry backed away somewhat from the practice in the early 1970s, in the economy as a whole planned obsolescence, in the form of frequent model changes, had by that time become ubiquitous. Perhaps by the last quarter of the century the practices associated with planned obsolescence had become so widespread that they, in efect, dropped into the background, becoming part of the taken-for-granted framework of the consumer economy. Alternatively, Detroit’s retreat from yearly model changes might have placated the current of opinion that fixed on that as the most egregious manifestation of planned obsolescence. Or maybe it was simply that any moral disturbance tends, in the absence of further provocations, or because of the intrusion of new ones of an entirely diferent sort, to run its course. Outrage, after all, takes some efort to sustain, and there are many competing demands on people’s energy and attention in modern life. Another possible explanation for the fading of concerns about planned obsolescence is that consumer durables themselves changed in nature, becoming increasingly technological. Consumer durables, construed as technological artifacts, are inscribed in a narrative of inexorable product progress, according to which technical obsolescence is inevitable. And indeed, the rate of actual technical progress, demonstrated for example by the success of Moore’s law at predicting the rate of increase of computer processor speed, must have made the “dynamic” or “progressive obsolescence” interpretation of the rapidity of the consumer product cycle seem more convincing. Perhaps people came to agree with Charles Babbage’s (1832) contention that obsolescence is a natural process in an industrial economy.

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All of these explanations probably have something to them. I want to suggest, however, that there is, in addition, a structural dimension to the rise and fall of the mid-century moral panic around planned obsolescence, which has to do with large scale changes in capitalism. Part of the explanation for the decline in worries about planned obsolescence, particularly as a matter concerning the morality of exchange, is that, from the later 1960s onward, the corporatist arrangements that undergirded the postwar Golden Age era of corporatist capitalism began to unravel. For reasons that are still the subject of much debate among social and economic historians, the relatively stable postwar order, in which economic growth was realized as increasing real wages as well as increasing profits, fell apart in the final decades of the century.103 Real wages, which had been closely tied to productivity rates under collective bargaining arrangements institutionalized by the state, started to stagnate in the early 1970s and by the 1980s had almost flat-lined.

As discussed earlier in the book, there is a tendency among political economists to explain Fordism in terms of the balance of power between labor and capital, mediated by the state.104 Mass production under Fordism, so the argument goes, entailed low unemployment, which made labor more powerful, and therefore better able to secure higher wages. The relative power of labor led to a difusion of purchasing power, which increased aggregate efective demand, and so supported the Fordist system of high-volume mass production. When the balance of class power shifted decisively toward capital, one of the conditions that allowed for a stable system of macroeconomic regulation was thereby undermined. But while this account certainly seems plausible, it would be wrong to assert that the Fordist arrangement just reflected the power of wage earners to push for their interests, for Fordism also had a vital normative dimension. To explain Fordism in terms of a particular balance of class power, in conjunction with a functional model of the state (its function being to maintain economic, social, and political stability) does not account for the specific pattern of economic growth in the postwar years. It fails to account for why labor tended to press for, or at least be satisfied with, increased income rather than more free time. Therefore, it does not explain why productivity gains were converted into wage goods, rather than, as Keynes predicted, a progressively shorter working week. It was the tendency for increases in productivity to lead to increases in real wages that facilitated the emergence of a mass consumption to complement mass production. And that tendency rested in part on an underlying moral framework, centered on the imperative of securing “fair” compensation for labor.

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The stability of the postwar configuration thus reflected not just a balance of economic power but also a degree of consensus on a vision of what a just and fair economy looks like, the roots of which can be at least proximately traced back to the politics and institutional innovations of the New Deal period. There were two sides to the mid-century Fordist moral economy. On the production side, a linking of wages to increasing productivity; on the consumption side, the right to what was regarded as a “reasonable” (therefore fair) amount of use-value in the consumer commodities received in exchange for the wage. It is important to emphasize here that the picture of economic fairness as commensurate exchange of use values was, by the middle part of the century, not just a feature of a union-bound workerist mind-set, contained therefore within the labor movement narrowly conceived. Rather, it underpinned a very widely held opinion that work should be commensurately compensated—a view summed up in the maxim, “a fair day’s work for a fair day’s wage” (which was adopted by the American Federation of Labor as its motto). The mid-century moral and political economy focused on the importance of purchasing power—the capacity of a wage to capture use values—as an evaluative category in economic life. A given amount of labor power is fairly exchanged when it is compensated by an amount of purchasing power deemed to be its equivalent. And the magnitude of the purchasing power of a wage is grounded in the use power (and, therefore, the notional use value) of the commodities it afords.

The high point of the politics of purchasing power came in the 1930s and 1940s. It was in those decades that increasing the purchasing power of the mass of the American population became an explicit political agenda, an active project of organized labor, the state, and significant parts of civil society, especially the consumer movement (which, roughly speaking, represented middle-class sentiment), working in concert. By the later 1940s, the alliance that had been forged between middle-class consumer advocates, the New Deal state, and labor unions had begun to fray somewhat. The interests of labor, seeking higher wages, diverged from those of the middle classes, which were more concerned about the inflation that had begun to increase after the removal of wartime price controls (Jacobs 2005). But the general concern with the buying power of the wage, and its centrality to a corporatist vision of capitalism, continued well into the postwar period. So, too, did the New Deal institutional framework designed to facilitate the maintenance and expansion of buying power—most importantly, collective bargaining arrangements supported by the state, and Keynesian macroeconomic policy. A concatenation of developments—the falling rate of profit, increased international competition, technological change in production, compounded by the oil shocks of the 1970s—led to the dissolution of the postwar corporatist compromise in the last quarter of the century.

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With the collapse of the corporatism of the mid-century period, the last two decades of the twentieth century witnessed the rise in influence of neoliberal ideology. This afirmed the view that wages should be determined solely by market forces, rather than through corporatist notions of objectively fair exchange. At the same time, in the new ideological climate, the consumer was increasingly taken to be by nature a sovereign, self-making agent. The “manipulationist” narrative about the role of marketing in cultivating false needs consequently became increasingly marginalized.

What does this history have to do with planned obsolescence? As I noted, insofar as the term refers to a high rate of consumer product turnover caused by rapid technological change, planned obsolescence did not, in fact, dwindle toward the end of the century. But the idea of planned obsolescence as a ruse of business to swindle consumers out of their hard-earned wages became increasingly sidelined by the newly ascendant neoliberal narrative, according to which the consumer is sovereign and consequently knows best.105 The pointed concern with planned obsolescence, construed as an act of business, directed against the consumer, is then a peculiarly mid-century phenomenon, which has much to do with Fordism as a particular kind of moral order.

I would suggest that the timing of the emergence of the concern over planned obsolescence, as well as the timing of its decline, makes sense, therefore, when put in the context of these changes in the broader character of capitalism. The disquiet about the specter of planned obsolescence coincided with the coalescing of the postwar industrial order—the so-called Golden Age. In that period of the history of capitalism, labor entered into a relatively stable (although often fractious) agreement with business, and the legitimacy of capitalism in general became hinged on the notion that increases in productivity would be shared with workers through increasing real wages, supported by conventions of collective bargaining in industry. This compact between wage earners and their employers was not an easy one, and consumers, who were almost always also wage workers, suspected that the value of the real wage—the purchasing power they received in exchange for their labor—was being eroded by big business employing strategies of planned obsolescence to deprive them of the full use power of the things they bought. In this sense, worries about planned obsolescence were of a piece with worries about inflation eroding the buying power of wages. Much of the energy behind the moral panic about planned obsolescence derived from the suspicion that what capital gives to wage earners with one hand (an increasing nominal wage) is, through planned obsolescence, surreptitiously taken away by the other, through shoddily produced products, or as psychological tricks were deployed to prompt consumers to needlessly replace perfectly good repositories of use value.106 At the root of the concern about planned obsolescence during the “Golden Age” were worries that the labor given at work would not be commensurately compensated. The standardized goods aforded by the wage were suspected of being deliberately deprived of adequate amounts of potential use value, and would, therefore, fail to measure up to the free activity lost through labor. The very strong reaction against the specter of planned obsolescence thus reflected the moral economy, centered on wage labor commensuration, that organized postwar economic life. And when the socioeconomic conditions underlying that moral economy began to fall apart in the last quarter of the century, its normative force became attenuated, and consequently the concern about planned obsolescence faded.

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1. Use Value and Aesthetics

That style obsolescence should have been seen as so problematic is, as noted at the outset of the chapter, on reflection, somewhat perplexing. For why should aesthetics be excluded from considerations of usefulness? If, for example, a consumer chooses to upgrade her car after three years (as was typical for automobiles), then it would be reasonable to assume that the aesthetic benefits of owning the new model justifies its price. That is certainly how an economist would typically explain the consumer’s behavior. And indeed, as we have seen, industry spokespersons often took that interpretation as self-evident and were incredulous that anyone could find objectionable yearly model changes for which there seemed to be genuine demand. And yet the attacks on planned “style” or “psychological” obsolescence presupposed a categorical distinction between the aesthetic and functional properties of products, with “real value” accruing to consumers only from the latter. The normative force of that distinction is reflected in the strategy followed by industry to justify frequent model changes by claiming that they entailed substantive (that is, functional) improvements, as opposed to “superficial,” merely aesthetic changes.

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