Alienation in the Post Cold War Era
Chapter 8
The Market Personality Today:
The Further Transformation of Human Beings Into Things
(page 5)

[Click here to go back to page 4.]

The Evolution of the Market Personality

In the nineteenth century, the productive forces of capitalism were still at a fairly early stage of development. Large factories, with assembly lines capable of producing commodities in massive quantities, were not extensively developed until later on, in the twentieth century. People were still riding horses. Cars, trucks, airplanes, and other forms of mass transportation, which are critical for transporting commodities on the scale needed to support mass consumption, were not available back then. Thus, economic exchanges and markets were confined to a large degree to the immediate local area. Without the huge department stores and malls of today, the rich and the middle class tended to hold onto their money, and not to spend it as much as they do today. In those days, beyond food and necessities, purchases involved mainly real estate, household furnishings, and domestic animals.

Communication was also quite primitive, in comparison to the twentieth century. The average person had neither a telephone nor a radio, and TV had not yet been invented. Given the low level of communication and transport during this very early stage of modern capitalism, the influence of the central government and the enforcement of law and order by the police were weak. Open corruption and the buying of officials were commonplace.

These conditions helped to create the “rugged individualism” that was typical of the next stage of capitalism – the early modern era, during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This period was marked by the initial rapid development of industrialization. The original industrialists were unabashedly aggressive, cunning, and ruthless. Their character reflects the era of early capitalism that was advancing rapidly and aggressively. The development of a character that displayed open aggressiveness was a standard way to advance up the social ladder and succeed. A selfish, individualistic ego, competing for dominance, could play a central and open role because the personal and emotional “security” of people in this period was not associated, as it is today, with the features of a consumer who is trying to become a likable commodity.

During this early modern period, the “security” of the middle classes was based on making money at the expense of others and hoarding goods – not the ceaseless buying of new commodities and discarding them quickly for new ones that is associated with the “pleasant” consumer of the mid-twentieth century. Because making money at the expense of others and climbing up the social ladder were acknowledged goals, it was socially acceptable to be openly cunning and ruthless. There was more frankness then about egotism in human encounters because the camouflage of the “agreeable” market personality was not a major consideration in human relationships. Stepping on people or stabbing former friends in the back was considered quite legitimate.

This type of personality is displayed in thousands of Western movies, in which money and guns buy officials and the control of the local area. These movies may exaggerate this individualistic character for the purpose of entertainment, but their essence is true. Moreover, this character type was not confined to the American West. Such people existed in the U.S. cities as well.

The character that enabled a man to become a “success” at the beginning of the twentieth century is described very well in the novel Martin Eden by Jack London. The book is a fictionalized version of London’s own life: to become a famous writer and advance from the working class to the upper classes, the hero had to rely to a large degree on the innovative cunning of individualism. Martin Eden was a great believer in Herbert Spencer, who twisted and reduced Darwin’s theory of evolution to the simplified notion of the “survival of the fittest.” With such beliefs Martin Eden experienced most people as opponents that he had to outwit – sometimes in a purely aggressive way – to survive and eventually achieve fame. While he himself had a good heart, the social environment that reinforced his philosophical notions in regard to Spencer gave him no other choice. Once he finally became famous and rich, Martin Eden was completely distrustful toward people and he lost the desire to live.

The aggressive and extremely individualistic character of the early modern period started to change in the mid-twentieth century, as the capitalist system developed its productive forces even further. In the 1920s, communications and transportation developed by leaps and bounds. By the 1940s, telephones, cars, and radios had become commonplace in ordinary people’s lives.

The period from the mid-1930s to the early 1950s saw the rapid development of mass consumer goods. Factories with huge assembly lines started to produce commodities geared toward consumption on a massive scale. Automobiles came of out of these factories like hot rolls from a bakery. By the end of this relatively short period, the abundance of commodities had perfected the development of the consumer personality. The emphasis was now on getting consumers to buy as many goods as possible, in the shortest possible time, by luring them to the new shopping Mecca — the department store. The key was to be nice and amenable in order to seduce people to buy, buy, buy. Hence the development of the superficial market personality that was based on buying and selling mass commodities.

It was not an accident that the great strikes of the 1930s, which formed the industrial unions — the CIO — coincided with the beginning of a change in the individualistic character. On one hand, the development of large factories and rapid communication encouraged the human capacity for greater solidarity against exploitation and injustice. But there was another side to these developments. Commodities that were produced on a scale that had been unthinkable in earlier times assumed a new dimension — as the means to forget and escape. Consumers started to identify to a greater extent with the commodities that they bought. By the 1930s, members of the middle class could walk into a huge department store and buy a new coat, saying to themselves, “I feel better about myself because of my new coat.”

Those who did not have the money to buy expensive coats could at least buy a ticket to a movie where they would fantasize about movie stars and their elegant lives. The 1930s and 1940s were the era of the big fancy movie “palaces.” The people in a neighborhood gathered on the weekends in these ornate theaters to forget their misery and identify with the magic characters on the screen. The entertainment industry began to play an important role in the commodification and manipulations of people’s emotions. When one identifies with the flawless hero on the screen, one forgets how anxious, lonely and helpless one remains in one’s own colorless life.

This trend of escapism was accompanied by a growing sense of isolation and internal loneliness in the big cities. By the early 1960s this was acknowledged by serious sociologists.[6] On the one hand, people depended increasingly on materialist consumption to feel “okay” about themselves and their lot in life. But on the other hand, people grew increasingly alienated because social “happiness” became ever more associated with the exchange and consumption of lifeless products by isolated, atomized individuals who had lost touch with their human empowerment. Without this empowerment, one could stay “sane” only by following the behavior of the majority: by developing one’s social and psychological behavior from the perspective of a packaged commodity, in which the consumption of goods, “fun,” TV shows, and superficial social activities are considered norms of modern behavior. This is so even if the norms produce a sick culture.

[Click here to continue to page 6; click here to go back to page 1.]


[6] See, for example, The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character by David Riesman.