To the editor,
Is there a Marxian understanding of the adage: “They don’t make them like they used to”?
Cheers,
Helen.
[Sent via email]
Hi Helen,
This question reflects noticeable shifts in production over time, beyond simple nostalgia for the past. Walter Benjamin wrote an influential essay touching on this subject in 1935, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” He describes the deteriorating aesthetic of artwork as mechanical processes were able to churn out assembly line copies of artifacts. Aura, derived from the uniqueness of a piece and the social and spatial location of where it was produced, is obliterated by machines. He writes that, “even with the most perfect reproduction, one thing stands out: the here and now of a work of art—its unique existence in the place where it is at this moment…The here and now of the original constitute the abstract idea of its genuineness.”1
Even earlier, in 1818, Arthur Schopenhauer arrived at a similar conclusion as he observed the early fruits of industrial output:
The apprehended Idea is the true and only source of every genuine work of art…Machines mince very fine and mix up what is put into them, but they can never digest it, so that the constituent elements of others can always be found again, and picked out and separated from the mixture.2
Whether it is Benjamin’s aura or Schopenhauer’s “apprehended Idea,” both thinkers identified a romantic fault line whereby products once had these characteristics and then did not.
But what to say of today, now that the artisan guild and independent craftsman have been extirpated from the economic landscape? What is being registered with “they don’t make ‘em like they used to” is an unfavourable comparison between commodities of today versus some vague past era, as in film, automobiles, appliances or furniture. But industrial production has been dominant for centuries now, as Schopenhauer attests.
As usual, it is Karl Marx who is able to transcend the particularities of Benjamin’s aura, Schopenhauer’s Idea and plain old subjective nostalgia. He explains commodity fetishism this way:
A commodity is therefore a mysterious thing, simply because in it the social character of men’s labour appears to them as an objective character stamped upon the product of that labour; because the relation of the producers to the sum total of their own labour is presented to them as a social relation, existing not between themselves, but between the products of their labour. This is the reason why the products of labour become commodities, social things whose qualities are at the same time perceptible and imperceptible by the senses.3
For example, Benjamin bemoans the transition from the live theatre to the recorded film—just as Schopenhauer regrets the replacement of artisanal textiles to the power loom’s churn. What they are witnessing is the abstraction of labour by machines as well as the deterioration of the social relations in which their own lives were situated. Nostalgia for the past necessarily includes a level of discomfort with the present.
As capitalism develops, it is the logic of exchange-value that drives the production process. Labour becomes more and more distant from the consumer. Newer technology, like artificial intelligence, extinguishes a range of human inputs. Varying combinations of sweatshops, resource extraction techniques and machine calibrations are utilized to produce everything from smartphones to dollar store items. Planned obsolescence is integrated into the very design of commodities, like a kill-switch to force more consumption.
As it stands, profit is at the heart of production. This is why commodity production contains an accelerating tendency toward social deracination—the outsourcing of jobs, predatory lending, vulture capitalism, rampant financial speculation and unaffordable costs of living. An economic primacy of use-values must be developed in order to replace the indifferent pursuit of profit.
Human flourishing should be at the heart of production and democratic decision making. When this occurs, “they don’t make them like they used to” acquires a different meaning: the very things that once deducted from our time and wallets now form the bedrock of leisure and productivity.
In sols.
Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (Penguin Books, 2008): 5. ↩︎
Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, Volume One (Dover Publications, 1969): 235. ↩︎
Karl Marx, Capital Volume One (Penguin, 1992): 164-5. ↩︎