After reading Andrew Wernick's thesis about promotional culture, it seems to me that his understanding is limited to the capitalist system. For him the existence of promotional culture is related to the existing market relations under capitalism where commodities are exchanged for the universal exchange value – money. The capitalist mode of production depends on the market where the process of exchange occurs that drives its productivity – the capitalist strives to lower the cost of the products’ use value in order to gain higher exchange value and this is how the need for profits brings the need for mass production. Industrialized mass production does not require skilled labor of artisans where the use value of the product is high and the quantity is limited, instead we have cheap labor that produces numerous quantities of the same “crap”. Advertising is one of the mechanisms that capitalism employs to solve the problem of demand – making sure that the mass produced supply of “crap” finds its demand. But capitalism is not just an economic system, it is a system of social relations that according to Marx needs constantly to revolutionize the means of production, it is not a static system, on the contrary it is a system in constant motion. In its current stage late capitalism is characterized by the leading role of the production of immaterial products – meaning, symbols and values; entertainment and advertising now usually work in symbiosis, some even add news. At the same time, the dominant neoliberal discourse treats all aspects of social life as a transaction (exchange for something, not necessarily money but the logic of this transaction stems from market exchange, which entails monetary reward). If the market functions in an instrumental manner to condition behavior, which then resonates in our cultural practices, Wernick is concerned with the question of degree rather than origin of promotional culture. Promotional culture is a culture in which the representation of the self is prompted by the expectation of “getting something in return”. Even if the reasoning behind certain behavior is not necessarily directly linked to the market, it signifies market characteristics, such as commodifying sexual experience – shopping for sex in the club – this goes with expectations to follow certain cultural models (types of clothes, ways of acting, language code, etc.) when this type of transaction occurs. Of course we should not necessarily examine these cultural practices form an ethical angle and condemn them. Yet, if we want to understand the meaning of such practices, we need to know how they came about.
Where can we trace the origin of promotion? Probably, where we have to search for such human trends as individualism and competition, though, in my opinion, those are learned and are characteristics of the human condition, rather than some primordial “human nature”. However, if we are to take Wernick’s definition, then we should look whether this is motivated by some exchange transaction. Political ideologies can advocate certain causes driven by altruistic motives, even if they have to resolve to the tools of promotional culture in the process. Again, I don’t think that we should put a negative sign on all forms of promotional culture. If promotional culture permeates our everyday life then the attempt to escape from it will be counterproductive. What we can do in return is acknowledge its dominant influence in our formation as individuals and use that to our advantage. How? Well, one way is to use promotional practices to promote political and economic change, like many activist do now but is it really working?
I grew up in a communist state where the allocation of economic resources was a top-down process. The need for central control of the Party over the means of production, in order to control the population, led to the economy of scarcity. All sorts of products were hardly available, except may be books (the Party’s emphasis on education was a crucial part of its ideological line). On a lighter note, I think, that’s why people in the Eastern bloc read a lot, not because of some unquenchable thirst for knowledge, but because at least the supply of books was abundant. Logically, advertising was to a great part unknown. Did promotional culture exist? Hard to tell. In our society other types of practices were of higher importance. The higher you were in the ranks of bureaucracy or the closer you were to bureaucrats, the more opportunity you had to acquire products. This encouraged behavior that demonstrated much different loyalty from the one existing in capitalism. A CEO demonstrates loyalty to the shareholders of a corporation and makes sure that he/she follows the rules and laws of this corporate culture. A communist bureaucrat in a top-down planned economy does not have the incentive to make sure that the state enterprise that he is in charge of is operating successfully as long as the statistics show so. His goal is to acquire more state revenue which gives him the power to distribute it to others in return for loyalty. This model characterized all strata of communist society. Thus, favors were done in exchange for loyalty. That is also on a level of interpersonal relationships. That is how the system bred nepotism and corruption. The rule of law does not matter as long as you have friends where needed. In this case if you are an idealist you become the loser, but this seems to be the case in any system, I dare say.
What can we say about this in relation to the main question? Well, let’s try a hypothetical example. Say, you work for the Academy of Science and you need funds to work on a research. Let’s limit this to social sciences or humanities. You come up with a very important discovery and need to publish it. What will matter whether your research sees the ray of light is not whether you mange to promote the importance of your research to a private company that can fund it, with the rest of your colleagues emphasizing on your credentials in the process. The state provides the funds and especially in these spheres the state provides funds only for what it deems important for sustaining power. Who convinces the state what is important then? This usually is the director of the AS, who is very high in the Party apparatus and in most cases has no clue about science. This is a person who most likely you deeply despise for his/her one-dimensional simple-mindedness, lack of sophistication, profanity and ignorance, whose only merit is his/her murky past as an “active fighter against fascism”. And this is precisely the person you need to be in good terms with by demonstrating loyalty, praising him/her of their great scientific genius, but most importantly by doing him/her favors, such as spying on and smearing colleagues who happen to exercise independent thought. It is obvious that in this type of environment independent and original thinkers were not tolerated.
At the same time me, a child in this system, was taught to believe that promoting oneself is very, very bad. Our education went under the slogan that “modesty makes a person beautiful” (which by the way has nothing to do with Soviet communism, it is Tolstoy’s saying).
As for the riots, I don’t think that the riots can be easily explained as being anti-capitalist, or even anti-consumerist but they are certainly characterized by a great deal of discontent with the current capitalist system. The economic and financial crisis happened as a result of neoliberal policies that completely disregarded the need for some degree of social safety, something that Roosevelt grasped in the 1930s. Also, we should not diminish the importance of the environmental crisis and the role of environmental activists in these riots. I am careful when I use the word anarchism, simply because it is not a clear cut political ideology, like Marxism for example. Also, contrary to Marxism, anarchism does not claim to know all the answers. Many angry youth name themselves anarchists without having any clear notion of the anarchist school of thought. At the same time, people from all sorts of life who are engaged in anarchist practices – exercising direct democracy in local politics, growing organic food, participating in bike collectives, car pooling, various co-ops, will laugh at the idea of being anarchist.
