The Guardian 5 March, 2008
Culture and Life
by Rob Gowland
Drooling over
conspicuous consumption
It was rather sad, wasn’t it, to see the brou-haha that was made over the visit to our shores of Cunard’s latest luxury liner, the Queen Victoria? One expects the capitalist media to go all gooey-eyed at the sight of ornate luxury that only the rich can enjoy but ordinary people were drawn into the love fest too.
On the train going home after the rally in Macquarie Street against the privatisation of NSW electricity, I sat opposite a woman who complained of how tired she was, having spent the morning jostling the crowds to look at — from a distance — the two queens, the QV and the QE2.
She regaled us with the exact time each ship had arrived in the harbour and where they had gone or were now going. This was a bit unreliable, for although she claimed the QV was on its way to Melbourne, it seemed the QE2 was going to Alice Springs, which would certainly have been a most interesting cruise!
There is no doubt that both ships are triumphs of human ingenuity and skill. To build a luxury hotel and then make it float is definitely an achievement.
But to fill this floating palace with people whose only claim to consideration is their acquisition of wealth is a travesty. I saw one report that cabins on the QV were $1,000 a night. The squandering of wealth in this way is an insult to the people whose muscle and brains (and all too frequently whose blood) actually created that wealth, the ordinary working people whom the exorbitant prices of the QV are intended to keep out.
The ruling class, of course, are past masters at exploiting any and everything for their own advantage, even the fact that they have wealth the mass of the people don’t. They flaunt their jewels, their designer gowns, their limousines, their polo ponies, their yachts, their large and opulent homes, and in the capitalist world still get away with it.
They have learnt over numerous generations now that wowing the common folk with their extravagant expenditure, their conspicuous consumption, can be a means of impressing people with the idea that the ruling class is not only privileged but special, favoured of god, somehow entitled to a bigger share of the good life than other, presumably lesser, people.
They utilize a whole army of specialists to promote their way of life as something to be envied, but also as something that is rightfully theirs. The Adelaide Advertiser, in an article on the mansions built or being built by the state’s "business leaders", last month had the barefaced audacity to assert that these worthies are spending "their hard-earned millions on developing some of Adelaide’s most imposing homes".
They are not "their hard earned" millions, they are stolen millions, stolen from the workers who actually created that wealth but who then had it appropriated by employers and their employers’ fellow business leaders.
These capitalists are referred to elsewhere in the same article as "home-grown business heroes" no less, which rather devalues the concept of hero, doesn’t it?
To praise a pirate for being hardworking is to miss the point of his piracy, surely. But if you tell the people often enough that the ones with money have it by right — or, even more inaccurately, by dint of hard work — you will convince at least some of them, especially if you keep alternative explanations out of the media.
Hence we have articles like the one in the Advertiser, TV programs like the notorious Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, and extensive media hype given to visits by opulent rich-people’s play things like the Queen Victoria.
Rich people do not become rich by virtue of being good or generous or even diligent, but by paying their employees less than the value of the goods and services produced or provided by those same employees.
The boss class know this very well: it’s the reason they are always trying to raise productivity or hours of work (but not wages), for they know that once a worker’s output has covered his wages, everything extra that he produces is sheer cop for the boss.
They also know that so long as the lion’s share of the nation’s wealth is held by a small minority which, despite the assertions of the capitalist media, did not produce that wealth, there is always the potential that one day the majority might rise up and demand the return of their riches.
Since it is impossible to hide the extravagance of the wealthy from the people, the ruling class resorts to the lying services of the "Public Relations industry" to persuade people that it is normal and acceptable to envy the rich for having more — and better — things than you do.
Envy, the ruling class can tolerate (even welcome); what they cannot tolerate is the concept of stripping them of their wealth and the sources of their wealth and returning it to the workers, the concept of socialist revolution.
That’s why they work so hard to get the crowds to flock to the harbour and admire the QV. Because it distracts people from thinking about taking over the ship as a rest home for asbestos victims, or a children’s holiday camp afloat, or a combined cruise liner and sanatorium for trade union members.
But it won’t distract them forever!