Political Economy of the Aphenomenal Model:
THE HONEY → SUGAR → SACCHARIN®→ASPARTAME® , OR HSS®A®, PRINCIPLE
Introduction
We are compelled to live out our lives in an aphenomenal universe. One of its features is the “Honey → Sugar → Saccharin®→Aspartame®” principle [1].
The central idea captured in the form of this principle concerns the degradation of the natural qualities of goods and services through intensified refining. Used originally without further external processing, materials taken originally from the natural environment (including even the living thoughts of human beings) become degraded step-by-step as a result of adding ever-further stages of external processing. This can carry on potentially indefinitely.
It is the aphenomenal quality of this principle that renders it so useful to the status-quo. This aphenomenality resides in its unquestioned underlying assumption that further refinement (or refining) must in the end improve quality [2].
Here we propose to discuss some aspects of the political economy of this principle.
I. The HSS®A® Principle & Monopoly Right
Greater refining is not a function of the increased application of creative human labouring power by the actual producers. On the contrary, it is a function of the owners and managers of production investing more in fixed capital, to replace creative living labour with more advanced machines. These machines are actually accumulated labouring power congealed in machine form, i.e., dead labour. In effect, dead labour is being employed to replace living labour [3].
The refining displaces natural elements of the original source material. Often the replacements are components in molecular forms that either would not be found in nature either at all, or in that particular physical phase, or in the presence of so-called catalysts comprised from laboratory-created combinations not normally present in, or characteristic to, nature. This displacement marks one of the main yet intangible manifestations of the degradation of quality after upgraded refining [4]. On the one hand, regardless of the relative increase in capital-intensiveness, an absolute increase in “total” labour content, i.e., of living labour plus dead labour, is indeed possible and is effected in practice by these means. At the same time, however, that absolute increase in “labour” content incidental to the additional “refining” effort neither prevents nor arrests the tendency for natural components to decrease relatively or absolutely compared to synthesised components in the end-product. What else is taking place within this transition? Exercising power on behalf of a monopoly, oligopoly or cartel, managers and owners of production are dictating the use-value of the commodities that they produce and market [5]. The ability to dictate how commodities will be used, and what value they have in use, derives from the exercise of monopoly right [6].
The capacity to dictate use-value by “over-engineering” at the point of production marks a major break with the situation that prevailed before that point. With the emergence of monopolies, oligopolies and cartels, there were major efforts undertaken to deploy mass advertising campaigns to invent new social wants which monopolies then fulfilled with products [7]. The purchasing power for consumption available in the markets that grew in this period of the 1950s and 1960s was based in the Third World, and mostly among the previously very impoverished at that. American levels of consumption were not going to become available any time too soon in these areas. The need and ability of the American system to expand on a global scale was also blocked by the presence of the Soviet camp. In the bipolar world of that time, monopolies could secure superprofits “at the margin” by inventing new needs for new products as opportunities arose. However, monopoly right was not in a position to trump public right, and a wide array of product standards were indeed regulated by various government agencies, thus posing a potentially punishing financial risk to monopolies that attempted to bully the markets with products that failed to acquire approval from these bodies [8].
Pre-monopoly capitalism had developed and spread across the world by focusing entirely and exclusively on the generation and capture of the exchange-value of commodities. Commodities were a vector, a delivery-vehicle, for this exchange value, in the same way that the modern cigarette was redefined by the U.S. tobacco giants in the 1950s as a nicotine delivery vehicle, or that the anopheles mosquito is described as a vector for the spread of malaria. Capitalists produced commodities to piggyback on these uses and needs which already existed among the populace in order to generate and capture the exchange-value congealed in these commodities. The uses and needs were labelled “demand”, the piggy-backing operation was labelled “supply” -- and voilà! neo-classical economics was born.
In the global economy of the post-bipolar world, on the other hand, monopoly right asserts its priority over public right. It does this by redefining many of the terms of conditions of the economics-of-scale to develop or apply in determining how far, in each case, to redefine and manipulate use-value. For example, honey is perceptibly “sugar”-y to taste. We want the sugar, but honey is also anti-bacterial, and cannot rot. Therefore, the rate at which customers will have to return for the next supply is much lower and slower than the rate at which customers would have to return to resupply themselves with, say, refined sugar. In other cases – in Bangladesh, for example – the amount of honey available in the market is extended by adding refined sugar. The content of this “economic” logic then takes over and drives what happens to honey and sugar as commodities. While there are natural limits to how far honey as a natural product can actually be commodified, sugar is refined to become addictive so the consumer becomes hooked and the producer’s profit is secured. What never enters into considerations of these economics of scale is the matter of intention. Here lies the heart of darkness in a world dictated by monopoly right [9].
II. Economics of Scale under Monopoly Right
There are two especially crucial premises of the economics-of-scale under monopoly right that lie hidden within the notion of “upgrading by refining”.
The first premise of economics of scale under monopoly right is that unit costs of production can be lowered (and unit profit therefore expanded) by increasing output Q per unit time t , i.e., by driving ∂Q/∂t unconditionally in a positive direction. If relatively free competition still prevailed, this would not arise even as a passing consideration. In an economy lacking monopolies, oligopolies and-or cartels dictating effective demand by manipulating supply, unit costs of production remain mainly a function of some given level of technology. Once a certain proportion of investment in fixed-capital (equipment and ground-rent for the production facility) becomes the norm generally among the various producers competing for customers in the same market, the unit costs of production cannot fall or be driven arbitrarily below a certain floor level without risking business loss. The unit cost thus becomes downwardly inelastic.
The unit cost of production can become downwardly elastic, i.e., capable of falling readily below any asserted floor price, under two conditions:
1. during moments of technological transformation of the industry, in which producers who are first to lower their unit costs by using more advanced machinery will gain market shares, temporarily, at the expense of competitors; or
2. in conditions where financially stronger producers absorb financially weakened competitors. In neoclassical models which assume competitiveness in the economy, this second circumstance is associated with the temporary cyclical crisis. This is the crisis that breaks out from time to time in periods of extended oversupply or weakening of demand. In reality, contrary to the assumptions of the neoclassical economic models, the impacts of monopolies, oligopolies and cartels have entirely displaced those of free competition and have become normal rather than the exception. Under such conditions, the lowering of unit costs of production (and expansion thereby of unit profit) by increasing output Q per unit time t , i.e., by driving ∂Q/∂t unconditionally in a positive direction, is no longer an occasional, and exceptional, tactical opportunity. It is a permanent policy option: monopolies, oligopolies and cartels manipulate supply and demand because they can.
The second premise of the economics of scale possibly under monopoly right is that only the desired portion of Q end-product is accounted as having tangible economic, and therefore also intangible social, “value”, while any unwanted consequences – e.g., degradation of, or risks to, public health, damage(s) to the environment, etc. – are discounted and dismissed as “faux frais” [false, incidental costs] of production. Here it becomes possible to glimpse a node around which resistance could begin to form, because popular rejection of this position gives rise to consciousness about the unsustainability of the present order. These methods of continuing indefinitely to refine nature out by substituting ever more elaborate chemical “equivalents” hitherto unknown in the natural environment have started to take their toll. The narrow concerns of the owners and managers of production are seen to be at odds with the needs of society. Irrespective of the private character of their appropriation of the fruits of production, based on concentrating so much power in so few hands, production itself has become far more social. The industrial-scale production of all goods and services as commodities has spread everywhere from the metropolises of Europe and North America to the remotest Asian countryside, deserts of Africa and jungle regions of South America. This economy is not only global in scope, but social in its essential character. Regardless of the readiness of the owners and managers to dismiss and abdicate responsibility for the environmental and human health costs of their unsustainable approach, these costs have become an increasingly urgent concern to societies in general. In this regard, the HSS®A® principle becomes a key and most useful guideline for sorting out what is truly sustainable for the long-term from what is undoubtedly unsustainable.
As monopoly right attempts further to trump public right, the human being already transformed ever further into the merest consumer of products is a being marginalised from most of the possibilities and potentialities of the very fact of his/her existence. This marginalisation is a further important feature of the HSS®A® principle. There are numerous things individuals can do that modulate or otherwise affect the intake of honey and its impacts, but there’s precious little – indeed: nothing – that one can do about Aspartame® except drink it.
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Notes
1. This principle illuminates much that is obscure about the laws of motion in this universe. It is elaborated explicitly in a Note to be published soon in a forthcoming volume of the Journal of Nature Science and Sustainable Technology (available through Nova Science Publishers).
2. The correct principle was that the increased application to materials and products of creative human labouring power by the actual producers should lead to a general improvement in product quality. The aphenomenal version is a distortion.
3. At the level of financial accounting, this “greater refining” reflects an increase, either relative or absolute, in the expenditure on such components of fixed capital compared to the outlay in wages for the human workforce. This transformation is what conventional economics discourse and financial press reports refer to as “capital intensive” industrial development, which they contrast favourably to “labour intensive” forms that only Third World economies can afford.
4. To our knowledge, the peculiar feature of the political economy of this reality is remarked nowhere to date.
5. This is another peculiarly intangible transformation within the political economy of such “refining” reality that also remains still unremarked anywhere.
6. Monopoly right is often only partially described or encapsulated in such terms as “privatisation” and “outsourcing”. It is essentially a usurpation of public, social rights, and this usurpation within the present stage of global economic development is something that has emerged with a vengeance and ruthlessness since the disappearance of the Soviet bloc and its COMECON and related semi-barter structures within international trade.
7. For example, the popular American writer Vance Packard was already documenting many aspects of this phenomenon in his bestselling book of 1957, The Hidden Persuaders. With the rise of these monopolies, advertising became a big part of mass marketing and the aphenomenal creation of new “needs”. The aim and conditions, however, in which these developments took flight included a certain stagnation or “plateau”-ing in market growth for established necessities like household appliances, cars, etc., took off. Further constraining the extent of this expansion was what happened to the weight of the consumption level -- disposable income -- available in the largest home markets of the capitalist world, in the United States and western Europe, relative to other parts of the world.
8. The works of Vance Packard and other social liberals in fact became rallying cries for more such regulation.
9. As a result of discarding any consideration of intentions, certain questions go unasked. No one asks whether any degree of external processing of what began as a natural sugar source can or will improve its quality as a sweetener. Exactly what that process, or those processes, would be is also unasked. No sugar refiner is worried about how the marketing of his product in excess is contributing to a diabetes epidemic. The advertising that is crucial to marketing this product certainly won’t raise this question. Guided by the “logic” of the economies of scale, and the marketing effort that must accompany it, greater processing is assumed to be and accepted as being ipso facto good, or better. As a consequence of the selectivity inherent in such “logic”, any other possibility within the overall picture – such as the possibility that, as we go from honey to sugar to saccharin to aspartame, we go from something entirely safe for human consumption to something cancerously toxic – does not even enter the frame. Such considerations could prove very threatening to the health of some group’s big business in the short term. All this is especially devastatingly clear when it comes to, say, the economics of crude oil as an energy source. Widely and falsely believed to be toxic before it is touched by a refiner, refined petroleum products are utterly toxic but not to be questioned since they provide the economy’s lifeblood.
Edible natural products in their natural state are already good enough for humans to consume at some safe level and process further internally in ways useful to the organism. We are not likely normally to overconsume any unrefined natural food source. However, the refining that accompanies the transformation of natural food sources into processed-food commodities also introduces components that interfere with the normal ability we would have to push a natural food source aside after some definite point. Additionally, with externally processed “refinements” of some natural source, the chances increase that the form in which the product is eventually consumed must include compounds that are not characteristic in nature anywhere and which the human organism cannot usefully process without excessively stressing the digestive system and-or other parts of the organism.
