You Can’t Handicraft the Apocalypse: The Invidious Consequences of “Opting Out“

ABSTRACT

For subjects of neoliberal authoritarianism, the precariousness of everyday life is amplified in the face of catastrophic climate change. Rather than build networks of solidarity to shape a new world, authoritarian neoliberalism encourages antisocial individualistic schemes to weather the storm by valorizing individuals who can prepare themselves for the worst. This essay extends Thorstein Veblen’s critique of the Handicraft Movement of the early twentieth century to explain the appeal of prepping, as well as its inadequacy in the face of catastrophe. Veblen shows how the Handicraft Movement was merely another way to conspicuously consume. This essay echoes that critique and recasts prepping as handicrafting the apocalypse, conspicuously consuming even at the end of the world. It shows the inadequacy in the face of an existential threat and concludes with a dialogue between Veblen and Bogdanov to theorize consciously directing industrial production toward democratic ends.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

¹ Andrew Szasz, Shopping Our Way to Safety (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2009); Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (New York, NY: Vintage Books, 2003).

² David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2005); Philip Mirowski and Dieter Plehwe (eds), The Road from Mont Pelerin: The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009); Ulrich Beck, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity (Newbury Park, CA: SAGE Publications, 1992); Gérard Duménil and Dominique Lévy, The Crisis of Neoliberalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011); Jason Hackworth, The Neoliberal City: Governance, Ideology, and Development in American Urbanism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006).

³ Bradley J. Macdonald, “William Morris and the Vision of Ecosocialism,” Contemporary Justice Review 7:3 (2004), pp. 287–304.

⁴ Joseph Dorfman, Thorstein Veblen and His America (New York, NY: A.M. Kelley, 1961); Sidney Plotkin and Rick Tilman, The Political Ideas of Thorstein Veblen (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011); Sidney Plotkin (ed.), The Anthem Companion to Thorstein Veblen (New York, NY: Anthem Press, 2016); Russell H. Bartley and Sylvia Erickson Bartley, “The Metaphysical World of Thorstein Veblen: Of and Beyond the Here and Now,” in Sidney Plotkin (ed.), The Anthem Companion to Thorstein Veblen (New York, NY: Anthem Press, 2016), pp. 101–28; Colin Campbell, “Conspicuous Confusion? A Critique of Veblen’s Theory of Conspicuous Consumption,” Sociological Theory 13:1 (1995), pp. 37–47.

⁵ Michael Spindler, Veblen And Modern America: Revolutionary Iconoclast (London, UK: Pluto Press, 2002).

⁶ Sidney Plotkin, “Thorstein Veblen’s Elusive Project,” in Sidney Plotkin (ed.), The Anthem Companion to Thorstein Veblen (New York, NY: Anthem Press, 2016), pp. 1–20.

⁷ John D. Kelly, “Reigniting the Anthropology of Capitalism: Returning to Veblen, after Postmodernism, after Postcoloniality,” in Sidney Plotkin (ed.), The Anthem Companion to Thorstein Veblen (New York, NY: Anthem Press, 2016), p. 178.

⁸ Evgeny Morozov, “Making It,” The New Yorker (January 5, 2014), available online at: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/01/13/making-it-2. Morozov also looks ahead and recasts “hacking” as a kind of handicraft for the digital age but notes many of the same limitations that Veblen does.

⁹ Thorstein Veblen, Essays in Our Changing Order (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1997).

¹⁰ Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of Business Enterprise (C. Scribner’s Sons, 1915).

¹¹ Ibid.; Robert Kirsch, “The ‘Digital Revolution’ Reconsidered,” New Political Science 38:1 (2016), pp. 100–15; Rick Tilman, “The Frankfurt School and the Problem of Social Rationality in Thorstein Veblen,” History of the Human Sciences 12:1 (1999), pp. 91–109.

¹² While it goes beyond the scope of this essay, Veblen’s conception of “instincts” are not necessarily biological imperatives, but cultural teloi that humanity sets for itself given a certain set of material facts that can be empowered or frustrated.

¹³ Thorstein Veblen, The Instinct of Workmanship: And the State of Industrial Arts (New York, NY: Macmillan, 1914), p. 256.

¹⁴ Veblen, The Instinct of Workmanship.

¹⁵ Ibid., 276.

¹⁶ Veblen, The Instinct of Workmanship.

¹⁷ Ibid., 268.

¹⁸ Veblen, The Instinct of Workmanship.

¹⁹ Ross E. Mitchell, “Learning from Veblen’s Masterless Man for Grassroots Democratic Change,” in Sidney Plotkin (ed.), The Anthem Companion to Thorstein Veblen (New York, NY: Anthem Press, 2016), p. 239.

²⁰ Veblen, The Instinct of Workmanship.

²¹ Plotkin and Tilman, The Political Ideas of Thorstein Veblen, p. 182.

²² Veblen’s analysis indicates he would not be surprised by the accelerated growth of the military industrial complex or staggering levels of military spending.

²³ Veblen, The Theory of Business Enterprise.

²⁴ Herbert Marcuse, “Some Social Implications of Modern Technology,” Studies in Philosophy and Social Science 9:1 (1941), pp. 414–39; J. L. Simich and Rick Tilman, “Critical Theory and Institutional Economics: Frankfurt’s Encounter with Veblen,” Journal of Economic Issues 14:3 (1980), pp. 631–48; Kirsch, “The ‘Digital Revolution’ Reconsidered.”

²⁵ While Veblen was known for building his own furniture, it is likely that his upbringing in rural Minnesota was enough to shape his own habits of thought that handicrafting an agricultural existence was grueling, and there was much to be said about the release from drudgery that industrial production represented.

²⁶ Here the insights of Theory of the Leisure Class begin to broaden their scope. The ability of the rich to display their wealth by showing a disdain for labor and an ability or willingness to sumptuously consume is not a matter of consumer (ir)rationality, but is an archaic holdover from other modes of production, where ruling classes were compelled to display their ability to abstain from labor in various ways. Later in his career, particularly in his Theory of the Business Enterprise, Veblen argued that in the machine process, one such atavistic holdover was “sabotage.” In Veblen’s telling, the machine process produced two classes: managers and engineers. Engineers were geared toward fulfilling the instinct of workmanship and making useful things for the ends of life, but managers were concerned with profits. As such, managers would sabotage the industriousness of engineers by inflating prices, advertising, and planned obsolescence through shoddy production practices.

²⁷ Oscar Lovell Triggs, Chapters in the History of the Arts and Crafts Movement (Chicago, IL: Bohemia Guild of the Industrial Art League, 1902), p. 58.

²⁸ Veblen, Essays in Our Changing Order, p. 195.

²⁹ Ibid.

³⁰ Veblen, The Theory of Business Enterprise.

³¹ Veblen, Essays in Our Changing Order, p. 197.

³² Ibid., p. 198.

³³ Ibid., p. 196.

³⁴ Ibid.

³⁵ Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class, (ed.), Martha Banta (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2009).

³⁶ Veblen, Essays in Our Changing Order, p. 196.

³⁷ While this sentiment might go beyond the analysis Veblen proposed, there is nevertheless an economic aesthetic here. The supposed aesthetic development of the Handicraft Movement is nothing more than a class project, and is reminiscent of Benjamin’s criticism of the “aura” in his essay on the mechanical reproducibility of art.

³⁸ Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class, p. 107.

³⁹ Veblen, Essays in Our Changing Order.

⁴⁰ Veblen is a mainstay in journals of consumer research. Marketing, business, and finance journals generally use the term to simply mean the rational irrationality of competition with neighbors to consume, even beyond their means.

⁴¹ Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class.

⁴² Here Veblen was a visionary ahead of his time. He saw American football (and most sports) as barbaric reenactments for honorific accolades. Knowing what we do now about the dangers of repeated concussions and the sacrifice of lives for sport, perhaps they are indeed more than simple reenactments.

⁴³ Donald J. Bush, “Thorstein Veblen’s Economic Aesthetic,” Leonardo 11:4 (1978), p. 282.

⁴⁴ Elias L. Khalil, “The Socioculturalist Agenda in Economics: Critical Remarks of Thorstein Veblen’s Legacy,” The Journal of Socio-Economics 24:4 (1995), pp. 545–69.

⁴⁵ Plotkin and Tilman, The Political Ideas of Thorstein Veblen.

⁴⁶ Ibid.

⁴⁷ Bush gives more biographical detail on Veblen. He made his own furniture, ordered his shoes through the mail, etc. By all accounts, he had an asceticism and a desire that industrial products should be designed to fulfill a function. Bush, “Thorstein Veblen’s Economic Aesthetic.”

⁴⁸ Ibid.

⁴⁹ Plotkin and Tilman, The Political Ideas of Thorstein Veblen.

⁵⁰ Devin Penner, “The Limits of Radical Institutionalism: A Marxian Critique of Thorstein Veblen’s Political Economy,” Review of Radical Political Economics 43:2 (2011), pp. 154–71.

⁵¹ Plotkin and Tilman, The Political Ideas of Thorstein Veblen, pp. 75–76.

⁵² Plotkin, “Thorstein Veblen’s Elusive Project,” p. 5.

⁵³ He did not. See: Sidney Plotkin, “The Critic as Quietist: Thorstein Veblen’s Radical Realism,” Common Knowledge 16:1 (2009), pp. 79–94.

⁵⁴ Sidney Plotkin, Veblen’s America: The Conspicuous Case of Donald J. Trump (New York, NY: Anthem Press, 2018), p. 31.

⁵⁵ Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (New York, NY: Picador USA, 2008); Sarah M. Surak, “Capitalist Logics, Pollution Management, and the Regulation of Harm: Economic Responses to the Problem of Waste Electronics,” Capitalism Nature Socialism 27:1 (2016), pp. 106–22, ; Mike Davis, Planet of Slums (New York, NY: Verso, 2007).

⁵⁶ Plotkin, Veblen’s America, p. 147.

⁵⁷ Casey R. Lynch, “‘Vote with Your Feet’: Neoliberalism, the Democratic Nation-State, and Utopian Enclave Libertarianism,” Political Geography 59 (2017), pp. 82–91.

⁵⁸ Ibid., 87–88.

⁵⁹ Ibid., 89.

⁶⁰ Erik Swyngedouw, “Apocalypse Forever? Post-political Populism and the Spectre of Climate Change,” Theory, Culture & Society 27:2–3 (2010), pp. 213–32.

⁶¹ Erik Swyngedouw, “Apocalypse Now! Fear and Doomsday Pleasures,” Capitalism Nature Socialism 24:1 (2013), pp. 9–18.

⁶² Ibid.

⁶³ Sidney Plotkin, “Veblen’s Localism and Its Ambiguities,” in Sidney Plotkin (ed.), The Anthem Companion to Thorstein Veblen (New York, NY: Anthem Press, 2016), pp. 213–36.

⁶⁴ Robert Kirsch, “Toward a Theory of Economic Development as a Mode of Flash Capitalism,” Fast Capitalism 14:1 (2017), available online at: http://www.uta.edu/huma/agger/fastcapitalism/14_1/Kirsch-Toward-Theory-Economic.htm.

⁶⁵ Garnet Kindervater, “Catastrophe and Catastrophic Thought,” in Jennifer L. Lawrence and Sarah Marie Wiebe (eds), Biopolitical Disaster (New York: NY: Routledge, 2017).

⁶⁶ Gwendolyn Audrey Foster, “Consuming the Apocalypse, Marketing Bunker Materiality,” Quarterly Review of Film and Video 33:4 (2016), pp. 285–302.

⁶⁷ Otfried Preußler and Penny Bun, “Tomorrow Never Comes,” Damage (2019), available online at: https://damagemag.com/2019/02/25/tomorrow-never-comes/.

⁶⁸ Plotkin, “Veblen’s Localism and Its Ambiguities,” p. 217.

⁶⁹ Ben Agger and Timothy W. Luke, “Blockbuster Marxism,” Critical Sociology 41:2 (2015), pp. 335–48; Kirsch, “Toward a Theory of Economic Development as a Mode of Flash Capitalism.”

⁷⁰ Plotkin, “Veblen’s Localism and Its Ambiguities,” p. 222.

⁷¹ Kelly, “Reigniting the Anthropology of Capitalism,” p. 182.

⁷² Timothy W. Luke, Ecocritique: Contesting the Politics of Nature, Economy, and Culture (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1997).

⁷³ Thorstein Veblen, The Engineers and the Price System (New York, NY: B. W. Huebsch, Incorporated, 1921), p. 134.

⁷⁴ Ibid.

⁷⁵ Christian Cordes, “Veblen’s ‘Instinct of Workmanship,’ Its Cognitive Foundations, and Some Implications for Economic Theory,” Journal of Economic Issues 39:1 (2005), pp. 1–20.

⁷⁶ Hardy Hanappi and Edeltraud Hanappi-Egger, “Gramsci Meets Veblen: On the Search for a New Revolutionary Class,” Journal of Economic Issues 47:2 (2013), pp. 375–82, .

⁷⁷ Thorstein Veblen, The Engineers and the Price System, p. 134.

⁷⁸ Ibid., 134–35.

⁷⁹ Timothy W. Luke, Social Theory and Modernity: Critique, Dissent, and Revolution (Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1990).

⁸⁰ It is worth noting that just because Veblen was skeptical of Marxism that he was a proponent of liberal political economy. His essays on Böhm-Bawerk’s theory of capital and Keynes’ early contributions perhaps would better classify him as simply skeptical of everything.

⁸¹ Kathleen Franz, Tinkering – Consumers Reinvent the Early Automobile (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011).

⁸² McKenzie Wark, A Hacker Manifesto (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004).

⁸³ Wark, Molecular Red Reader, p. 23.

⁸⁴ Plotkin, “Veblen’s Localism and Its Ambiguities,” p. 230.

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Robert Kirsch

Robert Kirsch is Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Leadership and Interdisciplinary Studies at Arizona State University (USA). His research focuses on heterodox rationalities of political economy in advanced industrial societies, as well as theories of organizational change that facilitate leaders of collective action within institutions. He is grateful to the editorial collectives at Holum Press (holumpress.com) and Damage Magazine (damagemag.com) for their thoughtful feedback when the ideas in this essay were much more protean.