Advertising Capitalism Rabindranath Tagore etc

Of late i’ve been reading a lot. Lot more than what i perhaps shud’ve been. Like a friend of mine said i’ve become a “non-academic geek” .. infact worse !

So let me start with the post.. It is a fairly long post .. (Hasn’t this become some kind of a cliche as far as my blog posts go ;) ) . Over a period of time i’ve come to the conclusion that the devil lies in the details and even if all you want to do is to scratch the periphery of a complex thing .. you need to go into some detail .. so please bear with the length :)

I am not going to write about all the sociology i have read of late .. or all the stuff about power and politics, social stratification , theories on industrialisation, marxism, capitalism, socialism , elitism, interactionism etc :P (You get the -ism thing right ? :P) Firstly, no point bragging about what i read because i am only reading what someone else wrote and for all that you and me know millions of people would have read it in the world across generations.. so its not something worth bragging about. Secondly, people already think i am trying  to portray myself as an intellectual so i can’t do more damage to my brand name. (Psst psst .. i am an intellectual only no ?? :P ) .

A lot of this reading orgininates from my reading of  “Sociology Themes and Perspectives” by Harlambos which is widely used by many students who prepare for UPSC (Before you ask questions.. 2010 Jan i did consider this seriously and hence bought this book sometime around that .. ). Or from my daily reading of “The Hindu” or “Financial Express”. They are the triggers .. with a 24×7 internet connection .. one small keyword is enough to ruin your entire day (Not ruin exactly.. nevertheless :) )

The thing about MBA->Marketing->Advertisment->Capitalism

I had recently posted this on my facebook album. It is a bit of criticism about how advertising promotes the view that happiness lies in accumulation of material possessions and how advertisers try to portray that they are making some difference to your lives with their products while all they are interested is in making more and more money. It says that the exploitative nature of capitalism is disguised well by advertising .. its most celebrated communication vehicle.

Now .. ofcourse one glance of the pic and you would know that it is a marxist talking .. nevertheless  there is no denying that some truth does exist in what he says

Because i am majoring in marketing .. i am generally into these cycles of doubt on the ethics of marketing every other day. Advertising has been widely criticised for a multitude of reasons by various people.. sample this here -> “The Unintended Negative Consequences of Advertising”.

All these are not mere arm-chair criticisms, they do have some relevance to the modern day context where the ethics and principles behind marketing and advertising are being criticised more often than not.

Now before someone pounces on me and says ” Fool ! why form opinions by reading just one side of the story ” .. let me also say that i also happened to read the other extreme .. “A Philosophic defense of Advertising” (from Journal of Advertising ?) .The author concludes by saying that:

“The so-called social criticisms of advertising seem to arise as rationalizations to cover up the deeper hostility toward capitalism and egoism. Far from being the cause of manipulative deception, persuasive coercion, and tastelessly offensive advertising, capitalism and egoism are the source and cause of the unprecedented progress we have experienced over the past 200 years”

The premise of this research as per the author is:

“It is morally right and good to pursue one’s own selfish interests. That is, it is right and good for egoistic producers to use persuasive advertising to appeal to the selfinterest of consumers for their own (the producers’) selfish gain“

If this is the only real justification for the selfish motives that underly advertising then i really dont know what to say. If we have really experienced “Unprecented progress”  in the past 200years because of the materialism+consumerism built in the society via advertising by Egoism+Capitalism then why would there be so much of inequality all around ? (There were Four -isms in the last sentence .. did you notice ? :P)

The problem i have with capitalism in its current everyday form that we see around us is that it doesn’t really care to distribute the wealth well enough .. perpetuates inequality between haves and havenots .. believes that is the only way to go about it .. mocks anyone who protests against it and inevitably sooner or later crushes the voices of dissent with the might of money.

In this backdrop.. in the recent past when i got stuck at this point .. i ended up at the model of co-operatives and felt perhaps that is the answer to all this .. a co-operative based economy ! Today i delved a bit deeper into this and this is where we go to the second part of the post ..

The thing about Rabindranath Tagore’s Co-operative model

Like i mentioned previously.. my last search on co-operatives ended at Venezuala‘s Hugo Chavez’s 21st century socialism which talks a lot about co-operatives amongst other things and this article in Hindu about Tagore and the idea of cooperation.

After this i tried to start off tagore research .. by reading some journal papers on his idea of cooperatives. But because IIM-L , IIM-B, IIM-K … all libraries don’t have access to it .. i couldn’t get my hands on it (Do you smell a capitalist conspiracy here ? :P)

Anyway.. today i had some time .. so because of the advertising debates again i ended up searching for that one model that is a bit capitalist .. a bit socialist .. a bit communist .. and ended up at co-operatives again. I finally found a collection of all of tagore’s essays on Co-operative model titled “The cooperative principle“. It is a viswabharathi publication and from what i understand it was called “Samavayaniti” in Bengali .

This is a wonderfully well written collection of essays. I would call it a masterpiece collection. It is so neatly written and raises very important questions about what has really gone wrong in the last 200 years of “Unprecedented development” that was talked about the last paragraph.

The span of the essays is amazing .. right from the what is wrong with capitalism .. the rights and wrongs of westernisation .. the charm of village based india .. the perils of city based civilisations .. the anti-charkha bits .. the importance of cooperatives .. the importance of human oneness/unity etc .

I would rate this book as a must-read given that it is just a 32 page pdf … It has got some traces of Gandhiji’s Hind Swaraj but also does differ from that in many respects.

Nevertheless .. i conclude with some excertps from the first three essays from this book.

He debunks the myth of selfishness being an inherent human quality as mentioned by the author in the research paper in the prev.section by saying that ..

“Man loses his true stature when he fails to unite fully with his fellows. A complete man is one who has this capacity for union, a lone individual is a fragmented being.”

The charm of a human civilization is captured below .. when he says ..

“What is civilization but a state of union in which the strength of each individual adds power to all and the power of all fortifies the individual?”

He is not anti-industralisation/technology per se .. as seen from below line ..

“It is not his own physical strength but the use of tools that has helped man to get the best out of cultivation, transport, and such activities as weaving, extracting oil, and manufacturing sugar. The plough, the loom, the bullock cart, the horse-drawn vehicle and the oil press have all reduced time and increased output. These have made progress possible ; otherwise, there would have been but little to distinguish man from the ape”

The beauty of cooperatives is captured here ..

“He who is lacking in hope must perish. No one can save him by offering alms or some other help. He must be made to realize that what is not possible for a single individual will be possible when fifty unite in a group. This combination of many people to earn a living is known in Europe as the co-operative system. It is by this system that our country can be rescued from its age-long
poverty and stagnation.”

“Thus we see that the welfare of the individual as well as the community is achieved only when there is scope in a community for each member to work for the good of all.”

The futility of the greed for money is explained below

“Almost in every society, work for the common good is hindered when the desire for making money takes possession of men, for personal ambition then gets the better of the sense of social welfare. Whenever a man resolves to excel others in wealth or power he does harm to himself for, as I have said before, no one is complete in himself. That selfishness and greed hurt the truth of man’s being is proved by the fact that all conflicts and treachery between man and man centre round this lust for wealth and power”

The futility of charity is captured here..

“The exhortation to give wealth away in charity is an attempt to link the interests of the rich to the welfare of the community, but it makes the latter dependent on the former, instead of placing it in the forefront”

“Our educated men are eager to serve the country. Nursing the sick, feeding the hungry and giving alms to the poor— these are some of the ways. That is like trying to put out a fire by blowing on it, when it has enveloped the whole village. Our ills cannot be  cured by treatment of the symptoms. The causes have to be removed”

The models of forced wealth distribution of the proletariat dictatorship and state ownership models are criticised here ..

“The artificial distribution of wealth can do no good; wealth must be produced by natural means. If the people in a community pool their earning capacity, they can easily prove that this combined capital has infinitely greater value than that of any individual, however rich. Not by force of arms, but by such examples alone, can capital be disarmed and stripped of its power to do harm. Man’s natural desire for the enjoyment of wealth cannot be trampled to death by violent means. The only way to rid it of its narrowness is to fulfil that desire in the widest sense by securing the enjoyment of wealth for all men.”

And some more on where it all went wrong ..

“Man has accepted the truth of co-operation socially but not economically. The production of wealth, its distribution and enjoyment are supposed to be entirely personal matters. Here he is unwilling to curb bis egoism, his selfindulgence. Here his attitude is that of an isolated individual, and hence his sense of moral responsibility is weak”

“Formerly, the production of wealth, both of goods and of profits, was limited. The equilibrium of society, therefore, was not thereby disturbed. But now the desire for money has so outstripped that for other forms of social well-being and has brought about such a tremendous discord that social life has become diseased and human nature overwhelmed. Money has ceased to be an instrument in the hands of man, but has become a demoniac power, before which the larger claims of humanity have become insignificant. Between money accumulated by the help of machinery and the natural powers of an ordinary man the difference is so great that the ordinary man must accept defeat at every step”

Finally i end with this one-liner .. which captures the essence of all that i said .. “The remedy is not in killing the capitalist, but in  giving all equal opportunities of becoming capitalists”

I too had a dream

I hope one day i can be a part of the co-operative revolution .. this is exactly how i felt when i read “I too had a dream” by Verghese Kurien of AMUL fame a year before i enrolled for MBA. After the recent reading of Hugo Chavez model and this reading of Tagore my belief that the co-operative model is the ideal vehicle to remove poverty and ensure equitable distribution has increased by leaps and bounds. Hoping that my post-MBA career will help do something on this note .. sooner or later :)  . Who knows may be i will also start a co-operative revolution one day like verghese kurien did :P ..

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