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In this excerpt, Magdoff and Williams show the immense levels of waste created by capitalism today, including the prison-industrial complex, food system and housing in the United States — not to mention the horrendous expensive and wasteful US military.
More production means more waste: more waste means more production. Waste is a sign of capitalism’s success. When people throw away a product after using it for a short period of time, in the spirit of planned obsolescence, they will buy a new one, contributing to growth and corporate profits.
As early as the 1920s Stuart Chase identified four systematic sources of waste under capitalism: (1) the labor power used to produce “vicious or useless goods and services”; (2) labor power wasted due to unemployment; (3) the unplanned nature of production and distribution of goods leading to inefficiencies and overproduction; and (4) the senseless waste and overuse of natural resources. Addressing the term coined by nineteenth-century writer and social reformer John Ruskin, Chase wrote that what capitalism produces is not wealth, but “illth.”
Illth abounds under capitalism. In Monopoly Capital: An Essay on the American Economic and Social Order, first published in 1966, Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy included an appendix by Joseph D. Phillips titled “Estimating the Economic Surplus.” Phillips demonstrated that the economic surplus — aspects of the economy that served no socially useful purpose and would therefore be considered waste in a more rationally organized society — averaged over half of the gross national product of the…