Luc Boltanski - Enrichment

The process of turning homes of aristocratic origin into heritage sites thus had a double and more or less contradictory character. On the one hand, the process allowed a memorial relation to objects to be extended to social classes that, although foreign to the nobility per se, had discovered their own “roots.” Their members, generally urbanized, often with university education and occupying upper managerial positions in modern companies, envisaged the objects and homes of their families of origin – often from the peasantry – as treasures worthy of being admired and preserved owing to the mere fact that they came from the past and could be invested with memorial power. The owners associated these objects – which, a few decades earlier, would have been scorned, or even abandoned – with narratives that invested them with value, initially for themselves and their children, as testimony to the family’s past. This democratization of the “chateau” effect, which can lead to showcasing the slightest little farm or even just a barn, enhanced with a narrative referring to the family’s history, is paralleled by the transformation of other goods endowed with powerful personal memories into heritage objects capable of taking on a capitalistic tenor. The process of transforming patrimony into capital is stimulated by an increased demand for residences and goods anchored in the past. This demand is spurred in turn by the spread of what could be called a patrimonial ethos , an ethos shared by large numbers of people who, although they themselves have not inherited real estate, invest their earnings from work in homes and objects apt to give them a sense of historicity. The practice of collecting is a somewhat comparable development, as is its “twin,” the search for genealogical origins (“collecting” persons rather than objects). A trend initiated chiefly by the descendants of “great” families, genealogical research has become a widespread passion in recent years. 65

The concomitant and interrelated processes of deindustrialization and the development of an enrichment economy attest to a profound shift in the strategies employed by Western capitalism to retain its central position. These paired phenomena constitute two responses to the crisis that began affecting capitalism toward the end of the 1960s and during the 1970s. This crisis, whose epicenter was in the United States, was marked by a significant drop in returns on capital (more than 40 percent between 1965 and 1973). Robert Brenner attributes the crisis to surplus production capacity on the part of businesses with the highest fixed capital. 66The situation did not allow these companies to maintain either their previous levels of profit or their competitiveness in the face of the systemic struggle for predominance that was under way at the time. Starting in the late 1960s, that struggle pitted established companies against new entrants whose costs were lower.

Still, we can follow Giovanni Arrighi when, in his responses to Brenner’s analyses, he stresses the intensification of conflicts between labor and capital from the late 1960s to the mid-1970s. 67These conflicts were particularly pronounced in Europe, especially in France and Italy, where they marked the exhaustion of “Fordian” arrangements. In a framework subjected to a Fordian (or Keynesian) mode of regulation, the production of industrial goods was achieved locally at the cost of increased standardization of products and labor. Redistribution of the profits derived from increased productivity was supposed to lead to increased revenues for salaried workers, which would enable them to acquire the goods produced for themselves. But workers’ demands (most often transmitted via labor unions) concerning salaries, working conditions, and job security intensified simultaneously with stagnation in the expected earnings from increased productivity. During the 1960s and 1970s, these combined developments triggered a major crisis in the capitalist mode of regulation: salaried workers received the larger share of increases in earnings, and stockholders, who saw their profits decrease as a result, responded in part by reducing their investments in production.

Taking back the initiative, the institutions of “central capitalism” (in Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler’s sense), 68acting in concert with economic and political agencies of central governments, began by re-engineering the production lines and management structures of the big companies in the hope of increasing their productivity, especially by shrinking the scales on which productivity was measured (a process facilitated by the development of computer technologies), sometimes down to the level of workshops and departments or even individuals, so as to eliminate workers deemed unproductive or useless. This skimming resulted in a situation of structural unemployment whose effects were initially attenuated by government aid and especially by monetary inflation, so that consumption could be maintained in the face of mediocre economic growth. 69However, as this new policy proved inadequate, central capitalism adopted the strategy of using legal arrangements for financial deregulation that favored the rapid circulation of capital and direct investment abroad, in countries where wages were low (those later labeled “emergent”) and where there was a plentiful supply of workers lacking job security.

That strategy led to delocalizing an increasing segment of local industries and to underutilization of the productive capacities of Western European countries, where many potential workers found themselves without jobs. The rise in unemployment was a factor in disrupting what had been called up to that point the working class, whose members, more and more dependent on protective measures and support from central governments, came to constitute a sort of “plebeian” class. Associated with intense movements toward the concentration of capital, the strategy had the effect of restoring “central” capitalism’s hold over “peripheral enterprises” – that is, local and dependent businesses – and empowering it to influence price fixing so as to generate higher than average profits, reinforce stock values, and thereby extend its scope in the struggle for differential accumulation.

The displacement of production, encouraged by a significant decrease in the costs of transporting merchandise (owing in part to the increased use of shipping containers in the 1980s), had the effect of maintaining a relatively high level of consumption and an abundance that the so-called consumer society needed to maintain itself, since everyday products (clothing, household appliances, and so on) manufactured in low-wage countries were less expensive than products made locally. But this shift in production sites also raised the question of how the people remaining behind would find work, and in particular the young people coming out of a rapidly expanding university system, a majority of whom came from the upper or middle bourgeoisie.

This is the context in which the shaping of an enrichment economy has to be interpreted. The process consisted in putting previously marginal forms of wealth creation at the heart of economic activity, which had long been dominated by manufacturing. Economies based on tourism or luxury goods already existed, but they had far less importance than they were to acquire later on, chiefly because their principal customers were less numerous and more locally rooted. But the wealthy and ultra-wealthy individuals who had benefited from the financial, industrial, and digital economies, as well as from the lowered costs of travel, were increasing considerably in number and becoming much more mobile. The development of an enrichment economy stimulated exports, which included more and more high-end goods. But it also enabled the highlighting and exploitation of resources that either could not be moved (such as landscapes and monuments) or were difficult to transport. These factors led to a doubling of the objects offered for consumption (this was particularly clear, as we have seen, in the case of food products): things manufactured in low-wage countries, intended for low-income households, were sold at relatively low prices, while things intended for the wealthy, identified with reference to their local and historical origins (which protected them from competition by conferring on them a specificity with monopolistic effects), could be offered for sale at high prices.