Postcards for the Affluent Society

Posted on December 11th, 2006 filed in Corporations, History, Media Analysis, Politics

Nearly fifty years ago John Kenneth Galbraith published his book The Affluent Society (1958) about the haves and have-nots of modern capitalist society.

The postcard on the left with images from Cwmbach is a reminder of the differences between the haves and have-nots.

Affluent Society was a book about contrasts in the economy. In Aberdare, the gulf between rich and poor has been transformed into a grotesque chasm in the past three decades of hyper-capitalism under Thatcher and Tony Blair, her ideological heir.

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Galbraith wrote his most famous book using the title “Why the Poor are Poor” but later changed it at his wife’s suggestion. He was an economist from the American University of Harvard and his book gives a solid critique on the tendency of modern capitalism to enrich the private sphere at the expense of a degraded public sphere. In his own words :

In a community where public services have failed to keep abreast of private consumption things are very different. Here, in an atmosphere of private opulence and public squalor, the private goods have full sway. - The Affluent Society (1958), ch. 18

Cwmbach in the Cynon Valley is a good example of this opulence living side-by-side with squalor. The Cwmbach Council housing estate called Rose Row was demolished to make way for Redrow Houses and associated corporate developers.

Redrow Homes in Cwmbach are priced at around £200,000 per home, and this corporation will sell several million pounds worth of housing in Cwmbach. There is a large plastic sign attached on one of Redrow’s houses offering £10,000 in cash should you buy one of their products. How many people in Cwmbach live on £10,000 – or less – as their gross annual income ?

There are very few spaces one could call public-spaces in Cwmbach, but Cwmbach library is one of them. In the photograph taken in the summer, the brown rusty metal object embedded in the crumbling brick and concrete is the entrance to Cwmbach Public Library, run by our local County Borough Council, Rhondda Cynon Taff.

How much would it cost to paint Cwmbach Library so that it looked like a place for learning and leisure and unlike a rusty old farm shed barn ? A hundred pounds ? Let’s say two hundred pounds, everything included.

So £200 to make a shared community resource safe and civilised compared with the many private houses being sold in Cwmbach at £200,000 a time. Any child could tell you there is an imbalance in those figures.

And contrast. Galbraith’s Affluent Society is a memorable economic critique of modern capitalism because of its honesty in drawing attention to the contrasts that exist within modern capitalist society. Alas, we do not enjoy the luxury of such honesty and candour in Cynon Valley.

We have no free press in Cynon Valley. Gary Marsh, the Editor of the Cynon Valley Leader, and his accomplices in Trinity Mirror PLC, are contractually bound to stoke the fires of demand on behalf of their employers, who make money selling advertising space to house building corporations like Redrow.

Thus you will not read a story criticising the corporate media’s customers, or a story criticising the basic economic system (viz. capitalism) upon which both the corporate media and fellow corporate travellers in the house-building sector make their millions. This is the ‘bounds of the expressible’ (see Chomsky) within which the corporate media work.

What is so significant about an old rusty library in a little Welsh village ? Libaries are important because they are places of learning. Working class people can not afford their own private libraries. We should not turn our back on our own history. Working people fought hard for their own education and emancipation and built their own libraries and places of learning long before it became the responsibility of local government.

If you would like to encourage Redrow Homes (South Wales) Ltd. to make a donation to the upkeep of the Public Library in the community from which they will profit, please consider writing to them at

southwales.sales@redrow.co.uk

Redrow Homes (South Wales) Ltd.

Redrow House, Copse Walk, Cardiff Gate Business Park, Cardiff, CF23 8RH

Or ringing them on Telephone: 02920 549103,

Or you can fax a message on Facsimile: 02920 541540