Coining for Capital
By Jyotsna Kapur
Rutgers University Press, 2005
197 pages
Order at <http://rutgerspress.rutgers.edu>
REVIEW BY BARRY HEALY
This book's title derives from a statement by Karl Marx in Capital Volume I. He commented that the law shortening the working day for children under the age of 12 would limit, to some extent "the coining of children's blood into capital".
Jyotsna Kapur, who teaches cinema and photography at Southern
Illinois University, argues that 21st century
capitalism is again after our children's blood — literally in the Third World and symbolically in the rich countries.
She surveys the evolution of the concept of childhood from its
portrayal in the 18th century as a pure, innocent, and
idyllic state. Today it is a mere variation of adulthood,
complete with characteristics of sophistication, temptation
and corruption.
This change in definition has been stage-managed through the
media but is not a media product. It is a built-in feature of
a deeply consumer-driven society.
Kapur was born in India but has raised her two children in the
United States. She is perfectly aware that Third World
children's labour is ruthlessly exploited to make the consumer
trinkets that sell in the advanced countries.
Like so many First World parents, she has grappled with
questions, such as the effects of too much television on her
children and even what sorts of little toys she should provide
for kids attending her children's birthday parties.
These may sound petty, but it is these everyday minor problems
that cause insecurity in parents. Parents become alienated
from their loving role at the same time as our children become
"colonised" by consumerism.
Kapur's is a revolutionary message, but one that begins with:
"We must under no circumstances leave out the children."
Every parent knows that the capitalist class is after our
children. The US children's market is estimated at between
US$120 and $160 billion dollars.
And that leaves aside the "pester power" of children in
influencing their parents' buying patterns. Chevrolet now
advertises its cars in children's magazines, chasing life-long
"brand loyalty"!
Kapur notes all of these developments but is focused
particularly on movies, marketing and the transformation of
childhood. She is a Marxist feminist, fascinated with global
capital's use of media culture to shape our experience of
life.
When capitalism emerged, the family changed from being a
productive organisation (growing food, weaving clothes etc.)
and became a unit of consumption. Productive labour shifted to
the factories.
The family became the sanctuary from the hideous capitalist
working life. Childhood was seen as the opposite of adulthood.
"The most significant change in the cultural notion of
childhood in the last decades of the twentieth century",
Kapur writes, "was the construction of children as knowing
consumers, overturning two hundred years of thinking of
children as innocent receivers of gifts".
Now children are consumers in their own right.
Up until World War II, children were meant to be shielded from
the harsh realities of commercial life, at least respectable
middle-class children. Working-class children were to be
"saved" from their debased state of premature understanding
of life through education.
Usually, children did not buy their own toys. Adults would
visit a toyshop and ask for a toy suitable for the age of the
child. Toyshops hired demonstrators in the Christmas season to
show adults how the toys were to be used.
These cosy family and commercial relationships have
disintegrated under late capitalism and brought people face to
face with the market. Advertising targets children
aggressively.
"Other than at the point of production, capital is at its
most vulnerable at the point of consumption", according to
Kapur. "We cannot be forced to part with our money to
consume, and that is why capitalism invests so heavily in its
core applied discipline, market research."
The holy grail of every marketer is to carve out a "niche".
The fact is capitalists over-produce low quality goods that
are virtually identical (e.g., McDonald's and Hungry Jack's) and that can only be separated in the consumer's mind through
advertising.
The coming of the post-WWII television age allowed advertisers
to reach children directly.
Children are losing the definition of enforced innocence both
in film and in life. They are both a part and a target of our
consumer-driven society and must learn to navigate in its
deeply inequitable, antagonistic values.
Since the 1980s, Kapur argues, Hollywood's children have grown
up and the adults are looking and behaving like children.
"In an economy run on debt", she says, "the adult consumer
too is drawn to the image of the child — impulsive, seeking immediate gratification, and playfully consuming toys such as computers and cars".
In films such as Harry Potter, Toy Story, Pocahontas, Home
Alone
and self-sufficient, while the adults are often portrayed as
bumbling and ineffective.
Pocahontas and Indian in the Cupboard were both made during
the 500th anniversary year of Columbus' landing in the "New World". No indigenous history made it into either film.
Kapur quotes a Native American activist as saying that
Pocahontas is like "trying to teach about the Holocaust and
putting in a nice story about Anne Frank falling in love with
a German officer".
Disney Corporation rejected such criticism because the film
was "only child's play". Kapur comments that Disney is both
reinstating and trivialising childhood.
"This is an early lesson in accepting the tyrannical notion
of the entertainment industry that we must enter its halls
with our brains turned off", she writes.
Indian in the Cupboard presents more of a criticism of
consumerism. But, for Kapur, both films ideologically justify
the American Dream that "conflicts are ultimately resolved
and harmony restored, as different groups inevitably move up
and join the nation — so much so that past conflicts can now be told as fairy tales to children".
Fairy tales told with massive marketing campaigns attached,
that is.
Kapur closely examines a large number of Hollywood products in
this book. Her inspection of the evolution of The Little
Princess
the 1940 Shirley Temple cutesy-pie movie to its 1995 film
remake is particularly good. It is an account of the commercialisation of nostalgia and the growing sophistication expected of child consumers.
Kapur has no illusions about the power of capitalism to create
the markets that it needs to survive, but she is not despairing.
Her message is powerful: "Two centuries of capital have not
allowed us to get used to the idea of childhood: that human
need, not profit, should guide our decisions; that only
collectively can we create a childhood which is truly safe,
where children can leave home without fear and come back
without anxiety; and that work should for all be like
children's play."
From Green Left Weekly, March 8, 2006.
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