Dreaming of capital-culturalism

Scritto il 4 Aprile 2015

Since I wrote a book, I found out that in Italy we read (unfortunately) very little and we write (thankfully) a lot. The numbers are impressive. We print more books than those who actually read and every year tons of books go to the shredder. And that leads us to a paradoxical economic situations where supply far exceeds demand. It would have been better the other way round (more readers less writers), but it would be worse if there were no writers at all. At least we clearly know the problem: we have to work on demand.
I start this off by saying that in any other context, I would not agree, but for this (literature and books) I am totally in favor of advertising-driven consumer demand. I am in favor of using marketing in order to increase demand even if all the potential readers (also called consumers) do not feel the need to read.
Now we just have to figure out how to increase demand. In this perspective, we can take inspiration from our history, and in particular, from the history of the United States, where both marketing and advertising-driven consumer demand were born.
During the roaring twenties in America, on one hand productivity (thanks to the use of machines) was growing and thus supply was increasing, on the other hand unemployment (again due to machines that were replacing labor) was growing as well and therefore sales and demand collapsed. A paradox that was pretty rare before the industrial revolution but that became normal with the advent of machines.
Trying to deal with paradox, American companies began to use marketing and advertising heavily in order to turn a society (as it was in 1920) of Protestants prone to saving and sobriety into a mass of consumers perpetually dissatisfied and willing to spend every penny they had saved in order to buy a car, then a dishwasher, then a house and so on. And that’s how a new economy based on consumption and a new meaning of marketing as a tool to create new needs were born.
The history of marketing is very deep and engaging, but I don’t want to go any further. I just want to give a starting point and try to daydream. What it might happen if Italy were the first country in the world to apply the logic of capitalism and marketing to culture in order to increase the need, the demand, of culture? Would it not be great? Yes, it would (at least for me).
After all we are like America in 1920s. High supply of culture and low demand. If we only could be as good as Americans were in 1920s to use marketing for our purposes we could create a new need. The need for culture.
It would be the beginning of capital-culturalism.