Brief comments on Veblen and his Leisure Class

Although Veblen can be hard to read, what he says is some powerful stuff. He likes the Leisure class about as much as Marx adores bourgeoisie. However, unlike Marx's bourgeoisie, Veblen's leisure class is not that smart. It has come to being not through innovation, but through violence, theft, destruction and force. He uses Barbarianism not just as a direct example, but as a metaphor as well: those who can threaten, intimidate and kill take charge. Here is what he says:

“Booty, trophies of the chase or of the raid, come to be prized as evidence of pre-eminent force. Aggression becomes the accredited form of action, and booty serves as prima facie evidence of successful aggression. As accepted at this cultural stage, the accredited, worthy form of self-assertion is contest; and useful articles or services obtained by seizure or compulsion, serve as a conventional evidence of successful contest. Therefore, by contrast, the obtaining of goods by other methods than seizure comes to be accounted unworthy of man in his best estate. The performance of productive work, or employment in personal service, falls under the same odium for the same reason.”

A common misconception arises when it comes to his description of women's roles. Veblen, indeed, talks about the gender differences, putting the alpha-males (the leisure class) on top of the society, and then placing other men and finally, women to the bottom of the hierarchy. Women do the lowliest of jobs, because they are physically weaker, and to Veblen - it's jungle out there. Although easy to take literally, Veblen is NOT declaring that men and women are unequal. He discusses the formation of society that views it in such terms, a primitive society. In his own words,

"When the predatory habit of life has been settled upon the group by long habituation, it becomes the able-bodied man’s accredited office in the social economy to kill, to destroy such competitors in the struggle for existence as attempt to resist or elude him, to overcome and reduce to subservience those alien forces that assert themselves refractorily in the environment. So tenaciously and with such nicety is this theoretical distinction between exploit and drudgery adhered to that in many hunting tribes the man must not bring home the game which he has killed, but must send his woman to perform that baser office.”

However, how different is a "primitive" society from a society that is "advanced"? Contemporary US still graces women with most of the dirty and unpleasant work, house chores is one example, where women do twice as much of it as men and qualitatively the women housekeeping is much different (mowing loans for men, scrubbing bathrooms for women, etc).

Many of you noted the issue of consumption. That is Veblen's shtick: conspicuous consumption. While Marx suggests that the lower class eventually will hate the bourgeois and revolts, Veblen is much-much-more pessimistic. To him, the leisure class will never be out of the picture, because of all emotions, the working class is jealous, they want to be rich, be on top, have a lot to show.

Therefore, while leisure class consumes (owning multiple houses, jets, gold encrusted pools and such) in order to maintain the status quo, the lower class consumes in order to show that they are getting closer to becoming the leisure class. Hence, they return to medieval means of living above their means: living on credit, for example (accumulating credit card debt), buying too big a house, too fancy a car, etc.

Although it might seem that to Veblen, the working class will rise through hard work and will become the leisure class, that is incorrect. To the leisure class, most work is dishonorable, as it diminishes their social standing. The leisure class traditionally never worked (they robbed, killed and used the work of others to support their fancy habits), so they cannot have jobs that allow for any meritocratic rising. That alone kills most prospects for the vast majority of the working class. So, Veblen is extremely glum about the future: the rich will stay there and the poor will try so hard to pretend they are making it, while falling farther behind.

Veblen, Thorstein (1994) [1899] (in English). The theory of the leisure class. Penguin twentieth-century classics.New York, N.Y., U.S.A.: Penguin Books.

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