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[...] As soon as the fiction of GDP is abandoned as the criterion of affluence, we have to admit that growth neither takes us further from, nor brings us closer to, affluence. It is logically separated from it by the whole social structure which is, here, the determining instance. A certain type of social relations and social contradictions, a certain type of `inequality', which used to perpetuate itself in the absence of economic progress, is today reproduced in and through growth.
Summarizing his position, we may say that the basic problem of contemporary capitalism is no longer the contradiction between 'profit maximization' and the 'rationalization of production' (from the point of view of the entrepreneur), but that between a potentially unlimited productivity (at the level of the technostructure) and the need to dispose of the product. It becomes vital for the system in this phase to control not just the apparatus of production, but consumer demand; to control not just prices, but what will be demanded at those prices. The 'general effect'--either prior to the act of production (surveys, market research) or subsequent to it (advertising, marketing, packaging)--is to 'shift the locus of decision in the purchase of goods from the consumer where it is beyond control to the firm where it is subject to control'. [...]
referring to two of Galbraith's books: The Affluent Society and The New Industrial State