(Name-mce) ListServ Multicultural Education and Consumerism

[Paul C. Gorski]

Hello all.

Below is an article on consumerism and out-of-control consumption. This is
an often-ignored dimension of equity, justice, and multiculturalism
despite the fact that it contributes to gaps between the rich and poor,
racism and classism (because the people who bear the brunt of
environmental injustices tend to be economically disadvantaged People of
Color), and other issues.

But I think we, especially in the U.S., especially those of us who can
afford to have access to the Internet to read this, are so trained from
birth to consume that we don't realize our consumption--the huge houses,
the new wardrobes every six months, the 4 televisions in a single house,
etc.--is directly connected to the oppression around us. And I think we,
educators, collectively, are doing an awful job teaching students about
this issue often because we don't even see it.

(This is also connected to the growing corporatization of schools -- those
Pepsi and Coke machines, corporate control of education policy, etc.)

I'd love to hear others' thoughts on this.

Paul


The era of unlimited consumption
Syed Fattahul Alim
7/1/2006

          The philosophy of free market economy holds high the ideal (!)
of consumerism. The more nations are embracing this ideal, the
bigger is becoming the market of consumer goods. The measure of
the standard of living of a community is the quantity of
consumer goods its members are able to buy. The people of the
highly advanced countries buy and use more consumer goods, the
proportion of the very expensive variety of such goods being
greater among them, than the people of less advanced societies
like ours are. The mission of this evangelical fervour of
consumerism has triggered the buying and spending spree of
people everywhere, which is considered beneficial for the
expansion of the market of various industrial products and
services globally. But how is this consumption pattern of the
people affecting human society and its environment?
Today's consumption is undermining the environmental resource base. It is
exacerbating inequalities. And the dynamics of the
consumption-poverty-inequality-environment nexus are accelerating. If the
trends continue without change - not redistributing from high-income to
low-income consumers, not shifting from polluting to cleaner goods and
production technologies, not promoting goods that empower poor producers,
not shifting priority from consumption for conspicuous display to meeting
basic needs - today's problems of consumption and human development will
worsen.

Looking at this behaviour of the consumers in the western societies a
critique of madness R.Cronk says: "The egocentricity of Western society
made it an easy target for the transition to a consumer society. As
deceptive advertising and academic nihilism gutted culture of its
subjectively realized values, the public was easily swayed onto the path
of consumerism. In the midst of a major identity crisis, will America
realize the lack of morality and humanitarianism in a world based on media
image and the transient satisfaction of ownership rather than the
ontological value of the meaningful cultural experience? The reduction of
cultural values to economic worth has produced a situation in our
'enlightened' society where product availability, as opposed to survival
needs, becomes ethical justification for political oppression.
Mass media perpetuates the myth of consumerism as a priority of the New
Capitalism. As America settles into its nightly routine of television
viewing, corporate profiteers are quick to substitute the lure of material
luxury and consumer gratification for the fading spirit. Media advertising
sells an image -- an empty shell. Corporate America placates its flaccid
public with despiriting pastiche. There is only fraudulent illusion.
Instead of Swiss clockworks encased in hand carved hardwood, the consumer
is offered a cheap imitation of routed particle board and computer chip
technology. Who cares as long as it looks good? "

Another strong antagonist of consumerism Doug Dowd in his essay
'Consumerism as a social disease' harangues against the culture of
consumerism in the following manner:

"Not for nothing was the opening chapter of Marx's Capital entitled
"Commodities," for commodification is among the defining characteristics
of capitalism. First was land and labour; now, everything is a commodity;
everything is for sale.

Adam Smith provided the analytical basis for commodification. In his
Wealth of Nations (1776), he argued that free market competition, warts
and all, would take us to "the best of all possible worlds." What he
sought to replace was the corrupt and power-drunk mercantilist state of
his time; he would be horrified by the corrupt and power-drunk monopoly
capitalism of our time.

As Smith wrote, and until the 20th century, capitalism had no need for
consumerism. There was, of course, "consumption," but that is as different
from consumerism as eating is from gluttony: we must eat to survive;
gluttony is self-destructive.

By his own reckoning, Marx knew it was impossible to foresee all that
capitalism would bring about, but in analyzing worker "alienation" in
1844, he anticipated the essence of consumerism:

The power of /the worker's/ money diminishes directly with the growth of
the quantity of production, i.e., his need increases with increasing power
of money... Excess and immoderation become /the/ true standard...; the
expansion of production of needs becomes an ingenious and always
calculating subservience to inhuman, depraved, unnatural, and imaginary
appetites. (quoted in Bottomore; Marx's emphases.)

Marx wrote as the first industrial revolution was roaring, when workers'
average incomes were so low their lifespan had been in decline since the
1820s. By the time Veblen wrote his U.S.-focused Theory of the Leisure
Class (1899), the second industrial revolution was in full swing.
Productivity and production had risen so dramatically that for
capitalism's "health" irrational consumption had become both necessary and
possible. The centre of Veblen's analysis were the elements of what became
consumerism: "emulation" and its children: "conspicuous consumption,
display, and waste.".

In 1899, such behaviour was possible then only for "the leisure class."
For most others, given the political economy of the time, just staying
alive remained a major problem. That began to change in the 1920s, if only
for a fifth of the people: by today's poverty measure, half of the people
were poor in the 1920s.

For consumer irrationality to reach today's levels in the U.S, (and, now,
other industrial countries), major socioeconomic developments were
essential; they arrived first in here, much enhanced by the economic
stimuli of two world wars: World War I reversed an ongoing economic
slowdown; World War II lifted us out of a decade of deep depression. But
that was not all; both wars subsidized a string of new technologies and
really mass production of durable consumer goods; most notably cars and
electrical products. After 1945, that vast expansion of industrial
production -- plus strong unions -- required and provided a qualitative
jump in "good jobs" and purchasing power.

The wars had come just in time. Their creation of a permanent
military-industrial complex plus consumerism assured that with or without
war, there would always be a way out of what, by the 1920s had become a
chronic and serious business illness: the inability of business to make a
profit using productive capacities efficiently.

Along with militarism, the solution was found in consumerism and modern
advertising, for all household products (from toasters to soap), for
"fashion," and, most famously, for cigarettes and automobiles.
Cars and smokes used different and overlapping techniques; but both
figuratively and literally poisoned the air we breathe. Lucky Strike, with
its "Reach for a Lucky instead of a sweet," glamorised and universalised
cigarette smoking, irrespective of gender, age, or condition of servitude.
Edward Bernays, the "genius" behind the Lucky Strike ads, had earlier
"invented" the art of public relations in 1916, when he was hired by
President Woodrow Wilson -- who ran for re-election in 1916 promising to
keep us out of war -- to soften up the public for our 1917 entry to that
war.

As for cars, their sales had levelled off already by 1923. It was in that
year that General Motors (GM) introduced three ways to enhance waste and
irrationality: 1) the annual model change ("planned obsolescence"); 2)
massive advertising, and 3) "GMAC," its own "bank" so buyers could borrow.
Consumerism came into being along with monopoly capitalism -- which, as
Paul Baran put it long ago "teaches us to want what we don't need and not
to want what we do." The "teaching" is done mostly by the always more
ingenious advertising industry -- now raking in more than $200 billion a
year in the U.S. alone.

Advertising feeds our irrationalities and energises our frenzied plunge
into debt: as of today, household debt (credit cards, car loans, and
mortgages) exceeds $10 trillion, and monthly payments are well in excess
of average monthly incomes.

Advertising's function is not to provide information any more than
consumerism's is to provide for people's needs; through delusion and
illusion, its function is the capture of "hearts and minds." Just what Dr.
Capitalism ordered!

That is bad enough; even worse are consumerism's socio-political
by-products: the citizenry, increasingly "bewitched, bothered, and
bewildered," is effectively distracted from what is being done to it by
"the power elite."

In his Instinct of Workmanship (1914), Thorstein Veblen argued we have
both constructive and destructive "instincts," but that capitalism brings
out -- must bring out -- the worst in us. Baran made that same point and
captured the essence of modern advertising in his essay "Theses on
Advertising" (in The Longer View):

It is crucial to recognise that advertising and mass media programmes
sponsored by and related to it do not to any significant extent create
values or produce attitudes but rather reflect existing and exploit
prevailing attitudes. In so doing they undoubtedly re-enforce them and
contribute to their propagation, but they cannot be considered to be their
taproot.... Advertising campaigns succeed not if they seek to change
people's attitudes but if they manage to find, by means of motivation
research and similar procedures, a way of linking up with existing
status-seeking and snobbery; social, racial, and sexual discrimination;
egotism and unrelatedness to others; envy, gluttony, avarice, and
ruthlessness in the drive for self-advancement -- all of these attitudes
are not generated by advertising but are made use of and appealed to in
the contents of the advertising material.

Economists and philosophers since the time of industrial revolution always
took consumerism with a grain salt. At the earlier stages of economic
development, consumption of expensive goods, in excess of what is
necessary for subsistence, was the privilege of the leisure class. Now
this line of distinction between different sections of society is on the
verge of extinction. The media and the ad industry have largely
contributed towards bringing down social barriers to conspicuous
consumption. The information superhighway or the Internet, too, is more or
less serving the cause of limitless consumption. What can then modern day
Adam Smiths or Veblens do against this fresh tide of consumerism?



-- 
Paul C. Gorski
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