Introduction to the special issue on consumption
Spring 2007, Volume 39, No. 2
ANN JENNINGS
DePauw University
Social scholars of the Left have been producing critical accounts of consumption practices since the late nineteenth century, when capitalist industrialization first allowed for rising living standards and new means of discretionary spending among some portions of the working classes. Among the classics of these discussions are Thorstein Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class (1899); John Kenneth Galbraith’s The Affluent Society (1958); Herbert Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man (1964); and most recently, Juliet Schor’s Overworked and Overspent American[s] (1992; 1998).
Up against the standard neoclassical rational, individualistic, more-is-better economic analyses of consumption, radical theorists have based their critical accounts in inextricably social relationships, emulatory motives linked to social inequalities, and power relationships; and critiqued the waste, the futility and the stultifying political effects of Western style consumerism. Although more recent theoretical commentaries have emphasized the need to incorporate richer conceptions of the agency of consumers, both the spread of consumerism beyond the wealthy West and the intensification of international inequalities have only served to further highlight the implications of consumerism for exploitation, social conflict, and environmental nonsustainability on a global scale today. The articles in this collection touch on all of these larger concerns, while emphasizing such more specific issues as the relationship between production and consumption, the means by which increasing consumption is being financed, narratives of consumer agency and “self-control,” the writings of fin de siècle socialists on consumption, and postmodern efforts to destabilize inherited economic divisions and categories.
This is the first RRPE special issue on the subject of consumption. In fact, a brief review of the historical contents of the journal reveals a general lack of attention to the subject previously; I found only two or three articles on consumption in it since 1968. Thus the five articles in this collection will more than double the space devoted to further developments in radical interpretations of consumer issues and practices so far. I am hesitant to suggest an explanation for this observation, but if there has been a traditional split between production and consumption categories (as the final paper here, by Bruce Pietrykowski, argues), it seems clear where the previous emphasis has fallen. Perhaps this reflects the constitution and priorities of the American New Left, whose resurgence in the 1960s also led to the founding of URPE and the RRPE. In any case, and for whatever reason, the importance of this special issue can only be underlined by the absence of attention to consumption issues previously.
The first article in the collection, by Andrea Migone, provides a broad overview of the dimensions of contemporary consumerism. Relying mainly on aggregate data for OECD countries, Migone documents the increasing inequality of incomes and consumption patterns, both nationally and internationally, to provide evidence for the French Regulation School’s hypothesized transition from Fordist to Post-Fordist accumulation regimes. Unlike Fordism, which rested on the twin bases of mass production and relatively diffused, broad-based consumption patterns, Post-Fordism matches intensified consumption patterns among national and international elites to flexibilized, low-wage labor patterns in production. Using Sen’s capability approach, Migone argues that the consequences are both socially unethical and environmentally unsustainable.
William Redmond’s article shifts the focus somewhat to examine how the increasing fungibility of homeownership has helped to finance the expansion of US consumerism. Once valued more for its contributions to both family and community belonging (a form of social glue, if you will) and as the most important form of personal savings, homeownership has increasingly become a resource for sustaining and/or expanding current consumption expenditures. Placed in the context of Migone’s arguments on the intensified disparities of Post-Fordism, what was once a means for Americans to enter the “middle class” may now be emerging as a vehicle for even greater inequality, as US consumers struggle to keep up and a growing fraction of homeowners become more vulnerable to capitalist uncertainties and mortgage default.
Martha Starr shifts the focus slightly, once again, to consider how the struggle to maintain consumption in the face of growing budgetary difficulties has been viewed, both within the new “behaviorist” projects of standard economics and in broader media narratives, as a problem of “self-control.” While the traditional “homo economicus” framework relied on a simple problem of individual optimization with an added time dimension, the “homo psychologicus” approach of the new behaviorists posits a tension within individuals between a present-oriented “doer self” and a future-oriented “planner self.” Though this attention to intrapersonal conflict is somewhat richer and validates expressions of limited rationality in habits and heuristics, the individuals in question remain atomistically conceived as both asocial and acultural. The cultural narratives of the media, meanwhile, mirror this concern with self-restraint in advertizing messages that model interludes of excessive spending as “youthful,” “imaginative” and “fun” lapses from more adult and wiser consumer behavior. Starr notes that the new focus of behavioral economics then appears as an unexamined, naturalized expression of the risks embodied in the continuing expansion of consumerism.
Noel Thompson takes a more historical view of the problems of consumerism by surveying many now lesser-known discussions of consumption by late nineteenth and early twentieth century socialist writers (he focuses particularly on English accounts). Once again, consumption problems are linked to social divisions and inequalities - though this time it is hard to avoid a sense that the middle-class vantage points of almost all of these thinkers colored their assessments of the impoverished and culturally or morally deficient consumption habits of the working classes. Yet as Thompson notes, late nineteenth century socialists confronted a conundrum: how to shift the arguments for socialism from a base in the exploitation and immizeration of the working classes, to something else, as industrial capitalism slowly began to extend the means for discretionary spending to more and more workers. Perhaps the growth of working class consumerism was an early indicator of Migone’s Fordist accumulation regime; in any case, socialists needed to reimagine the grounds for mobilizing the working classes as their stake in capitalism slowly expanded. While the moralistic, condescending tone of much of this literature is both striking and disturbing, recovering it also creates an interesting context for the charges of moralism that at least some critics have lodged against more recent accounts of consumers, as pursuing the satisfaction of (perhaps) “artificial” wants. Thompson’s survey can be read as an object lesson, pointing clearly to the need for a greater and richer emphasis on agency in future accounts of consumer culture and practices.
Bruce Pietrykowski’s final article in the collection speaks most clearly to the problem of individual agency, and against the tendency to moralize within consumerist critiques. Writing from a postmodernist framework, he also focuses on the need to rethink the boundaries between the realms of production and consumption that characterize modernist economic accounts. Within modernism, however, he includes not just the “objective” quantitative scientism of neoclassical economics, but also the radical political economy of traditional Marxism, which has tended to (quoting Marx) “disregard the use-value of commodities.” In his effort to decenter traditional modernist categories, Pietrykowski first examines the liminal case of retail sales, as a place where the roles of producer and consumer are indiscrete and unstable. This implied denial of the unified subject further implies the rejection of universalizing narratives and grand theory, however; so Pietrykowski advocates methodological pluralism. He seeks alliances with other social constructionist accounts that also challenge modernist dualisms and identifies two prime candidates that have specifically transgressed the production/consumption binary: first, the “social construction of technology” framework, emphasizing the unintended uses and interpretations of new technologies by consumers; and second, feminist economics. Both of these perspectives have also worked against modernist tendencies to structure/agency dualism. Postmodernist discussions of how individuals use goods to navigate the symbolic terrain of contemporary society, fashioning personal identities and meanings both within and against dominant patterns and messages, are important contributions to that end.
The present RRPE special issue on consumption provides both very useful discussions of a number of recent trends and issues in the patterns of capitalist consumption, as well as much needed attention to an area of radical social theorizing that has been largely neglected by this journal until now. I wish to congratulate and thank both the contributors and the members of the editorial collective for their hard and very fine work in helping to bring the question of consumption back to the center of attention for radical social scholars and the RRPE readership. I hope that this excellent and stimulating collection will serve as an encouragement to greater and renewed attention to the dimensions, dynamics, interpretations, and connections of contemporary consumerism in radical political economics.
Ann Jennings, for the special issue collective:
Ben Fine
Christopher Gunn
Ann Jennings
John McDermott
Gary Mongiovi
Bruce Pietrykowski
References
Galbraith, J.K. 1958. The affluent society. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company.
Marcuse, H. 1964. One-dimensional man. Boston: Beacon Press.
Schor, J. 1992. The overworked American. New York: Basic Books.
______. 1998. The overspent American. New York: Harper Collins.
Veblen, T. 1899. The theory of the leisure class. New York: Macmillan.
More information about this special issue is available from the Sage Publications website
