Archive for the '“consumer” vocabulary' Category
Monday, September 26th, 2011
Diagnosing Ghosts
It never stops, apparently. Would-be greens just love to blather on about “our culture” being the root cause of ecological destruction, as if capitalists don’t exist, and “we” somehow freely and pristinely chose what we got.
The latest purveyor is a source who damned well ought to know better: The Post-Carbon Institute. Here is the pronouncement of Peter Whybrow, M.D., whom the POI publishes as its voice on “culture and behavior”:
We had perfected the consumer-driven society. The idea was simple and irresistible. It tapped deep into the nation’s mythology and for a brief moment, during the exuberant years of the dot-com bubble, the Dream was made material. Vast shopping malls proclaimed prosperity throughout the land. Horatio Alger’s story was once again our story—the American story—but this time on steroids. Temptation was everywhere. And true to our instinctual origins, we were soon focused on immediate gratification, ignoring future consequence. Shopping became the national pastime. Throwing caution to the wind, at all levels of our society we hungered for more—more money, more power, more food, and more stuff.
The United States is the quintessential trading nation, and for the past quarter century we have worshiped the “free” market as an ideology rather than for what it is—a natural product of human social evolution and a set of economic tools with which to construct a just and equitable society. Under the spell of this ideology and the false promise of instant riches, America’s immigrant values of thrift, prudence, and community concern—traditionally the foundation of the Dream—have been hijacked by an all-consuming self-interest. The astonishing appetite of the American consumer now deter-mines some 70 percent of all economic activity in theUnited States.
Wow. To borrow from E.P. Thompson: Folks, this here is what you call an orrery of errors. It’s 100 percent made-up, unexamined mainstream pseudo-history, repackaged as being somehow alternative and liberating and honest.
According to Dr. Whybrow, not only have “we” somehow “hijacked” ourselves, but “Our nature has no built-in braking system. More is never enough.” Sure, right. I think I’ll go home tonight and kill myself by eating 27 pepperoni pizzas. According to the good doc, that’s my biologically-dictated fate, and yours, too.
With liberators like these, with this kind of quarter-baked rot parading as rebellious social criticism, who needs the corporate media?
Friday, September 9th, 2011
TCT’s Purpose
TCT reader Nick asked me to explain our basic views. I thought I’d repost my answer, in case any other readers want to add their thoughts.
Here’s what I said, with a few additions and amendments:
Hi, Nick, and welcome to TCT. You ask excellent questions.
The immediate purpose of this blog is to show people how corporate planners (on behalf of the overclass of wealthy shareholders who remain the primary beneficiaries of big business) manipulate “free time” experiences and choices, and to demonstrate that corporate capitalism requires this manipulation, on an always-expanding basis.
The secondary purpose of this blog is to get people to think about how radically unsustainable this arrangement is, and to encourage movement toward a decent alternative. The work you are doing sounds vital. My only complaint about local solutions is that many of their architects tend to forget about the larger levels of reality. But that is certainly not a necessary part of making new local arrangements. And any adequate macro-level changes are certainly going to require radical reconstruction of our towns.
As for my objection to the way people talk about culture, those are of two kinds.
First, a great many supposedly radical thinkers begin from a sophomoric and unscientific definition of the word. Culture, properly defined, if the set of learned habits and behaviors prevailing among a population. As such, it is a very large-bore concept, close in scope to “society.” Meanwhile, many “cultural” theorists use it as a stand-in for one part of life only — free time, or personal life. Often, they shrink it even further to mean merely entertainment. In making that move, they build their attempts at explanation of reality on quicksand.
My more specific complaint about culture is that it is so often twinned with the bias-word “consumer,” to make the doubly stupid concept “consumer culture.” Social science (and the humanity and democracy it exists to serve) demands that its practitioners take care to make their concepts and data as free from bias and as descriptively valid and neutral as possible. To accept the word “consumer” as a valid equivalent for product-using human beings is to forgo the possibility of powerfully and accurately describing people’s product-related activities.
“Consumer” is a capitalist’s narrow view; nothing more, nothing less. It is a rank and destructive bias, poison to objective description of reality and its determinant institutions and processes. It is an ongoing tragedy that social science has swallowed it, without so much as a hiccup.
We live in a capitalist society and a capitalist culture. To choose to call it a consumer society and a consumer culture is to deny the cardinal facts and to confuse and insult the potential audience.
Jettisoning the word “consumer” is a first necessary step toward getting serious about describing humanity’s extremely dire crisis of economic waste and injustice.
The second step is to stop yammering hot air about culture, and to start examining and explaining the details of existing institutions and processes.
Alas, these both remain micro-ghetto endeavors, for a host of reasons.
Wednesday, August 10th, 2011
Brixton’s Fuel: Politics Not “Consumerism”
I mentioned that Billy Bragg has attributed the ongoing British riots in part to “exclusion from consumerist society.” As TCTer Justin points out, sociologist Zygmunt Bauman takes this ridiculous diagnosis much farther, attributing the riots to the “non-shopping” of “defective consumers.”
Here is Bauman’s underlying claim about the nature of contemporary social life and social structure:
It is the level of our shopping activity and the ease with which we dispose of one object of consumption in order to replace it with a “new and improved” one which serves us as the prime measure of our social standing and the score in the life-success competition. To all problems we encounter on the road away from trouble and towards satisfaction we seek solutions in shops.
This confirms what I said in a comment on the prior Billy Bragg post: Those who swallow the “consumer” vocabulary have a license to make up the wildest bullshit. If you doubt that, consider the utter silliness of each of the bolded phrases from this supposedly emininent supposed sociologist. Not one of them is even a half-truth, yet Bauman presents them as if he were revealing the motor of history. Empirical evidence about what actually motivates people? No need for that! We have “consumerist society” incantations, which are true in and of themselves, by mere recitation.
The spread of such gibberish speaks volumes about the sorry state of what passes for a left/realist/progressive survivalist movement these days. As the mainstream media amplify the usual interpretation — verbalized by David Cameron, who attributes the events to “pockets of our society that are not just broken, but are frankly sick” [ed: Cameron is not thinking of capitalists here, despite the rather plain fit of his diagnosis to them] — Bauman simply papers over reality in the name of rote pseudo-explanation.
The fact is that these are not frustrated shoppers who have somehow had their Harrod’s charge plates retracted. These are young and poor and often non-white UK residents who are being forced to pay for the implosion of the Thatcherite supply-side capitalist orgy that is now meeting its own logical end in Britain and around the world, and which has always pissed on the poor and the average. The situation is well understood on the ground:
The welfare state is under a sustained assault. Each day brings news of ever more drastic government plans – privatisation of the health service, destruction of the benefit system, public services cut to pieces.
The politicians say it is because we’re in a financial mess. This is nonsense – public debt is no worse than at many times in the past. The rich are getting richer, the bankers once again paying themselves massive bonuses. Yet the rest of us are expected to give up our essential public services to pay their gambling debts.
The bankers’ crisis continues to cause mass job losses. But while numbers on welfare increase, the government is slashing benefits for the unemployed, sick and disabled, single parents and those on low wages. Anyone out of work is threatened with sanctions and workfare.
To justify this, the government paints benefit claimants as useless scroungers who have to be bullied to get a job.
The Manchester Guardian reports:
The biggest losers, the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) said, are likely to be single people without children, those working more than 30 hours, those not in receipt of housing benefit, and households with savings of more than £16,000.
In other words: mostly young, working class people.
And, as Billy Bragg does note, the slashes are far deeper than mere dole reductions.
Meanwhile, the usual Tory mendacity has been gratuitously throwing salt into these wounds. PM Cameron’s depiction of the rioters as sick residents of mere social “pockets” is hardly a new phenomenon. As Britain’s economy has tanked and structural unemployment climbed, Cameron has all along portrayed the unemployed as shirkers. This, despite the well-known-in-Brixton fact that Cameron himself is about as thoroughly ensconced in inherited British upper class privilege as it is possible to be. As such, he has, of course, never himself done anything but “work” as a Conservative “researcher” and politician, with the usual in-between “gap years” and club outings.
Finally, a socio-political observer I trust deeply is actually in England at this very moment. His report:
I have probably less information than anybody else here about the exciting events elsewhere in Albion — haven’t been following the news reports closely at all. TV is as useless and mendacious here as it is in the States, and overheard conversations equally censorious, wrong-headed, and petty-bourgeois.
In other words, the stiff-lipped British overclass is roughly the same as our Yankee-Confederate one — just as deluded and ideologically high on its own fumes; just as powerful in the realm of communications; just as uninterested in, and thoroughly out of, answers.
Hence, it seems to me that the oppressed youth of Britain are merely taking the rather obvious next step. They are engaging in straightforward politics under the conditions they’ve been placed in.*
If only the youth of America could start making similar attempts to save themselves, and perhaps the rest of us in the bargain.
*Speaking of evidence:
Speaking to Reuters late on Tuesday, looters and other local people in east London pointed to the wealth gap as the underlying cause, also blaming what they saw as police prejudice and a host of recent scandals.
Spending cuts were now hitting the poorest hardest, they said, and after tales of politicians claiming excessive expenses, alleged police corruption and bankers getting rich it was their turn to take what they wanted.
“They set the example,” said one youth after riots in the London district of Hackney. “It’s time to loot.”
Thursday, July 21st, 2011
And the Trappie Goes to…
I know 2011 isn’t over, but there is next to no chance that there will be a worse TCT-related movie this year than the utterly, massively, screamingly terrible Consumed: Inside the Belly of the Beast, recipient of the coveted Trappie Award for the worst documentary film of the year.
Billed as “a compelling documentary about modern consumerist culture,” the film is chock full of pompous idiots who spout preposterous pronouncements that are as historically and institutionally ignorant as they are insultingly wrong about ordinary people* and obscurantist and exculpatory of overclass practices.
Watch the trailer, and you’ll find some ridiculous academic clown (I intend to identify the fool as soon as possible and name him to the DbC Hall of Mirrors) stating that “We all have this weird mental disease called consumerism. We’ve all kind of gone collectively psychotic.” You’ll also hear this alleged pandemic described as a “very natural human process.” Marketing gets fleetingly mentioned, but the movie treats it as a mere symptom of the underlying problem of “what we are” — crazy consumers.
Corporate capitalists, who coined and spread the word “consumer” in the first place, must be peeing themselves with delight at the appearance of such unintentionally Orwellian drivel.
Of course, the liberal greens are eating it all up, no questions asked.
By the way, among the string of howlers in just the trailer alone is the line: “We’re at the cutting edge of evolution.”
Excuse me, but ROFLMFAO, you supposed deep thinkers and experts! News Flash: Evolution has no cutting edge. To have a cutting edge, there has to be a dominant or intended direction. As Stephen Jay Gould explained over and over, human beings are both a kind of wild miracle and also nothing more than “a tiny twig on the floridly arborescent tree of life.” This elementary point is the stuff of Science 101, which one would hope self-promoting pontificators about the nature and logic of “modern culture” might perhaps have digested before distributing their glossy films.
Of course, the wankers behind this steaming turd of a movie know even less about capitalism than they do about science, so it’s all par for their course.
*Contrast these talking heads’ “diagnosis” that we’re all a bunch of Paris Hiltons with this bit of real-world news:
U.S. Consumers Relying on Credit for Basic Necessities
I’ll say it again: Using the word “consumer” short-circuits attention to reality.
Thursday, March 10th, 2011
The Secret of Green Shopperism
“Tune in, turn on, drop out.” Good advice, or terrible? Can we really imagine winning fundamental change in the status quo without using our democratic rights and powers to name and fight “the system,” a.k.a. corporate capitalism?
It’s a long-running question inside what passes for a left in the United States. And the navel-gazing, polito-phobic answer continues to win out, despite the times.
The latest form is what I call Green Shopperism, or the proposition that attempting to live a less harmful personal life is the core, rather than the inherently inadequate sidenote, of radical resistance. The call to Green Shopperism is everywhere among the so-called “transition movement,” for instance.
The great common denominator in such circles is their careful and consistent avoidance of the topics of capitalism and social class. Instead, Green Shopperists treat social power in America as if it is merely a simple sum of all citizens’ co-equal votes in the marketplace. In this entirely conventional (and fictional) view, “the average American way of life” is both the enemy and the co-equal responsibility of all Americans, regardless of wealth or access to institutional power. Overclass domination and manipulation — things like transportation dictatorship and big business marketing — are nowhere, treated as if they do not exist.
Among the Green Shopperists, the logical conclusion of such familiar premises is that personal guilt and pledges to be a smarter “consumer” are the way out of present reality:
In the Green Shopperist world, of course, there isn’t the courage even to name what needs to be changed, let alone an effort to organize a movement in that direction. I mean, who wants to do yucky and unpopular and extremely difficult things like attacking capitalism, when you can drive or fly to a workshop or a meetup and congratulate yourself for buying (or planning to buy) a Prius or planting (or planning to plant) a backyard garden?
Thursday, February 24th, 2011
Less Than Nothing
I’ve long maintained that we’d all be better off if what passes for the political left had never yet said anything about “consumption.” What it has said is much worse than silence. Harangues about “consumer culture” are part navel-gazing LSD trip and part major symptom of the very disease they purportedly want to cure.
For those who doubt this, I encourage you to read this report on the latest act of hopeless and phony pseudo-rebellion by the atrocious and simply ignorant author of some of the worst offenses.
Among his brain-dead howlers:
The whole culture needs to say, “Enough! Now we must serve the economy instead of expecting the economy to serve us.”
We currently spend $900 per capita to be shelled with unsolicited advertising, embedded in the cost of products and services. A culture that is less consumer-driven will tolerate less advertising and less debt.
Yes, shame on us, what with all our unreasonable demands that dictate what happens in our consumer-driven economy! Oops, wait a minute, I’m running late for my shareholders’ meeting…
Holy Jesus. With rebels like this, who needs capitalists?
And a post-script: If this clown understood marketing, rather than mere advertising, he’d know that $900 per person is not close to the half of it. Of course, he’s uninformed about and uninterested in actual institutions, so the thought that he’s radically understating the problem he thinks he’s attacking has never crossed his mind.
