Excess

Anti-consumerism in the West

Kim Humphery

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780745645414, 9780745645407
• eBook ISBN: 9780745659039
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Over-consumption is one of the key issues of our time, especially in the Western world. Over the past decade, in the face of historically unprecedented levels of consumer spending in the West - and the more recent impact of recession - a vigorous politics of anti-consumerism has emerged in a range of wealthy nations.

This timely and original new book provides a comprehensive overview and analysis of what has come to be called the 'new politics of consumption'; a politics embodied in movements such as culture jamming, simple living, slow food and fair trade. The book offers an examination of anti-consumerism at a time when the idea of 'consumer excess' is being re-framed by a global economic downturn, and crucially explores what this means for the future of political debate. Drawing on interviews with activists across three continents, and offering a refreshingly accessible discussion of contemporary commentary and theory, Kim Humphery sympathetically explores anti-consumerism as cultural interpretation, lifestyle change, and collective action.

Whilst analysing the positive advances of the anti-consumerist movement, Excess also challenges contemporary critical thinking on consumption, taking issue with the return to theories of mass culture in contemporary anti-consumerist polemic. Alternatively, Humphery begins to forge a politics of anti-consumerism that addresses the complexity of material acquisition and which avoids treating consumers as mere dupes in the logic of capitalism, viewing them instead as active participants in a culture which is capable of transformation.

1

THE NEW POLITICS OF CONSUMPTION

In the month I began writing this book I paid a long overdue visit to an old and very dear friend. We lunched round a solid Australian blackwood table that I knew well, though on this occasion I was to be served more than I bargained for. Not far into the first drink and the nibbles I was beckoned to the loungeroom and ushered into a space transformed or, rather, colonized. Obliterating a view of almost everything surrounding it was the latest of gargantuan and impossibly flat TVs. It had just been home delivered, unceremoniously dumped in the centre of the room, and hastily connected-up; we now stood together before the beast – given that sitting down, in what was still a tiny Edwardian parlour, was no longer a viable option. Remaining silent, but sporting a slightly excited and cheeky demeanour, my friend, knowing my work on consumption, seemed to be half insolently bracing for the critical onslaught. For my own part, I slowly, perhaps oddly, sensed what I can only describe as a rising joy, not in response to the flickering, inescapable screen but because what was being played-out in wordless action was a social reality, a human moment, that is rarely captured adequately in commentary, and least of all in theoretical writing. I could, and would, well argue the merits of the purchase, yet what was being impressed upon me was the delightful fact that the ‘commodity’ in front of us said nothing in particular, or at least not immediately, about the individual who had purchased it. It did not tell me that he was greedy or stupid, immoral or hypermaterialist, acquisitive or status-hungry, uncultured or unthinking. Knowing this individual, I knew also that such knee-jerk assumptions were ludicrous. They were not only wrong as a summing-up of the man, they illegitimately turned his act of consumption into a means of evaluating him. Here, in fact, was a person who, in his gregariousness and community engagement, put me to shame, and who had simply acquired, and was now showing me, a rather large piece of up-to-date and expensive technology – a thing – that would be used and enjoyed, and no doubt come to be a vehicle of good times to be had through watching the cricket with his kids.

Among critics, this way of understanding consumption is not common. There is an irresistible urge for intellectuals and social commentators to make objects say a range of things about the people who possess them. And what they are made to say is, as we have previously noted, often none too flattering towards the ‘consumer’. Occasionally, this is challenged. The anthropologist, Daniel Miller, for example, has recently explored with great delicacy the relationships between people and objects and the way in which our acts of acquiring and valuing things, far from defining us as materialistic and superficial, express our constant ability to use the material world in order to forge and foster our relationships with other people.¹ This challenge, however, raises a central analytical and political dilemma. While there is much about material culture and our relationship with things that can be understood as constructive (and we will certainly return to this fact in later chapters) we cannot escape the need also to reflect on and question market systems, consumption decisions, and the ultimate value of particular kinds of objects. It is the preparedness to tackle this latter imperative that has indelibly shaped contemporary anti-consumerist critique. In fact, at no time in the modern period have social observers and political activists sought to be more evaluative of consumption and material possessions than they are currently.

For this, there has been a ready audience. There is, indeed, a definite though now perhaps shifting market for polemic on western consumerism. Across the English-speaking world in particular rarely has a month gone by over the last ten or fifteen years without a new book being published on the perils of working, borrowing and spending. Ironically, by late 2008 one could sense this output slowing in tandem with the global economy. Critics of consumerism have scrambled, like everyone else, to rejig their analysis in face of a boom gone pear-shaped. What remains in place, however, is anti-consumerism itself; that is a highly active and well-developed field of resistance to the still globally dominant logic of overconsumption. But just what is this field of opposition? What perspectives and aims partially unify it? In what sense can it be called a new politics of consumption? And what are its limits in terms of its ability to understand western material life and those who consume? In this chapter I begin to explore these questions by way of synthesizing and, at times, challenging a broad but relatively unified body of contemporary western social commentary on the extent, causes and consequences of consumerism.

In this commentary, there have been some prominent voices. This has been particularly so in North America, long the cradle of world commodity consumption. Pre-eminent here are Juliet Schor’s skilful expositions of overwork and overspending in the USA, which have been instrumental in reinstating consumption and affluence as a field of public debate in her own country and beyond. Schor’s work has constituted a vigorous return to a sense of western levels of affl uence as socially problematic – a critical sensibility that Schor rightly identifies as having once been a key part of an oppositional political agenda within western nations during the 1960s and 1970s. What this critical return brings with it, however, is a slightly altered set of concerns embedded in a realization of the urgency with which we must now confront the social and environmental costs of overconsumptive western economies set on fire over the past few decades by a ‘new consumerism’, and now struggling out of the inevitable recession. In a similar vein, the North American environmentalist Bill McKibben has spoken of ‘a new critique emerging’, not simply within intellectual circles but by way of the more grounded formation of a movement for ‘voluntary simplicity’.²

Notwithstanding the quality of Schor’s and McKibben’s insights, however, the epithet ‘new’ in relation to a contemporary politics of consumption smacks a little of overstatement. Invoking such an epithet underplays the extent to which contemporary anti-consumerist commentary exists on an analytical continuum, to a large extent reiterating earlier social theoretical, environmentalist and public intellectual arguments in relation to a commodity capitalism. Similarly, beyond the realm of commentary, a contemporary anti-consumerist activism and alternative lifestyle movement plays out a politics with a long pedigree.

It might be more accurate, then, to talk of a reinvigoration of a politics of consumption having taken place in a range of western countries over the last decade or more. And this needs to be placed itself within the context of a broader reinvigoration of the genre of oppositional political criticism more generally. Although it’s difficult to ground this claim empirically, there is an undoubted sense among western intellectuals, social commentators and activists that the ‘noughties’ have signalled a return, in the wake of a post-modern moment of radical doubt, to the stuff of politics. Just as there has been a discernable ‘environmental turn’ across the field of social analysis in the West, there has emerged also what we might call a ‘moral turn’ which seeks to rescue questions of value, universal rights and purposive ethical and political action from the clutches of what is seen by many as a debilitating overemphasis during the 1980s and 1990s on cultural and moral relativism.

Already, in introducing this book, we have noted the recent questioning of theory by social theorists themselves, with both Terry Eagleton and Bruno Latour writing of the necessary demise of a mode of late-twentieth-century theorizing intent on endless deconstruction. We noted also in the Introduction the vigorous re-emergence over the past few years of left and liberal public intellectual critique and of a readership receptive to its arguments, particularly concerning questions of global economy and culture. In fact, Naomi Klein was writing by the year 2000 of a political (and generational) shift from an activist concern with questions of discrimination and identity to a new, more globally engaged politics of anti-corporatism. Similarly, the British writer David Boyle, in exploring an emerging desire among western populations for ‘authenticity’ in opposition to the spin and virtuality of western culture, has written of a new humanism replacing a now defunct postmodernism.³

Whatever the status of such claims, recent anti-consumerist commentary is undoubtedly a part of what many see as a renewed political moment, and Schor is right in recognizing this. In fact, the links between rubric critiques of globalization and more focused anti-consumerist polemic are somewhat blurred. Thus, the writings of a varied bunch of thankfully very present contemporary malcontents, from John Ralston Saul, Martha Nussbaum and Richard Sennett to Naomi Klein and George Monbiot – to name but a few – target consumerism and overconsumption as an element of their concerns. Other writers, such as Joel Bakan, David Boyle, Thomas Frank, Carl Honoré and Eric Schlosser – once again a selective list – focus specifically on aspects of current economic life and its alternatives, from fast food and brand marketing to corporate power and slow living.⁴ Finally, there is the very particular body of work framing this study: those writers who over the last decade or so have taken on consumerism directly as their principal focus of analysis and opposition.

There are, I want to suggest here, a number of tiers to this latter body of work. Predominantly, commentators critical of western consumerism – from Juliet Schor, Barry Schwartz, John de Graaf and Kelle Lasn to Robert Frank, Paul and Anne Ehrlich, Tim Kasser and many others – have adopted the genre of the concerned public intellectual intervention.⁵This work is resoundingly North American in origin and mostly journalistic in style – even when written by academics.⁶ Yet underneath this is another tier of anti-consumerist research and writing that is both more specialist – aimed, for example, at an environmentalist or even business readership – and more avowedly scholarly in that it examines the issue of ‘sustainable consumption’ with a formality not usually possible in the context of pursuing the pacy syntax of the non-fiction bestseller.⁷ Finally, these popular and specialist tiers of anti-consumerist commentary and analysis inevitably draw on and reframe social and cultural theory. Thus, increasingly, contemporary theorists invoke the new politics of consumption in reflecting on the current predicament of late modernity.⁸ It is the first and, to a lesser extent, the second of these tiers that I discuss in this chapter, leaving an engagement with recent social theory until a little later.

It must be said from the outset that one of the defining features of the new politics of consumption – particularly as expressed in public intellectual commentary – is its repetition of a limited set of understandings and perspectives and the speed with which a number of its pronouncements on western economic life have become in part irrelevant in the post-2008 era. There should be no mincing of words here. Much contemporary anti-consumerist writing in the West is, in conceptual and analytical terms, a somewhat static conversation in which, with some notable exceptions, one text blends into another, proffering the same arguments, utilizing the same evidence and juggling a similar range of solutions. Emblematic of this is the use over the past few years of the same title – Affluenza – for three separate books: one North American, one Australian and one British. Each of these in part constructive books essentially pushes the same pathologizing argument; that consumerism is driven by a conditioned desire to keep up with the Joneses and ultimately results not in satisfaction but personal unhappiness.⁹ This minor epidemic of affluenzas does not signal a politics that is, in analytical terms, creative. Rather, it signals a type of commentary that has reached an impasse, uncertain of how to further develop an interpretation of and response to the exigencies of global consumption. Even more damagingly, talk of ‘affluenza’ has become a dead end in a time beyond the millennial boom; an era that requires a far more nuanced understanding of why and how the West consumes than is evident in a trite, if pithy, labelling of the western individual as manic shopper.

Yet, notwithstanding these difficulties, much recent commentary on western consumption has, on any fair estimation, admirably reframed public political agendas in many affl uent nations. Repetition may make for a lack of analytical dynamism but it does at least speak of a certain unity of focus and intent on the part of those who seek to expose and oppose the environmental and social ramifications of western consumerism. It yields also a political perspective that is remarkably synthesized in relation to the identification of the causes and consequences of contemporary western overconsumption. In the remainder of this chapter, then, I trace and explore the contours of this synthesis. In doing so, I focus particularly on how a western consumerism has come to be interpreted and contested in ways that are intensely socially oriented rather than simply ecologically framed.

OVERCONSUMPTION

Undoubtedly, the key concept of overconsumption has come to shape contemporary critical engagements with a global consumerism. In the context of decades of rising, if now stumbling, Minority World affluence, commentators have looked to the historical rise in the consumption of goods and services within many western nations as reflective of an inability and lack of will to grasp the pressing realities of environmental ‘overreach’ and of global economic inequality. But more than this, overconsumption is understood also in terms of a further threshold having been reached in the maintenance of personal wellbeing and, more broadly, of social health. Although the concept of overconsumption is often invoked with a frustrating vagueness, it remains useful in drawing attention, when used in its most politicized sense, to the unnecessary excess of global commodity capitalism. Within contemporary discussions of anti-consumerism, this is an excess variously and interconnectedly understood in terms of ecology, equity, wellbeing, social cohesion and morality. While thus loosely defined, and often mistakenly used as a synonym for the somewhat different processes of consumerism and commodification, overconsumption is made to cover a very broad conceptual ground. Its conceptual importance has also, we might note, been strengthened in face of a world economic downturn; in large part because, while a rampant consumerism is presently a less visible feature of affl uent societies, the global overuse of resources and the churning-out of waste has only marginally declined.

The well-known critics of western affluence and global population growth Paul and Anne Ehrlich utilize the term overconsumption in a predominantly ecological sense to designate levels of acquisition that go beyond those necessary to meet ‘basic needs’ and provide ‘reasonable comfort’.¹⁰ This serves as a straightforward starting definition. In considerably more detail, however, Thomas Princen usefully distinguishes between overconsumption as an aggregate ecological concept, indicating a level of resource usage that undermines a species’ life support system, and misconsumption, understood as the taking of poor economic decisions on the part of individuals that results in a loss of personal wellbeing through the stress of debt and overwork. Such a distinction, although contestable, effectively allows us to more clearly envisage a rubric notion of overconsumption dualistically: as a structural and very much ecological problem inhering in particular forms of economic organization, and as a problem concerning the nature of individual consumption decision making.¹¹

There is, of course, recognition by many writers that overconsumption is an increasingly global rather than simply western issue, evidenced in the rise of what Myers and Kent have called the ‘new consumers’ within developing and transitional economies. Similarly, overconsumption, on an aggregate basis, is most definitely related to global and regional population levels as well as consumption rates.¹² Yet, notwithstanding the impact of population growth and the global spread of high-consumption modes of living, it is indisputably the case that western capitalist economies have always been the most highly consumptive on a global per capita basis; and this remains so despite recent First World recessionary trends.

Given this fact, overconsumption has a broad ethical meaning in the hands of many contemporary critics that goes beyond a sense of its crucial ecological impacts or the personal psychophysical effects of individual consumption decisions. To return to the work of the Ehrlichs, they offer a clear recognition that a global environmental crisis is embedded in a two-dimensional political reality involving overconsumption on the one hand and underconsumption – or poverty – on the other. As they constructively state:

Ironically, the world is thus faced with a complex dual problem. If civilization is ever to achieve sustainability it must find ways both to increase necessary consumption in poor nations and to simultaneously reduce wasteful and harmful consumption in both rich and poor countries.¹³

This ‘other dire...

Table of contents

• Cover
• HalfTitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Dedication
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: The New Politics of Consumption
• Chapter 2: Anti-Consumerism in Action
• Chapter 3: Encountering Anti-Consumerism
• Chapter 4: Interpreting Material Life
• Chapter 5: Consuming Differently
• Postscript: After the Boom, Beyond the West
• Notes
• Bibilography
• Index