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Consumer capitalism as a cul-de-sac

Consumer capitalism dominates our economic, social and cultural life. Its omnipresence in the developed world has, in part, depended upon the actions of governments to moderate its excesses and harness its profits for public good. In the twenty-first century this understanding appears to have withered, and consumer capitalism frames many of our assumptions.

The notion of a consumer culture now pervades most aspects of private and public life. There is, however, an increasing tension between a consumer culture based on permanent growth in production and the finite nature of our physical, social and psychological landscape.

Consumer capitalism as a way of life

An economic system may simply be a way of organizing the production and distribution of resources, but there is nothing innocent or incidental about these arrangements. Any system of production and consumption imposes its own range of possibilities. Economics can inspire wars and revolutions, it is at the heart of most political struggles, and, perhaps most fundamentally, it can play a central role in our understanding of what constitutes a good life. The way we shape our economy will, in turn, shape us. 1

We are more than mere cogs in a money-making machine, witlessly obeying its commands. There are many aspects of life whose relationship to our economic system is indirect and diffuse: our relationships with our family and friends may take place in an economic context, but those relationships have a volition that transcends economics. Nonetheless, our goals, values and opportunities are inevitably influenced by consumer capitalism – from the media we consume to the food we eat. Consumer capitalism may not encompass everything we do, but it does, in part, define us as a society. 2

This point is always easier to grasp when we are looking at systems foreign to our own. Economics is, in this sense, a little like language. Other ways of speaking are distinct and identifiable, whereas the way we speak ourselves seems natural, a point of departure for every other accent or dialect. Consumer capitalism is often discussed as if it evolved as a natural and necessary consequence of human activity in a productive, democratic age. And yet anthropology teaches us that life in contemporary consumer economies is both contrived and distinct. 3

Accordingly, when we talk about ‘capitalism’ we are usually implying more than a set of financial arrangements. Consumer capitalism evokes a culture and a lifestyle. We refer, after all, to ‘capitalist societies’ as often as we refer to ‘capitalist economies’ 4 – the assumption being that capitalism is a social as well as an economic system. 5

It is worth pausing here to reflect that, despite its ubiquity, most of us no longer use the word ‘capitalism’ as often as we might. Since the collapse of Soviet-style communism and the integration of China as a key player in a global capitalist economy (whatever it may call itself), there has been no obvious counterpoint to give meaning to the word. The battle between capitalism and communism defined politics for much of the twentieth century. In the twenty-first, consumer capitalism no longer has a visible alter-ego. Our principal point of comparison has disappeared.

In theory, the collapse of the Soviet model liberated us from a narrow dichotomy, where critical thinking about capitalism would inevitably be reduced to positions somewhere on the continuum between communism and free market liberalism.6 In practice, it created an intellectual dead-end, whereby capitalism’s victory was seen as the final product of an evolutionary process, an idea encapsulated in Francis Fukuyama’s well-known tract, The End of History.7 In this vision, capitalist democracies represent an endpoint in human progress, their success a guarantor of the system’s superiority. Without a point of comparison, capitalism (or various versions of it) assumed an air of inevitability, stunting our ability to appreciate its flaws and imagine alternatives.

Consumer capitalism’s place in our institutions, our social life and our consciousness seems assured, and yet its capacity to enrich our lives appears to be draining away. Thereby lies a central theme of this book: human progress, especially at this moment in our history, relies less on an acceptance and more on our interrogation of consumer capitalism.

The rise, falter and rise of consumer capitalism

It is easy to anthropomorphize consumer capitalism. In 1955, a retail analyst called Victor Liebow wrote – with remarkable prescience and candour – that:

Our enormously productive economy … demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and the selling of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfaction, our ego satisfaction in commodities. 8

This epiphany gives consumer capitalism a commanding voice: we may have created it but, like Doctor Frankenstein’s brilliant creation, it refuses to do our bidding. Rather than serving our interests, it is ‘our enormously productive economy’ that makes demands. It tells us – like a deity or a dictator – how we should best serve its interests. Its rapacious wants become our needs.

Liebow’s gospel is deeply pessimistic, robbing us of our independence. His use of anthropomorphic metaphors is not unusual (indeed, the observant reader will have noticed that I have already succumbed to this temptation). For its devotees, capitalism is an ingenious and dynamic creature, magical yet rational, one which – like a benign will-o’-the-wisp – will deliver the greatest good to the greatest number.9 For its critics capitalism can be a merciless despot, a creature red in tooth and claw which, left to its own devices, becomes bloated, corrupt and, in extremis, brutal.

The problem with both descriptions is that whether we see capitalism as clever or cruel, it has no ingenuity, no wit, no morality, no feeling and no understanding. It is a collection of financial forces and mechanisms which have, at times, been both efficient and productive. But, while the system has a genius for reinventing itself, its capacity is limited and, like many of its products, it comes fraught with imperfections.

If we ask consumer capitalism to create an information system enabling citizens to understand the world, its best efforts continue to fall well short of our ideals. So, for example, even our wealthiest market system – that in the United States – has been unable to create a news service to rival the breadth and scope of the publicly funded, non-commercial BBC. 10

For all its adaptability, capitalism fits awkwardly with many contemporary social or political desires. The rise of democracy saw a clamour of politicians, preachers, poets and protest movements speaking out against unfettered capitalism, a system they saw as oblivious to a whole range of human needs. They resolved that we use other means – whether political, legal or cultural – to craft our own destiny, rather than allow history to be guided by the ethereal force of the ‘invisible hand’. Their combined will was too insistent to be ignored: some societies tried to bypass capitalism altogether, but most set about restricting and adapting it in the name of the common good.

As a consequence, the twentieth century was characterized as much by the contestation of capitalism as by its promulgation. We saw a raft of regulations to change or modify some of its systemic features (often referred to as ‘market failures’).11 Capitalism’s flair for wealth creation had a series of unintended consequences – what economists call ‘externalities’. It is a technical term that, like the military euphemism ‘collateral damage’, covers a multitude of ills. It was a Conservative British prime minister in the 1970s who spoke of the ‘unacceptable face of capitalism’,12 and whose government was content to preside over the rise of a less avaricious public sector, one more responsive to social goals and created to provide on the basis of need rather than ability to pay.

On the home front, the ‘self-correcting’ nature of capitalism – the idea that when companies or financial institutions crashed and burned, new business would rise from the ashes – was regarded as unacceptably cruel.13 The gap between failure and rebirth took little account of the human misery caused by the upheaval. Governments – especially those in the wealthier, developed world – began to intervene in the marketplace to stimulate economic growth and to limit the damage (in their own countries, at least) when things went awry.

The rise of democracy created a demand for careful planning and equality of opportunity – something that, in many realms of life, was delivered more successfully by public rather than private institutions. Despite capitalism’s energy, some of the twentieth century’s greatest achievements – in healthcare, culture, architecture, education, science and technology – came from public investment rather than private capital. Without public money and political will there would have been no space exploration, no universal healthcare or education...