Consumerism and Consumption in our Modern $ociety (part I)
I want to start todays article with a little quote:
"[...] Wealth or money must be able to purchase labor power. But as long as people have access to the means of production --land, raw materials, tools (e.g. weaving looms, mills) -- there is no reason for them to sell their labor. They can still sell the product of their labor. For the capitalistic mode of production to exist, the tie between producers and the means of production must be cut; peasants must lose control of their land, artisans control of their tools. These people once denied access to the means of production must negotiate with those who control the means of production for permission to use the land and tools and receive a wage in return. Those who control the means of production also control the goods that are produced, and so those who labor to produce them must buy them back from those with the means of production. Thus the severing of the persons from the means of production turns them not only into laborers, but into consumers of the product of their labor as well."
In his book, Global Problems and the Culture of Capitalism, Richard Robbins describes that for the rise of consumerism in the "developed world" to occur, buying habits had to be transformed and luxuries had to be made into necessities.
The goal of advertisers is to aggressively shape consumer desires and create value in commodities by imbuing them with the power to transform the consumer into a more desireable person. Today businesses, such as oil, food,
electricity and rubber spend over $120 billion in the United States alone and over $250 billion worldwide on advertising.
The idea of "fashion" helps stirring up of anxieties and restlessness over the possession of things that were not "new" or "up-to-date". Fashion pressures people to buy not out of need but for style -- from a desire to conform to what others define as "fashionable".
Robbins notes in his book, that "Educational and cultural institutions, governmental agencies and even the family itself changed their meaning and function to promote the consumption of commodities."
But, as well as meeting consumer desires, there was a more fundamental political and economic reason for promoting individualism thru consumerism. The social, economic and political aspects behind this are as follows:
Corporate America as well as the political elite have to naturally try to promote the desired conformity, which helps a stable and predictable political economy. "Methods of psychological research were deployed by corporate America and various research institutions to understand and categorize people into predictable behaviors and be able to get people to express their individuality by purchasing products.
In the past two centuries a change in spiritual and intellectual values from emphasis on such values as thrift, modesty, and moderation, towards a value system that encourages spending and extreme consuming patterns (especially from 1880 - 1930).
This support for individualism is seen very valuable because it is a form of subtly imposed social control, whereby it would individualize people in a way that would remove or at least loosen the strong political and social activism, as people would turn more inwards to themselves only. A group of people who were once concerned about social issues were largely transformed into exploring and fulfilling their individual desires through the purchase of material goods.
This shaping of people's choices and opinions has been coming from pressures and skills of big business, to which even governments had to succumb to gain power. The irony is, that the drive for individualism had made people feel unique and NOT driven by big governments or big business in their lives and choices, and yet it is the big multinationals that have been able to influence deeply both individuals and governments; "[...]People's desires were being listened to, but people's democratic rights and broader powers were being undermined; a process that has been attempted for centuries by the elites of the time.".
With these types of transformations, the consumer society has evolved in such a way, that consumption and consumerism (for good and (mainly) for bad) is identified as being at core of a modern culture and society.
To deal with social and consumerism pressures and their effects, people may on occasion resort to what psychologist term as "compensatory consumption" -- that is, ironically consuming even more to feel better.
Research evidence seemed to suggest that increased wealth did not necessarily lead to more content and satisfaction.
"Thus by the 1930, the consumer was well entrenched in the United States, complete with a spiritual framework and an intellectual rationalization that glorified the continued consumption of commodities as personally fulfilling and economically desirable, and a moral imperative that would end poverty and injustice. [...]Since that time the institutions of our society, particularly those of corporate America, have become increasingly more adept at [...] hiding the negative consequences of our patterns of behavior, consequences such as labor exploitation, environmental damage, poverty and growing inequality in the distribution of wealth."
-- all quotes and some inspirations taken from Richard Robbins', Global Problems and the Culture of Capitalism & GlobalIssues.org
Children as Consumers
Children wield enormous purchasing power, both directly and indirectly - indirectly in the sense that they are able to persuade and influence parents on what to buy.
"Observe a child and parent in a store. That high-pitched whining you'll hear coming from the cereal aisle is more than just the pleadings of a single kid bent on getting a box of Fruit Loops into the shopping cart. It is the sound of thousands of hours of market research, of an immense coordination of people, ideas and resources, of decades of social and economic change all rolled into a single, "Mommy, pleeease!"
"If it's within [kid's] reach, they will touch it, and if they touch it, there's at least a chance that Mom or Dad will relent and buy it," writes retail anthropologist, Paco Underhill. The ideal placement of popular books and videos, he continues, should be on the lower shelves "so the little ones can grab Barney or Teletubbies unimpended by Mom or Dad, who possibly take a dim view of hypercommercialized critters.""
-- Dan Cook, Assistant Professor of Advertising and Sociology at University of Illinois,
Lunchbox hegemony; Kids and the Marketplace, Then & Now, LiP Magazine, August 20, 2001
"In the 1960s, children aged 2 to 14 directly influenced about $5 billion in parental purchases," McNeal [professor of marketing at Texas A&M University] wrote [in an April 1998 article in American Demographics]. "in the mid-1970s, the figure was $20 billion, and it rose to $50 billion by 1984. By 1990, kids direct influence had reached $132 billion, and in 1997, it may have peaked at around $188 billion. Estimates show that children's aggregate spending roughly double during each decade of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, and has tripled so far in the 1990s.""
-- Miriam H. Zoll, Psychologists Challenge Ethics of Marketing to Children
"What is most troubling is that children's culture has become virtually indistinguishable from consumer culture over the course of the last century. The cultural marketplace is now a key arena for the formation of the sense of self and peer relationships, so much so that parents are often stuck between giving into a kid's purchase demands or risking their child becoming an outcast on the playground.
Children consumers grow up to be more than just adult consumers. They become mothers and fathers, administrative assistants and bus drivers, nurses and realtors, online magazine editors and assistant professors - in short, they become us who, in turn, make more of them. Childhood makes capitalism hum over the long haul."
-- Dan Cook, Assistant Professor of Advertising and Sociology at University of Illinois,
Lunchbox hegemony; Kids and the Marketplace, Then & Now
However, another aspect to this that makes it a challenge is also due to the fact that such consumption is ingrained into the culture, and the parents typically grew up with aspects of that culture themselves!
"The children's market works because it lives off deeply-held beliefs about self expression and freedom of choice - originally applied to the political sphere, and now almost inseperable from the culture of consumption. Children's commercial culture has quite successfully usurped kids' boundless creativity and presonal agency, selling these back to them - and us - as "empowerment", a term that appeases parents while shielding marketers. Linking one's sense of self to the choices offered by the marketplace confuses personal autonomy with consumer behavior. But, try telling that to a kid who only sees you standing in the way of the Chuck-E-Cheese-ified version of fun and happiness. Kids are keen to the adult-child power imbalance and to adult hypocrisy, especially when they are told to hold their desires in check by a parent who is blind to her or his own materialistic impulses."
-- Dan Cook, Assistant Professor of Advertising and Sociology at University of Illinois,
Lunchbox hegemony; Kids and the Marketplace, Then & Now
"When you go into a Wal-Mart or a Toys 'R' Us store to purchase Disney's Monsters Inc., Martell's Barbie, Sesame Street, Hasbro's Star Wars or Pokemon do you ever think of the young women in China forced to work 16 hours a day, from 8am to 12 midnight, seven days a week, 30 days a month, for months on end, for wages of 17 cents an hour? Workers forced to work overtime, but cheated of their pay? Do you ever imagine women working all day long handling toxic glues, paints and solvents, women fainting, nauseous, sick to their stomachs? Women housed 16 to a dorm room and trying to get by on four hours of sleep a night? Workers whose bodies ache, who are exhausted from racing through the same operations 3,000 times a day, day in and day out? Women who are fired when they get sick? Workers who have no rights, and who - if they try to defend their most basic, internationally recognized human and worker rights, will be immediately fired and blacklisted? Workers who are worn out and used up by the time they reach 30 or 35 yeaers of age and are removed to be replaced with another crop of young teenagers?
Unfortunately, this is the real world behind the toys we purchase. It is a big industry. In the United States alone over $29.4 billion are being spend on toys each year.
We purchase hundreds of millions of toys each year that are made in China, but when was the last time we heard from a toy worker in China, about their working conditions and lives? Even once? Ever? Isn't it a little strange that we know so little?
In 2000, U.S. toy companies spent $837 million on advertising. The companies do not want us to know or to think, just buy."
-- Toys of Misery; A Report on the Toy Industry in China National Labor Committee, December 2001
Reading this, it is simply ridiculous to call China communist or even socialist! 
"No one's really worrying about what it's [advertising to children] is teaching impressionable youth. Hey, I'm in the business of convincing people to buy things they don't need."
-- An advertising executive, in Business Week, August 11, 1997
There might not be anything wrong with businesses trying to make sales and profit. However, the effects of things like mass consumption, the intense advertising, and targeting to children and its emphasis over so many aspects of daily lives is of concern. That is, the effects of constantly buying things, while discarding older but often functioning things, increasing demands on the world's resources for this consumption, managing more waste, exploitation, other people to labor over this, environmental destruction, and so on. And all this while many still go hungry and poor because their lands are being used to export away food and other resources for producing products to be consumed elsewhere. It is this way that the pressure and drive for profits has led to an over-commercialized consumerism, which has wider effects around the world and on the unseen majority peoples of the world, as we look at next.
Effects of Consumerism
"William Rees, an urban planner at the University of British Columbia, estimated that it requires four to six hectares of land to maintain the consumption level of the average person from a high-consumption country. The problem is that 1990, worldwide there were only 1.7 hectares of ecologically productive land for each person. He concluded that the deficit is made up in core countries by drawing down the natural resources of their own countries and expropriating the resources, through trade, of peripheral countries. In other words, someone has to pay for our consumption levels.
Our consumption of goods obviously is a function of our culture. Only by producing and selling things and services does capitalism in its present form work, and the more that is produced and the more that is purchased the more we have progress and prosperity. The single most important measure of economic growth is, after all, the gross national product (GNP), the sum total of goods and services produced by a given society in a given year. It is a measure of the success of a consumer society, obviously, to consume.
However, the production, processing, and consumption, of commodities requires the extraction and use of natural resources (wood, ore, fossil fuels, and water); it requires the creation of factories and factory complexes whose operation creates toxic by-procducts, while the use of commodities themselves (e.g. automobiles) creates pollutants and waste. Yet of the three factors envrionmentalists often point to as responsible for environmental pollution - population, technology, and consumption - consumption seems to get the least attention. One reason, no doubt, is that it may be the most difficult to change; our consumption patterns are so much a part of our lives that to change them would require a massive cultural overhaul, not to mention severe economic dislocations. A drop in demand for products, as economists note, brings on economic recession or even depression, along with massive unemployment."
-- Richard Robbins, Global Problem and the Culture of Capitalism
As hinted in the above quote, within the current economic system of "perpetual growth", we are being locked into a mode of development that is:
"Junk-food chains, including KFC and Pizza Hut, are under attack from major environmental groups in the United States and other developed countries because of their environmental impact. Intensive breeding of livestock and poultry for such restaurants leads to deforestation, land degradation, and contamination of water sources and other natural resources. For every pound of red meat, poultry, eggs, and milk produced, farm fields lose about five pounds of irreplaceable top soil. The water necessary for meat breeding comes to about 190 gallons per animal per day, or ten times what a normal Indian family is suppose to use in one day, if it gets water at all.
[...] Overall, animal farms use nearly 40 percent of the world's total grain production. In the United States, nearly 70 percent of grain production is fed to livestock."
-- Vandana Shiva, Stolen Harvest
Because industrial agriculture is using more monocultures, rather than a diversity of crops, the loss of biodiversity is leading to more resource usage, as described above. This as well as other political situations such as the motives for dumping surplus food on to developing ccountries to undersell the local farmers, leads to further hunger around the world.
Consumption patterns in wealthier countries increase demands for various foods, flowers, textiles, coffee, etc. Combined with commercial interests in things like tabacco, largely grown by corporations from wealthy nations, and with input-intensive agricultural practices (incl. using herbicides and pesticides) the diversion of and misuse of land and the associated environmental damage in unsustainable methods adds up.
As land ownership has become more concentrated in the hands of larger companies, larger agribusinesses and so on, and as things like food dumping increases hunger and drives rural workers out of jobs, there is an increase in urban migration as people move to cities in hope for a better chance. These economic policies that are based less on people's sharing and development, but more on acquiring wealth and profit lead to additional stress on the larger cities to provide for more people. It also results in more slum areas, health problems and so on. Many easily conclude that by just looking at the cities that we have overpopulation in the world. While the cities are no doubt facing problems of over population, a variety of political and economic circumstances are leading to such conditions and looking only at cities to determine if the planet is over populated misses out these factors.
~peace~
PS: This is only part I. It would be too long to write everything in one entry (and maybe too boring as well), therefore I decided to split it into two. Part II will be up and running soon. In the mean time enjoy the other entries.
