Consumerism is not the problem

Americans are given two messages: go shopping and spend responsibly. Measures of economic well-being include indexes of consumer confidence, consumer spending, housing starts, etc. At the same time, we read reports of out of control spending, outrageous credit card balances, the lowest levels of household saving in a hundred years. The American consumer is out of control and the American consumer is the lynchpin of the global economy.

The political form that these messages typically, but not necessarily, take in the US is that the right places all responsibility for the situation with individuals while the left blames capital. The conflict over the state is a conflict over the ways to direct policy, to regulate the behavior of individuals or to regulate corporations. This summer, beginning, though, in presidential primaries, there has been increasing commentary on the ways that the left and right are blurred, and blurred to favor finance capital: finance is bailed out and taxpayers (not to mention future generations) are posting the bail. Naomi Klein's "shock doctrine" seems appropriate: the US as a whole is encountering the shock effects of neoliberalism's transfer of wealth from public funds and the work and savings of people to the pockets of the .001 percent, who continue to get richer and richer. It's what has been going in the former socialist countries, Latin America, and much of Africa. Now it's happening to us.

I don't know of much theory on the left that is helpful here. Think, for a start, of the messages of consumerism: go shopping and spend responsibly. Are these messages simple reflections of the contradictions of capital? Ideology's distorted image of a fundamental incompatibility? And, is a better approach one that emphasizes abundance, infinite productivity, the productive desire of the multitude (even considered in terms of the symbolic labor of hackers as a class ala Wark)? For me, these approaches are ever less convincing.

Americans produce debt. The capitalization of debt has been at the core of the economy for over 20 years. It is parasitic on consumerism, but requires much more than that. An article in the NYT today describes the ways that credit today is no longer based on the assumption that loans will be repaid. Rather, loans pay. From the fees for administering them, the penalties attached to them, the costs in refinancing them, to their repackaging in complex debt structures, debt is the primary US asset. It's what "foreigners" buy, what we export and they invest in. It's not an economy of abundance but an economy based on a hole or absence. It circulates around this absence and is premised on buying it, selling it, betting on it--or against it (selling short).

Some have seen this consuming for a long time: corporate "mergers" and the buying of companies only to strip them of their assets, fire their workers, take on their debt, and sell that as well. Commentators have been telling us for a long time that manufacturing has declined. There have been major layoffs in white collar idea-based industries (advertising, dot coms) as well. The economy runs on debt. That's what we make now.

So the idea of the consumer as producer so prominent in net critique isn't wrong. It just hasn't named what consumers produce. Consumers produce debt.

Comments

[Joe]

Isn't this something that Libertarians and the like have been arguing about fractional reserve banking for, probably, a lot longer than the critique of neoliberalism?

[Jodi]

I don't know. I think it is pretty different from fractional reserve banking.

[Kenneth Rufo]

Baudrillard seems to be a good source of theoretical inspiration on this issue, fwiw.

[Alain]

I really like this post Jodi - consumers produce debt. But I think we stand on the precipice of economic disaster precisely because the consumption side has been insanely promoted for the last 25 to 30 years. I remember when I was growing up that President Carter was rediculed and driven from office in part because he asked Americans to conserve energy. He challenged Americans to abandon their isolation and naricissism and asked them to sacrifice (a modest amount) for a greater cause. He clearly articulated that Energy dependence not only threatened the economy but was also a matter of national security.

I think the fact that his warnings were completely rejected says alot about the trajectory of American capitalism. People do not want to be told they cannot have more - that there are limits. And the ruling elites play on this tendency which invariably supports American militarism. In 1980 America imported something like 30% of its oil and today it is over 70%. As President Bush Sr said on the dawn of the first gulf war, "The American way of life is not negotiable." I cannot remember any major political figure of either party questioning that statement. It was merely a given.