Ever since Richard Hoggart’s attempt to grapple with the ‘consumerization’ of the working class in The Uses of Literacy, the politics of consumption have been on the agenda for the left in some form or another. In recent years, particularly within the field of cultural studies, there has been a growing interest in consumerism not as regressive (a position put in much of Jeremy Seabrook’s writing) but as a progressive trend – for example in studies of fashion and subcultural activities where commodities or styles can be ‘subverted’ into rebellious statements. The extreme form of this is found in the academic idea of ‘postmodernism’ where, because no meanings are fixed and anything can be used to mean anything else, one can claim as radical almost anything provided it is taken out of its original context.
The original context of any product is that of its production. The one feature shared by both Hoggart, whose argument is limited to the sphere of leisure and domestic culture, and the cultural studies post-punk stylists, whose concern is with the meanings of consumerism alone, is an absence of any sense of a relationship between the spheres of production and consumption. Because if the product’s context is, first of all, its production, what is the context of the consumer, without whom, after all, there can be no consumption? It is the context of a society in which the majority of people have no control whatsoever over their productive lives: no security, little choice in work if they have work at all, and no means of public expression. In this society, consuming is, for those who can afford it, a major form of cultural and social activity and at the same time a central feature of the economy which is imposing such frustrations in the first place. The production of an ever-increasing range of consumer goods is crucial to modern capitalism while the consumption of those goods is crucial not only to the economy but to the ideology which supports it. Marx chose to begin his great study of the capitalist system with – the commodity; not because of its economic role alone, but because of what it means.
The conscious, chosen meaning in most people’s lives comes much more from what they consume than what they produce. Clothes, interiors, furniture, records, knick-knacks, all the things that we buy involve decisions and the exercise of our own judgement, choice, ‘taste’. Obviously we don’t choose what is available for us to choose between in the first place. Consuming seems to offer a certain scope for creativity, rather like a toy where all the parts are pre-chosen but the combinations are multiple. Consumerism is often represented as a supremely individualistic act – yet it is also very social: shopping is a socially endorsed event, a form of social cement. It makes you feel normal. Most people find it cheers them up – even window shopping. The extent to which shoplifting is done where there is no material need (most items stolen are incredibly trivial) reveals the extent to which people’s wants and needs are translated into the form of consumption.
Buying and owning, in our society, offer a sense of control. If you pay for something you do tend to feel you control it; a belief borne out by people’s eagerness to buy British Telecom shares regardless of the fact that they already owned BT. Yet the idea of having a stake in society or a tiny voting right in a public institution is not of itself reactionary, only the form it appears in. Although at present the left shies away from many issues of public ownership, surely the enormous rush of small-scale BT investors shows, not that everyone is a rabid ‘Thatcherite’, but that a great many ‘ordinary’ people do want ‘a stake in this country’ – something which they (like so many NHS patients) were evidently not made to feel they had when it was owned by the state.
Ownership is at present the only form of control legitimized in our culture. Any serious attempts at controlling products from the other side – as with the miners’ demand to control the future of their product, coal (or the printing unions’ attempts to control their product, newspaper articles, etc) are not endorsed. Some parts of the left find these struggles less riveting than the struggles over meanings in street style. Yet underlying both struggles is the need for people to control their environment and produce their own communal identity; it is just that the former, if won, could actually fulfil that need while the latter ultimately never will. ‘Progressive’ socialists who argue that ‘Thatcherism’ has captured many popular needs are quite right – but while such needs are captured by this system they are precisely not fulfilled by it, in the way that they could be by a more daring socialism.
The point about consumerism is that people are getting something out of it – but something which the left must be able to offer in a different form. The current drift towards right-wing programmes on the left – e.g. the sale of council houses – because they are ‘popular’, ignores the possibility that many needs and ideals currently fulfilled by – to pursue this example – the ideology of home ownership, could be met in different ways. Some of the left seems now to have accepted the bourgeois equation of private ownership with freedom and the devolution of power – precisely the concepts behind Mrs Thatcher’s election victories. It is as if the left can think of no other way to win than by imitating its enemies. The reason council tenants want to buy their houses is quite simple. They are not besotted with the idea of ownership; they are gripped by the need for security. The key emotions underpinning the dream of home ownership for most council tenants are the desires for control, autonomy and continuity. It should be possible for public housing to provide these by, for example, building into its principles the notion of the control of the individual tenant and in practice giving Council tenants the feeling that their Council flat or house is ‘their’ home.
The analysis of consumer items as the concrete forms taken by particular needs is essential if socialists are to envisage different ways of meeting them. As many have pointed out, street fashion is often an attempt to subvert, create, provoke. The TV and video boom shows not only a trend towards the privatization of entertainment but offers the ability to control, say, a film on video in the same way one can control when and how one reads a book. The phenomenon of the Walkman provides both a symbolic and a physical means of cutting off from a society which itself appears deaf to, in particular, the young people who form a large proportion of the walkman market. In analyzing these products we can understand more about the society which both produces and uses them. But their forms are fundamentally those of a market capitalism – which they reflect, rather than shape. What are potentially radical are the needs that underlie their use: needs both sharpened and denied by the economic system that makes them.
In this sense the economic and the ideological need not be seen – and are not experienced – as separate. Economic oppression is a large part of the powerlessness which consumer ideology seeks to overcome, or, for the very many whose only consumption is barely at the level of necessity, to confirm. The possession of expensive jogging shoes, videos, home computers and so on does not necessarily mark a level of fulfilment for the supposedly right-wing ‘bourgeoisified’ working class but, in part at least, a measure of frustration. Their aspirations have been caught up in the wheel of consumer production. Wearing a Lacoste sweatshirt doesn’t make anyone middle class any more than wearing legwarmers makes you a feminist. The idea that ideologies – including consumer fads – are increasingly ‘cut loose’ from the economic ‘base’ has become more and more fashionable on the academic left at a time when these levels have perhaps rarely been more obviously connected. But there are several specific reasons for this view. One is quite simply that a rather demoralized generation of the ’60s left, who once looked on discos and TV as the opium of the masses, have recently ‘discovered’ style – i.e. that you too can dye your hair red, read The Face and no longer feel guilty about all those ideologically unsound records and all that Habitat furniture. While nothing is especially wrong with these things, the trend towards seeing consuming as a ‘semi-autonomous’ ideological phenomenon is definitely, for those left theorists concerned, a bit of a relief. Of course, the great irony is that it is precisely the illusion of autonomy which makes consumerism such an effective diversion from the lack of other kinds of power in people’s lives. At a time when such power in the political and economic spheres seems very distant, the realm of the ‘superstructure’ is, for consumers and Marxists alike, a much more fun place to be. Certainly it offers more fun than trying to deal with the frustrations channelled into it but created, predominantly, by the economic realities which are still the major constriction on most people’s lives. And also more fun than trying to envisage new ways in which some of the needs and desires appropriated by consumer goods can be met.
(New Socialist, 1985)