The Case Against Consumerism

The Case Against Consumerism, Part 1.
Introduction

Consumerism is defined as taking part in a constant indulgement of goods and services. We see consumerism everywhere, in our shopping malls, movie houses, and possibly most importantly, in the comfort of our own homes. Behind every Spongebob wrapper, Trix bunny, and Quaker Oatmeal man, there is a huge mega monopoly of business aching to get you to buy their product through any means necessary. When we see commercials, the business aspect is always there. Monopolies have even found ways to insert messages into TV sitcoms, televised sports, and even the news. And sadly, the American public buys into that. The increasingly libertarianised capitalist system America takes part in has managed to strain into our heads, whether through education, the media (something already very heavily consumer-biased), ect. The neo-liberal and libertarian economic tendencies of both Republican and Democratic parties continuously and unwaveringly support this subtle indoctrination, much as the Stalinist leadership of regimes such as the Khmer Rouge of Cambodia and the Nazi Reich did in the past. Actually, the relationship between classical free-market ideologies and extreme dictatorial indoctrination are surprisingly similar. As an example of the cultural hegemony Marxist thinker Antonio Gramsci proposed almost 70 years ago, classical liberal fundamentalists use consumerism in politics and on the market to sedate the masses by distributing heavy doses of consumer advertising in almost everything we do. Our current government supports business economics and capitalist growth around the world, as if they are on a new, neoliberal crusade of free market for all. Former President Bill Clinton’s borderline neoconservative policies of extreme globalization started within the depths of the WTO and acted out in his controversial NAFTA rulings, something that sparked protest all over the world. Before that, other American capitalistic extremists in the US government caused chaos and thousands of innocent lives in the capitalist campaign in Vietnam, overthrowing democratically elected left-wing governments in places like Guatemala because they threatened “international capitalism”. Similar situations took place in places like Nicaragua, Romania, Cambodia, and even in Argentina with right-wing tyrant Augusto Pinochet. Corporate politics are seemingly obsessed with non-democratically spreading capitalism even when the general populace doesn’t want it, and commencing to instill class division and hegemony on the victims. Even after all this, the biggest accomplishment of these huge monopolies and libertarian politicians is their unwavering ability to make you, the consumer, totally happy and sedate that you are in fact part of this machine.
In short, consumerism gives people a purpose. Shopping malls become a sort of temple to government-supported indulgence. The free-market system acted out in shopping malls, gift shops, and department stores across America seems, and claims, to usher in individuality and independence, yet the reality is the exact opposite. Current styles, called trends, have grown to pronunciation the already significant class division in America, and separate those who can participate and those who can’t. Now, poor and rich are even more distinguishable in modern society. These trends create an outlet for though roughly brainwashed wealthy people and a depressed angst for those unable to purchase such objects due to their financial or cultural positions. Lowering self-esteem and heightening profit is a direct result on the hegemony applied on the lower classes to believe they amount to nothing without these products. In other words, the truth behind all the glamour and glitz of modern trendsetting is a corrupt, faceless monopoly interested in making a profit on tears and self-hate.
However, in a consumerist world, some choose to blatantly avoid the current trends. They’ve been called laggards, anti-consumerists, or even “fashion existentialists”. They resemble at first glance Nietzsche’s Ubermensch: They have an unapologetic individuality to them. But in reality, this is exactly what the mega corporations are looking for. They will find new individualists, determine whether or not their style is applicable to the millions of hungry consumers, and if the answer is yes, they will willingly manipulate them and remove all remaining Nietzschean individuality by distributing variations on this formerly individualistic new style across the country. This is the genius of the fashion industry: fight all opposition by conforming it. Without something to be different, trends wouldn’t exist. The fashion industry survives on consumerising subcultures; for example the consumerising of the Hippies and the Punk Movement into the Disco and New Wave movements, respectively. Fashion has a shape shifting aspect. It can change the current trend, or “uniform’, by finding something new, waiting for response, and raising prices drastically to separate those who can afford it from those who can’t. Thus is the goal of consumerism.
Does free market always mean free people? Many would say no. The Anti-Consumerism movement has existed since capitalism was conceived, and now contains many of the people who have broken away from the naïveté of the common consumer to support a true, not passively dictated, democracy. Also, many anti-consumerist movements exist, such as Greenpeace and formerly the IWW. Many intellectuals and politicians have spoken out against capitalist hegemony, from socialists like Engels and Marx (who wrote the epic novel Kapital, a moving criticism of the capitalist system), to anarchists like Emma Goldman and Noam Chomsky. In the next section of my writing I will explain the pros and cons of historical anti-consumerist ideologies and people.














The Case Against Consumerism, Part 2
Historical Anti-Consumerism

The consumerist movement started, ironically, in a resistance movement. Around the age of the American Revolution, another war was raging. This war, however, was not being fought with guns, it was being fought with thoughts and ideas. This war was called “The Enlightenment”. As a blatant opposition to the harsh religious totalitarianisms and the oppressive feudalistic tendencies of corrupt monarchies, Enlightenment philosophers like Voltaire ushered in new thought, both religiously and politically. One of the more important Enlightenment thinkers was Adam Smith, a Scottish economist. Smith, having lived in a society where everything was controlled by religion and monarchy, rebelled with a concept known as “Laissez-faire”, or “let do”. This belief, the basis of libertarian capitalist theory, literally meant that the government should leave the economy to work on its own. Smith called this “true economic freedom”. Many other Enlightenment thinkers, including the likes of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, bought into the concept of “market freedom”. This belief became to be known as “classical liberalism”. Classical liberals were driven by the belief that “free market must mean free people”. However, for many, as Laissez-faire capitalism became an indoctrined ideology in many parts of the world, this statement wasn’t true. The main issue of the Free Market was the workers that were subjected to control by the many rich people at the top of the system. Capitalism was creating class division, and through wage slavery by the business owners and with no government regulations to control anything, corruption and a growing plutocracy of the rich was becoming apparent. Many workers were becoming resentful of the so called “free market”. In 1817, a factory worker and former classical liberal by the name of Robert Owen thought of a new idea: “lets start a society from the bottom up, by the people, for the people”. He realized that capitalism was creating increasing amounts of corporate control and business corruption as the working man struggled. Owen’s belief in a government in which everything is collectively owned became known as “Socialism”.
Owen went on to build numerous communes across Britain, but none was as successful as the one in New Lanark, Scotland. He purchased cotton mills and property and immediately began orchestrating a collectivist situation. Eventually, New Lanark’s factories, shops, and people were governed democratically, and all production funded the community, so no-one went hungry. Other Europeans were fascinated by the productivity, enthusiasm, and business viability of the people and functions of New Lanark. The success of Owen’s communes started an influx of new socialist thought, including other utopianists like Charles Fortier and anarcho-collectivists like Mikhail Bakunin.
Over time, small scale socialism and communalism began to decline. Utopian socialist ideals began giving way to a new form of socialism: State socialism, or “communism”. Communists resented capitalist hegemony but also believed that a strong centralized government was necessary to hold the intrinsically “flawed” populace together. The views of the Communist parties, set in 1842 by Marx and Engels, go as following:
Confiscation of all privately owned land for public ownership.
A large gradual income tax.
Removal of inheritance rights.
Confiscation of the property of all non-citizens.
Centralisation of credit into one National Bank, all money to be controlled by the State.
Centralisation of transport and communication to the State.
Extension of previously State-owned factories and farms to encompass all labor; pre-planned agricultural improvement.
Equal liability of every citizen to labor, and creation of massive labor unions.
Combination of industries; blurring line between town and country; spreading populace evenly rather than concentrating them.
Free education and healthcare to all.
Basically, the state would hold all property, rather than being held by the collective workers, as in early socialism and collectivism, or by private monopolies, as in capitalism.
Over time, two young socialists by the name of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, began making their way into the socialist mainstream. They were both fierce anti-capitalists, but they both believed that the utopian theories of Owen and Fourier were madness. They believed a strong, all encompassing government (which would include all workers, property, ect.) to exercise socialism to the masses. Their views were documented in a famed collaboration entitled The Communist Manifesto, which quickly became known as the universal guide to the Far Left. Ending with the rousing call to arms “Proletarians, you have nothing to lose but your chains. You have the world to win. Workers of the World, Unite!” the Manifesto sparked numerous Communist resistance movements across Europe, in places like France, Germany, Poland, Italy, and Russia. It also foresaw the establishment of Communist parties across Europe, such as the French Communist Party and the Russian Bolshevik Party. This book was instrumental in the Russian Revolution of 1915, when Lenin’s Bolshevik Communists ousted the Czar from power and instilled a Communist government.
Over time, it became apparent that Communist theory was becoming very corrupt. The totalitarianism of the Soviet government was creating something just as oppressive, if not much more oppressive, than Western capitalism was. Over time, the Left in places like America began to realize this, as a rift appeared in Left-wing politics around 1960. On one side was the “Old Left”, which stood for Stalinism, Marxism-Leninism, and Trotskyism. The “Old Left” represented cold, repressive Soviet ideologies held by the regimes of the USSR, Cambodia, and Vietnam. The other side in the rift, called the “New Left”, ushered in positive social change in concepts such as gay rights, free-love, more moderate Socialist theory in the form of Social Democracy, civil rights, radical politics, and a revival in communal living. They tended to speak out against both corporate tyranny as well as authoritarian Communism, though many revisionist Communist groups existed that associated themselves with this new movement, both militant (The Weather Underground, the Black Panthers) and peaceful (Students For A Democratic Society). However, the New Left also ushered in a revival of a very important anti-capitalist ideology: anarchism.
Anarchism, which roughly translates into “no government”, has numerous varieties (including right-wing varieties, i. e. anarcho-capitalism), but the two that were widely revived during the New Leftist movement.
The most important of the two was called “libertarian socialism”, or “syndicalism”, with other varieties such as “anarcho-communism”. Libertarian socialism is very much a revival of both the communal ideologies of early utopian socialists and the collectivist theories of anarchist Mikhail Bakunin. Libertarian socialists believe that all property should be controlled collectively in small direct democratic communal situations, with no leadership of government or corporate monopoly. Everything produced would be shared so that none would go hungry. These unions would govern themselves and participate in a huge global “gift economy” of non-mandatory trade.
Libertarian socialists believe that anarchism is the only logical reproduction of classical liberalism in the industrial age. They tend to renounce hegemony of all kinds, whether corporate or governmental. They believe that the power of moral and friendship would be enough to govern these small-scale socialist situations.
The authoritarian Left has criticized Leftist anarchism for being essentially a crackpot, utopianist theory that could never work in reality. Anarchists respond by calling Communism oppressive and corrupt. Beneath all this quarreling in the political Left, a new movement began emerging, distant from both socialism and capitalism. This alternative became known as the “green movement”.
Though environmentalism has existed for a very long time, its first major political association was manifested in another New Left idea: green anarchism. Green anarchism, or “anarcho-primitivisim”, was invented by radical Counterculture environmentalists in the mid-sixties. Green anarchism stresses extreme social downgrading, which would include removal of everything from government to education, to bring society backwards to its most environmentally friendly point, the “hunter-gatherer” lifestyle. More radical environmentalists in the Green political movement despise cities, museums, colleges, factories, modern medicine, schools, and anything that provide progress to humans at the expense of the natural environment. The Green Movement typically agrees that both capitalism and socialism are “forks in the road on a path to environmental destruction”, and support neither. More moderate Green politicians advocate environmental protection in regular socialist or capitalist situations.
In the end, socialism, anarchism, and green politics have all historically created alternatives to capitalism. In the next section of my writing, I will go on to discuss my views on corporatism and how I believe it could be prevented.














The Case Against Consumerism, Part 3
My Views on the Subject

I personally believe that consumerism is a corrupt, misguided practice. Because of this I typically align myself with the Left, due to the increasing tendencies of the Right to embrace non-revisioned “Laissez-faire” capitalist theory. As a huge advocate of democracy, I believe that classical liberals were extremely misguided in their belief that “free market means free people”. They were not taking into account that, as proposed by Gramsci in the 20s, free market capitalism creates plutocracy of the rich, which indirectly creates hegemony to suppress the masses, retaining extreme class division. The increasing say of the few over the many isn’t what freedom should be, in my opinion. Communism and pure State socialism merely provide a more direct, yet equal, amount of suppression on the masses. Thus, both corporate control and government control are essentially, in my opinion, two sides of the same issue. In both situations, it involves sheep claiming to be herders attempting to control other sheep. In that respect, the end result of both pure capitalism and pure socialism, in my opinion, doesn’t and will not work.
Because of these beliefs I hold, I would ideologically associate myself with the likes of the libertarian socialists and anarcho-syndicalists. By creating a democracy on small scale without the interference of corporations or the government, corporate greed and class structures would effectively be compromised. Gone would be the rule of the few. True democracy would exist, without any infiltrations of representative removing the essence of democracy. Society could, for the most part, live in harmony, with everyone helping everyone else.
I will, however, accept the criticisms of libertarian socialism. Sure, the idea is, at best, very far-fetched. Media hegemony has indoctrinated the public so much it would take years without any biased media for the public to seriously consider reverting to anarchism democratically, because violent revolution goes against my fundamental beliefs. Without a government, it would take years to indoctrinate the average man into the ideals of equality and compassion, rather than the ideals of ambition and greed that corporatism has imposed on the average citizen. In the end, I respect the fact that creating an ideal government would be a huge, huge task.
Because of this, totally ending consumerism is just as far-fetched as creating an ideal society. However, there are ways to not participate. For example, many large anti-capitalist organizations like Industrial Workers of the World and GreenPeace take part in anti-consumerist protests, corporation boycotts, and even corporation-sabotages. If you don’t wish to participate in corporatism, join the crowd! A group of protestors is better than one. Educate others on the horrors of capitalism. Avoid Starbucks, resent McDonalds, and resist corporatism publicly to announce that the specter of consumerism can’t hang over society forever. Thus is my belief on how you, the reader can avoid consumerism and help end it once and for all.
Unfortunately for activists, the growth rate of anti-capitalist politics has been steadily falling, especially since the failure of the USSR. Despite this, there has been a revival recently in communal living and small-scale socialism. Interest in the ideologies of socialists like Che Guevara and anarchists like Emma Goldman has also grown. Popularity of anti-capitalist activists like Noam Chomsky has risen. Also, capitalist governments like that of the USA and England have been gradually moving towards socialist principles themselves, with welfare, corporate bailouts, ect. Things like these suggest anti-capitalism and socialism, whether statist, anarchist, or otherwise, is on the rise. Whether successful or not, the anti-consumerism movement is a great testament to the resisting and individualist powers of humanity.