Be a CITIZEN , not a CONSUMER

So if you can, work less, so others can work more, on some days buy nothing – expect the New Statesman, of course. Otherwise buy less, buy better, but buy time, love, care, compassion, freedom and some control over your life and your society the only way you can – by doing it not as a consumer but as a citizen

Why is the left silent on the scourge of consumerism? Labour must look beyond the politics of more and recognise that the good life cannot be bought off a shelf. New Statesman, BY NEAL LAWSON 29 NOVEMBER 2012 Did you do it – by accident or design? Did you manage to buy nothing on Buy Nothing Day last Saturday? What do you mean you didn’t know you it was Buy Nothing Day? Too busy Xmas shopping?

The idea that an issue can only be raised by dedicating one day out of 365 to it is just one indication of how we have become a consumer society. Being a consumer society doesn’t mean that all we do is shop, rather it suggests that knowing ourselves and others by what we consume is the prime way in which society now reproduces itself. It is the dominant way of being, just as work once was, when we knew ourselves, and others, primarily as producers. We were what we did.
Now we are what we buy.

I don’t know the ‘Buy Nothing Day’ people but I’m guessing the problem isn’t consumption per se. We have to consume to live. The problem is one of balance. What is the damage being done to us, our society and the planet by consuming too much? And the issue is not the inability
of capitalism to balance its need for expanding profit and our
individual, collective and environmental needs, capitalism can’t do
balance. The problem is that our politicians have given up trying to
secure that balance through regulation……..
Even when you come up with what you hope to be a telling insight, to
help people liberate them themselves from the high street of hell, the
market cleverly co-opts it and comes with its own response – as it
must if it is to successfully reproduce itself. So, when you offer the
idea of the time to read a child a bed time story as a moment of
non-commercialised freedom you have to contend with the company called
Nursery Rhymes who offers an iPad app to read “with a child” so that
you can be in the office or anywhere around the world. So you work, to
earn, to buy the products to assuage the guilt because you are always
working and never with your children. This is why capitalism is
winning.

And then you try this clincher as an argument to stop shopping; no one
dies wishing they had more things but that they had more time with the
people they loved. ….
The left is pretty silent on consumption. Social democracy is the
politics of more – and the more in question is money and therefore
spending power. Today ‘Labour’ is not about dignity or craft but raw
consumption. Jobs, any jobs, are what matter. For many on the left, it
seems enough is never enough, no matter how much consumerism tears
society apart and threatens the basis of social democratic dreams.

Of course, in a time of austerity the fixation is growth, as we saw
with the figures this week on the two million jump in those who are in
work but feel underemployed and therefore are under-spending. But that
desire to return to pre-crash ‘business as usual’ is misguided. Many
of us have more clothes than we can wear and more food than we can eat
– but work too hard and have too little time to do what we really
want. Instead, the emphasis should be on two things; first sharing
work more equally and therefore the material benefits and time that go
with it. And second, help each other recognise that the good life
cannot be bought off a shelf but created in our imagination and our
mutual endeavours. There are many visions of the good society, said
J.K.Galbraith, the treadmill is no one of them.

December 1, 2012 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | Uncategorized

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