Capitalism — The Being of Consumption

The chapter opens with a macroeconomic backdrop: the crisis of the Northern economies, underconsumption caused by intensive accumulation, falling profit rates, and developing countries losing their redistributive and planning functions after the end of Keynesian policies. Fordism is then explained: an advanced form of Taylorism, it tied production to mass consumption and strengthened unions and collective bargaining, but at the same time subjected wage labour to capital not only in the factory but in every area of life, consumption included.

The book's central thesis follows: after World War II capitalism shifted its support from production to consumption and wants people to spend their free time consuming. The media are presented as the most effective tool for spreading these «hegemonic» values. Consumption, once the preserve of elites, has been «democratised», but abundance of choice breeds confusion, dissatisfaction and unhappiness; pampered with the message that they «deserve the very best», consumers become «slaves of consumption» in their pursuit of pleasure. These sentences reveal the chapter's tone: more stance than information.

The «Need» section is the fullest part of the chapter. Various definitions of need are given, followed by the 14th-century thinker Ibn Khaldun's theory of «umran», in which need drives society from nomadic life to settled life and civilisation. Maslow's hierarchy of needs is presented, with an interesting note: in consumer society people do not satisfy their needs in the order of Maslow's pyramid. Veblen's concept of «conspicuous consumption» from «The Theory of the Leisure Class» (1899) — displaying wealth to signal status — still sounds relevant today.

Bauman's ideas are well chosen too: there is a «chicken-and-egg» relationship between individual needs and what the market offers; «responsibility for the other» gives way to «responsibility to oneself»; and phrases like «You deserve it» or «You owe it to yourself to indulge a little» are lifted from the moral sphere to legitimise consumption. The «Consumption» section lists Raymond Williams on the earliest meaning of «consume» — «to destroy, use up, waste, exhaust» — Baudrillard's definition of consumption as «a morality and a system of social values», de Certeau's idea of «the production of consumers», and Weber's concept of social status.

The chapter's weaknesses are just as clear. The text seems cut and pasted from various theses and articles: biographical notes from the margins run into the main text, and there are misspellings like «Maslaw» and typesetting errors like «1 4th century». More seriously, there is no balance: capitalism is said to «enslave» consumers and the media to «naturalise hegemonic ideology», but counter-arguments, the link between consumption, prosperity and freedom of choice, and empirical data are almost entirely absent. The thinkers are not put into dialogue either — they are simply quoted in turn.

In the end, this chapter is a useful «map» of the main names and concepts in the critique of consumer society. A first-time reader can use it to find their way to Veblen, Baudrillard and Bauman themselves. But anyone wanting to understand capitalism objectively should read this book as one side's view rather than as a sole source.

• Short sections and colour illustrations
• Brief biographies of thinkers in the margins
• Quotations from classics of sociology and economics
• Bibliography and the translator's sources at the end