Consumer Culture Reborn

The Cultural Politics of Consumption

Martyn J. Lee

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9781134888122
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Popular Culture in Art

Consumer Culture Reborn focuses on consumption as the point at which economy and culture combine. The book draws the often polarised discourses of political economy and cultural studies closer together in a historical context as a means of understanding our social situations as we approach the end of the millenium. Taking as its central theme the ability of the capitalist mode of production to transform the material and social world which sustains it, the book focuses on some of the ways in which this transformational impulse has altered the means by which ordinary people reproduce their life and their patterns of life. Neither a history book, nor simply a book of theory, Consumer Culture Reborn fuses elements of economic, social and cultural theory in an historical perspective.

Part I: Preliminaries: perspectives on capital, consumption and culture

Chapter 1: Capital, labour and the commodity-form

PRODUCTION, CONSUMPTION AND NEEDS

Any study of consumption must inevitably begin with a recognition of the fact that, whatever else it may represent to us in contemporary society, the consumption of mass-produced commodities constitutes a vital dimension of the modern capitalist economy. Consumption is the final link in a chain of economic activity in which capital, existing in the form of money, is transformed through a process of material production into commodity capital. It is the exchange and consumption of commodities which allows for the realisation of profits, which, when returned back to the money-form, can be reinvested into further production and so begin the circulation of capital once again. This process represents the primary characteristic of capitalist enterprise, and it is from this basic process that a vast social environment begins to take on its distinctive character.

Since by far the most thoroughgoing and detailed analysis of capitalism has been undertaken in the work of Marx, it would seem to be appropriate to begin this study of consumption with a consideration of some of the important issues he identifies. However, before it is possible to explore Marx’s critique of capitalism per se, let alone some of the implications that this may have for modern practices of consumption, it is first necessary to outline some of the central principles expressed in materialist philosophy and which inform most of Marx’s ideas. These were to be firmly established in many of Marx’s earlier writings, but can be seen principally in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts written in 1844 (Marx 1975) and The German Ideology of 1846 (Marx and Engels 1974).

One of the central questions addressed by Marx in these early works focused upon the ontological difference that marked out humanity from the rest of the animal world. What was it, asked Marx, that made human beings not merely a highly advanced form of animal life, but a unique species-being? For Marx the answer to this question lay in the nature of human needs and the manner in which they were satisfied. To be sure, humans, in common with all other forms of animal life, must appropriate materials from the resources of nature in order to satisfy their needs and secure their means to life. Nature therefore provided the means by which all animals could reproduce themselves and their species. Unlike other animals, however, humans actively and consciously produce their means to life from nature. It is this act of material production, of adapting and working upon the resources of nature through conscious activity, that signalled the distinctive essence of human species-being. In an often cited passage from Capital Marx comments:

A spider conducts operations which resemble those of a weaver, and a bee would put many a human architect to shame by the construction of its honeycomb cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is that the architect builds the cell in his mind before he constructs it in wax. At the end of every labour process, a result emerges which has already been conceived by the worker at the beginning, hence already existed ideally. Man not only effects a change of form in the materials of nature; he also realises his own purpose in those materials.

(Marx 1976:284)

But for Marx production represented something more than merely the production of the means to life, for in the production of its means to life humanity also possesses the unique potential for its own ontological self-realisation and advancement. Unlike the rest of the animal world, humanity is not chained solely to its basic physiological and subsistence needs, but is capable of adapting the resources of nature far in excess of those needs. In Marx’s schema, human ontological development corresponds directly to the development of needs. In turn, the development of needs is historically contingent upon the development of ontological potentialities. In a dynamic and mutually dependent relationship of evolution, needs and the processes of satisfying them through the mastery of nature and the development of new modes of material production allow humanity to achieve real self-advancement.

Implicit in this early formulation of needs is the concept of culture. But this is a view of culture seen from the basis of material production: through their material production, or through the production of their means to life, humans develop ‘a definite form of expressing their life, a definite mode of life’ (Marx and Engels 1974:42). This makes culture much more than some mere ‘symbolic echo’ of economic activity or, for that matter, far more than a social concept representing those ‘residual activities’ that are left over after material production has occurred. In this schema, culture is seen as the meaningful expression of human life and social relations, and the real foundation of all human life and social relations is to be found in material production. This makes culture neither an isolated, independent or autonomous sphere of spiritual and idealistic contemplation, nor some neutral ‘by-product’ of material production, but an inseparable dimension of productive activity. As Marx and Engels were to argue: ‘As individuals express their life, so they are. What they are, therefore, coincides with their production, both with what they produce and with how they produce’ (Marx and Engels 1974:42). Given this, the formation of human cultures and cultural activity is dependent directly upon the material and historical conditions that daily confront individuals and with which those individuals must engage in order to reproduce themselves. Elsewhere Marx was to write: ‘Men make their own history, but not of their own free will; not under circumstances they themselves have chosen but under the given and inherited circumstances with which they are directly confronted’ (Marx 1973a:146).

From this basis it is not difficult to see why Marx was drawn to investigate the areas of labour and the products yielded by that labour. In the sphere of production there is found the critical site where human societies developed their distinctive characters. Indeed, it was through the activity of labour, through the utilisation and adaptation of the resources of nature in the process of satisfying needs that human consciousness came to be what it was. This meant that human consciousness was itself realised, that is to say objectified, in the material products of labour:

Such production is his active species-life. Through it nature appears as his work and his reality. The object of labour is therefore the objectification of the species-life of man: For man reproduces himself not only intellectually, in his consciousness, but actively and actually, and he can therefore contemplate himself in a world he himself has created.

(Marx 1975:329)

This is why the object of labour—the material artefact or product—holds a central space in the determination of the ontological health of individuals and society generally. Far more than being simply a functional utility useful in satisfying purely corporeal needs, the product of labour has, figuratively speaking at least, enshrined beneath its physical shell a metaphysical kernel that, as a result of the labour invested in its production, expresses the essential species-being of its creator and the social and historical conditions under which that product was created. In other words, this transformation of nature into culture through labour and material production becomes the vital process by which humanity is connected to its own species-being. Material culture is thus the objectification of social consciousness; that is, the meaningful expression of humanity as a social species. Through its appropriation, nature is therefore transformed into a series of cultural, as well as material utilities.

In the above context the concept of objectification appears to be used by Marx to describe a vital process of human ontological development. Here objectification would merely seem to indicate a process in which the creative and the free use of labour allows for the satisfaction and the free development of needs, and in doing so enables the full realisation of human potentialities. In this sense the concept of objectification simply describes the materialisation of essential species-being. However, Marx was also to use the concept of objectification in a very different sense indeed; in discussing the estranged social conditions under which labour occurs in capitalism, objectification appears here as the impoverished realisation of essential species-being. In short, it comes to describe the manner in which the specific conditions under which labour occurs in capitalist production stultify the processes that would, under more positive circumstances, enable needs to develop freely. In this sense, objectification describes the process by which labour produces, not a vital and ontologically edifying utility, but a ‘petrified’ product appearing to its creator as alien to, or estranged from, the energies that have been invested in its production.

Under capitalism workers no longer retain control of the potential that is embodied in their labour. This potential, or what Marx terms labour-power, has been exchanged with the capitalist for the abstract token of value to be found in wages. Labour-power has thus become a commodity, its usefulness no longer to be found in its ability to produce objects for the satisfaction and development of the worker’s needs, but in its capacity to function as a token of exchange for wages. The diminution of labour-power to the status of an article of exchange effectively means that the worker has simultaneously traded away the positive potential for self-realisation that is inherent within his or her labour-power. Hence, compounded by the division of labour, workers now see neither the fruits of their labour, nor any reason to work other than to obtain wages, nor the sum total of the social relations of which their labour forms a part. In this way workers become detached from the means of direct need satisfaction and from the appropriation of the object of labour as an instrument useful in positive human development.

Seen from this perspective, capitalism does not simply represent an impoverished mode of socio-economic organisation; far less does it embody the most efficient route to social emancipation that had, at the time of Marx’s writing, been promised by bourgeois political economy; in short, capitalism is seen here as nothing but the critical historical rupture between labour and needs. Under capitalism, labour and needs have become detached and isolated, and each is now displaced into the independent spheres of production and consumption respectively. The system of wage-labour has therefore disunited labour from need so that labour is now no longer an act of need satisfaction but merely the means to need satisfaction:

[It is] the fact that labour is external to the worker, i.e. does not belong to his essential being; that he therefore does not confirm himself in his work, but denies himself, feels miserable and not happy, does not develop free mental and physical energy, but mortifies his flesh and ruins his mind… His labour is therefore not voluntary but forced, it is forced labour. It is therefore not the satisfaction of a need but a mere means to satisfy needs outside itself.

(Marx 1975:326)

In tearing away the object of his production from man, estranged labour therefore tears away from him his species-life, his true species-objectivity, and transforms his advantage over other animals into the disadvantage that his inorganic body, nature, is taken from him.

(Marx 1975:329)

The ontological rupture between labour and need, and the once organic unity between humanity and nature, now appears objectified as the petrified or dehumanised product of estranged labour:

The object that labour produces, its product, stands opposed to it as something alien, as a power independent of the producer. The product of labour is labour embodied and made material in an object, it is the objectification of labour. The realisation of labour is its objectification. In the sphere of political economy this realisation of labour appears as a loss of reality for the worker, objectification as loss of and bondage to the object, and appropriation as estrangement, as alienation.

(Marx 1975:324)

In order that essential species-being may be realised successfully there should exist a certain unity between labour (production) and needs (consumption), with the latter satisfied directly by the productive efforts of the former. Indeed, in all socio-economic formations prior to capitalism, be they communal or exploitative, such a unity has generally existed. In pre-capitalist social systems, such as feudalism, primitivism and nomadism, production is essentially the production of use-values for consumption. However, with the advent of market-capitalism and the widespread establishment of private-property relations as the dominant socio-economic form of the modern world, the unity between production and consumption is broken. With the production of use-values, not as an end in themselves, but simply as the means to achieve an exchange between private properties, production and consumption become isolated spheres of activity which are rendered discrete by the market-place. Through the dominance of exchange-value over use-value, therefore, producer is separated from the product of labour, and consumer is simultaneously denied any meaningful access to those means of production that are required to explore fully the potential of needs. In short, the product now confronts the producer as an unrecognisable form in the alien sphere of consumption.

For Marx it is this overriding sense of rupture that has become the undeniable hallmark of capitalist societies. It appears as that overwhelming feeling of estrangement and alienation experienced by ordinary people when confronted by a material and social environment that is profoundly unfamiliar. At its extreme, this sense of alienation is captured in the Marxist concept of reification. This concept refers to the transformation of human relations and activities into a state where such relations and activities appear to assume the characteristics of an autonomous force governed by a logic that seems to be independent of human action. In essence, things, structures or organisational forms that are the direct product of human activity appear to function according to their own mysterious logic. For example, God, the circulation of money, the market, the state, bureaucracy and even capitalism itself are seen to possess some ‘inner’ and deeper logic that transcends the logic of their initial formation. Of course the most systematic exploration of such a process that was undertaken by Marx concerns the analysis of the commodity-form. In Capital, first published in 1867, Marx was to undertake perhaps the most thoroughgoing and far-reaching analysis of capitalism to date. This was based in the first instance upon the analysis of the commodity. Pursuing many of the themes outlined in the early works, but especially the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, Capital cites the commodity as that primary focal point into which the major social relationships of capitalism are condensed. Some of these ideas are explored in the following section.

VALUE AND ABSTRACT LABOUR IN THE COMMODITY-FORM

All forms of society must produce their means to life. Under capitalism this productive activity materialises principally in the form of the commodity. Viewed from this stance, then, the commodity is straightforwardly the material form taken by the means to life that is common to capitalist societies. Accordingly, the significance of the commodity lies in the fact that it has the capacity to satisfy some human want or need. Perceived in this way the commodity is thus a use-value. The commodity, however, can also be viewed from the perspective of its exchangeability; that is, from the standpoint of its capacity to command other commodities in exchange. Unlike use-value, which is primarily representative of a qualitative relation between objects and human needs, the value that is expressed through the exchange of commodities is based primarily upon a quantitative relation between individual commodities. Hence the significance of a commodity when regarded in terms of its exchangeability is essentially the ratio at which it will exchange with other commodities. As such the commodity is said to possess a value. Laid out in the first chapter of Capital, the concept of value is used quite precisely by Marx to describe the manner in which commodities are designated a status in which they are effectively treated as qualitatively equal, and different only in the respective quantities at which they achieve equivalences with each other. Moreover, Marx immediately stresses the significance of the difference between use-value and the value-form itself, and in doing so draws our attention to what appears to be the natural basis of value:

What initially concerns producers in practice when they make an exchange is how much of some other product they get for their own: in what proportions can products be exchanged? As soon as these proportions have attained a certain customary stability, they appear to result from the nature of the products, so that, for instance, one ton of iron and two ounces of gold appear to be equal in value, in the same way as a pound of gold and a pound of iron are equal in weight, despite their different physical and chemical properties.

(Marx 1976:167)

The common misrecognition that value has its basis in some natural or physical law would at first glance appear to be of trivial significance. But Marx demonstrates throughout the pages of Capital how this misleading appearance of value lies at the very heart of capitalist production and exploitation and is a necessary condition for its reproduction.

If commodities are simultaneously use-values and values, each term merely representing different perceptions of the commodity’s significance, then it may be tempting to regard value, as it materialises in exchange, simply as an objective valuation or measurement of use-value. Indeed, this was a notion which at the time of Marx’s writing had assumed the status of the common sense of classical political economy. At the core of Marx’s political economy, however, lay the systematic rebuttal of the idea that value expressed through the commodity-form was merely a product of a logic of supply and demand, and that the values seen when commodities exchanged with one another were in effect nothing but the objectification of the relative demand of a given proportion of use-values. For Marx, value bore no intrinsic relation to use-value at all. Value was not the simple and objective measure of the qualitative attributes of a given use-value; on the contrary, value had its basis in the concrete social relations of capitalist production and expressed the expenditure of a certain amount of social labour in that production.

Here we can regard the character of social labour from two distinctive perspectives. First, social labour can be conceptualised in terms of its specific quality; that is, as concrete labour under which material nature is transformed by the application of specific productive activities in order to produce use-values of a particular kind. Second, social labour can be considered independently of its qualitative characteristics as abstract labour. Since, under the value-form, any qualitative difference existing between commodities is effectively marginalised at the expense of those commodities’ quantitative relationship, it follows logically that the labour which is embodied in the production of those commodities is also rendered qualitatively equal. Therefore, since exchange-value represents a measure of the magnitude of the value of a commodity when compared with other commodities, then by extension so is exchange-value a measure of the magnitude of the abstract labour th...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface: The soul of things
• Part I: Preliminaries: perspectives on capital, consumption and culture
• Part II: The social transformations of capital
• Bibliography