<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Some of the best people of our time speak now only in this dark language. Their grave voices have to compete with the jingles of happy consumption, the only widespread form of contemporary optimism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Raymond Williams, \u2018Walking backwards into the future\u2019, New Socialist, May 1985, p. 21.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Whether the acute new awareness of self\u2014its demands, its privileges, its rights\u2014that had invaded the western psyche since the First World War was a good thing or a largely evil consequence of capitalist free enterprise\u2026whether people had been media-gulled into self-awareness to increase the puppet-master\u2019s profits or whether it was an essentially liberalizing new force in human society.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
John Fowles, Daniel Martin (Jonathan Cape, 1977, BCA edition, p. 555).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The basis on which good repute in any highly organized industrial community ultimately rests is pecuniary strength; and the means of showing pecuniary strength, and so of gaining or retaining a good name, are leisure and a conspicuous consumption of goods.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), (Mentor, 1953, p. 70).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I always think about the meaning of our lives as consumers. As well I am concerned with leisure, lifestyle, and markets in today\u2019s consumer culture. In 1986 one measure of people\u2019s use of time in Britain identified television watching as the major activity for both men and women outside paid employment and sleeping. On average, women watched slightly over three hours a day of television; men a little more.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But if we look at the range of consumer activities and leisure spending in people\u2019s daily lives it is clear that much more goes on in the home, around and beyond the television set. Nearly one in three people in this survey have an alcoholic drink at home; one in five or so regularly eat at fast-food restaurants and one in thirteen bring the fast food home.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Home entertaining is quite regularly engaged in by 6 per cent of the sample. Although this may not sound many, it represents several million people in Britain. That is a far from insignificant \u2018group\u2019 of consumers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Over a quarter of a century ago J.K.Galbraith observed, in his classic critique of modern consumer society, the need for a \u2018theory of social balance\u2019, for a combined concern with publicly provided services and privately produced goods.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
His vision of the imbalance at the heart of the postwar affluent society became one of the most widely quoted cultural comments of our time: The family which takes its mauve and cerise, air-conditioned power steered and power-braked car out for a tour passes through cities that are badly paved, made hideous by litter, blighted buildings, billboards, and posts for wires that should long since have been put underground.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
They pass on into a countryside that has been rendered largely invisible by commercial art\u2026 They picnic on exquisitely packaged food from a portable icebox by a polluted stream\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It\u2019s all there in this passage: family-based conspicuous consumption; indulgence alongside neglect, boom running side by side with blight; the intrusion of the copywriter into the natural environment. Galbraith was warning the advanced industrial world, the capitalist world, that if pursued as a major social objective, production would lead to modes of consumption taking place against a backcloth of neglect of public needs Debates on the exploitative dimensions of contemporary capitalism have focused upon the experience of work, the nature of paid labour. The political dimensions of patterns of consumption have received little comparable sustained attention.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
. Yet it is particular modes of consumption upon which many major productive processes now depend. Galbraith urged, quite rightly, the need to develop a balance between the public and the private, between state services and private enterprises.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Margaret Thatcher sees a great industry. In packaging people\u2019s pleasure, and constantly searching for the most lucrative novelty, this leisure and tourist industry prospers in a Britain in which the imbalance pointed to by Galbraith is as prominent as ever.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The examination of patterns of consumption and leisure is a key contemporary task. For it raises hugely significant questions about what we believe and think, how we arrive at our beliefs, what we do, and how our actions express particular beliefs or values.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Propagandists of the new right know this, which is why the apparent paradox of the new plastic usurer-culture is so perfectly in line with their views. Although the rhetoric of Mrs Thatcher conjures up the jam-jar cash economy of the kitchen, her economic growth is dependent upon spending before saving and her ideological hold is premised upon a notion of freedom in the marketplace.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
As we pass the end of the second millennium, we see \u20182000\u2019 used as a dramatic landmark in the development of human civilization. But if \u20181984\u2019 symbolized debates about political freedom and citizenship, \u20182000\u2019 might come to symbolize issues concerning economic freedoms and consumerism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In Britain media institutions already offer an example of how things might move. Rupert Murdoch\u2019s takeover of The Times, for instance, led to the appointment of an editor whose editorial direction was, in Hugo Young\u2019s words, a drift from the notion of citizen as victim to a notion of citizen as consumer (New Statesman, 2 November 1984).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
We have passed 2000. Many of us may be free. But free for what? By then, worldwide, the sign of satisfactory survival well is the colour television set and video, the personal transport system, the personal organizer, the personalized deodorant.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It is in the sphere of consumption\u2014conspicuous leisure on the basis of adequate disposable income\u2014that many will seek to express their sense of freedom, their personal power, their status aspirations. The effect of such a trend upon collective consciousness and cultural relations in particular societies cannot be understated.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Popular culture and everyday life have always been of great concern to our political and economic masters. If popular culture can be reduced to a set of apparent choices based upon personal taste then we will see the triumph of the fragmented self, a constant lust for the new and the authentic among a population of consumer clones.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
That is why the issue of leisure, lifestyle, and consumption is a political one. If religion was, in Tawney\u2019s celebrated phrase, vital to the rise of capitalism, it is consumption which has become vital to its continuation and expansion.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Some of the best people of our time speak now only in this dark language. Their grave voices have to compete with the jingles of happy consumption, the only widespread form of contemporary optimism. Raymond Williams, \u2018Walking backwards into the future\u2019, New Socialist, May 1985, p. 21. Whether the acute new awareness of self\u2014its demands, … <\/p>\n