Overselling Capitalism with Consumerism (Baltimore Sun, via CommonDreams)

[marmar]

Published on Sunday, April 15, 2007 by The Baltimore Sun

Overselling Capitalism with Consumerism
by Benjamin R. Barber

The crisis in subprime mortgages betrays a deeper predicament facing consumer capitalism triumphant: The “Protestant ethos” of hard work and deferred gratification has been replaced by an infantilist ethos of easy credit and impulsive consumption that puts democracy and the market system at risk.Capitalism’s core virtue is that it marries altruism and self-interest. In producing goods and services that answer real consumer needs, it secures a profit for producers. Doing good for others turns out to entail doing well for yourself.

Capitalism’s success, however, has meant that core wants in the developed world are now mostly met and that too many goods are chasing too few needs. Yet capitalism requires us to “need” all that it produces in order to survive. So it busies itself manufacturing needs for the wealthy while ignoring the wants of the truly needy. Global inequality means that while the wealthy have too few needs, the needy have too little wealth.

Capitalism is stymied, courting long-term disaster. We still work hard, but only so that we can pay and play. In order to turn reluctant consumers with few unsatisfied core needs into permanent shoppers, producers must dumb down consumers, shape their wants, take over their life worlds, encourage impulse buying, cultivate shopoholism and invent new needs.
...(snip)...

Consumerism needs this infantilist ethos because it favors laxity and leisure over discipline and denial, values childish impetuosity and juvenile narcissism over adult order and enlightened self-interest, and prefers consumption-directed play to spontaneous recreation. The ethos feeds a private-market logic and combats the public logic fashioned by democracy.

This is capitalism’s all-too-logical way of solving the problem of too many goods chasing too few needs. It makes consuming ubiquitous and omnipresent, turning shopping into an addiction facilitated by easy credit.

Compare a traditional town square with a modern suburban mall. In the square, you’ll likely find a school, town hall, library, general store, park, movie house, church, art gallery and homes - a true neighborhood exhibiting our human diversity as beings who do more than simply consume. But our new town malls are all shopping, all the time. ......(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/04/15/536/

[JDPriestly]

1. Wonderful!

I remember Christmases where each child got one or two toys. We shared each other's toys and played together. Four of us shared one bicycle for example. And when we had finished playing with the few new things we had received, we went back to the old standards like checkers and chess and Old Maid. Our joy was just as great if not greater than the joy of children in suburban America who have a whole room full of toys plus various moving mini-vehicles. Consumerism is just crazy . . . and TV is what brings consumerism into our homes.

[marmar]

2. That's how it should be....

I'm a GenXer, and grew up under a constant barrage of corporate branding pressure, but I think it's much worse now. I just look at my young cousins, who raise unfettered hell if they don't get everything on their Christmas lists, which are shaped by advertising.

[kestrel91316]

3. Until I was at least 35 I went "shopping" at some mall or another virtually

every weekend. I never really NEEDED to buy much, but always seemed to find things I just had to have. The very definition of impulse shopping!

I never do that anymore. I ONLY go the mall about three times a year, with a specific purchase in mind. I buy what I have come for, and leave. All those display windows and beautiful shops full of STUFF are designed to make me dissatisfied with the perfectly good stuff I already have. Sorry, I ain't buyin' anymore.