Abstract
In this chapter, we present a history of the institutionalization of capitalist consumption in the West. Our goal here is to use history as a resource — a resource containing demonstrable patterns and tendencies that can be used to illuminate contemporary developments around the world. Rather than a comprehensive overview, the task at hand is to outline how capitalist consumption emerged and, in so doing, identify the dynamics behind contemporary trajectories.
Today we dare not wait until men in their own good time get around to wanting the things; do we permit this, the machine flies to pieces. The wind blew and so the windmill went around. Under the new order, the windmill goes around and so the wind must blow. It is becoming a matter of general remark that the economic emphasis is changing; it is shifting from how to make things to how to dispose of things that are made so that the machine can be kept in constant operation. The problem before us today is not how to produce the goods, but how to produce the customers.
—Samuel Strauss1
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Notes
Strauss, ‘Things are in the Saddle’, The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 134 No. 5 (November 1924), pp. 577–88, esp. p. 579.
Quoted in Robert Cox, Approaches to World Order (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 80, n. 12 (emphases added).
Larry Patriquin, ‘The Agrarian Origins of the Industrial Revolution in England’, Review of Radical Political Economics, Vol. 36 No. 2 (Spring 2004), p. 204.
Freeholders were the elite of peasants due largely to their undisputed Crown-recognized right to occupy and use a parcel of land. Patriquin, ‘Agrarian Origins’ (2004), p. 205.
D. J. Seipp, ‘The Concept of Property in the Early Common Law’, Law and History Review, Vol. 12 No. 1 (Spring 1994), p. 85.
Patriquin, ‘Agrarian Origins’ (2004), p. 206.
Ellen Wood, The Origin of Capitalism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1999), p. 76.
By the early seventeenth century, one-quarter to one-third of the English peasantry no longer had customary access to land. See Patriquin, ‘Agrarian Origins’ (2004), p. 208
and William Lazonick, ‘Karl Marx and Enclosures in England’, Review of Radical Political Economics, Vol. 6 No. 2 (Summer 1974), p. 19.
Richard Lachmann, From Manor to Market (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), p. 27.
Patriquin, ‘Agrarian Origins’ (2004), p. 211.
John Lie, ‘Visualizing the Invisible Hand’, Politics & Society, Vol. 21 No. 1 (September 1993), pp. 281–3.
Christopher Chalkin, The Rise of the English Town (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 1, 5.
Ibid., pp. 66–7. Among working class families, well into the nineteenth century, most spent at least half their incomes on food and beverage. It was not until the early twentieth century that England’s proletariat earned the wages needed to purchase the kinds of goods and services bought by the middle-class bourgeoisie two centuries earlier. See Arthur J. Taylor, ed., ‘Editor’s Introduction’, The Standard of Living in Britain in the Industrial Revolution (London: Metheun & Co., 1975), p. xxxiv.
Chalkin, The Rise of the English Town (2001), p. 10.
Lie, ‘Visualizing the Invisible Hand’ (1993), p. 288.
Grant McCracken, Culture & Consumption (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), pp. 11–16.
Neil McKendrick, ‘The Consumer Revolution of Eighteenth-Century England’, in The Birth of Consumer Society, McKendrick et al., eds (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), pp. 29–31. Commodities as varied and bizarre as Venice treacle, elephant’s teeth, artificial eyes and even asses’ milk were for sale in eighteenth-century London (McKendrick, p. 81). One advertisement, appearing in the Salisbury Journal in 1777, promoted ‘night caps made of silver wire so strong that no mouse or … rat can gnaw through them’. Ibid., p. 64.
Slater, Consumer, Culture and Modernity (1997), p. 30.
According to a national Anglican census report published in 1851, the working class were ‘thoroughly estranged from … religious institutions’. Quoted in Hugh McLeod, Religion and Irreligion (Bangor: Headstart History, 1993), p. 13. Also see pp. 18–19.
Chalkin, The Rise of the English Town (2001), pp. 52, 68.
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 1983), pp. 29–39.
Chalkin, The Rise of the English Town (2001), p. 58.
W. Cooke Taylor quoted in E. P. Thompson, ‘Standards and Experiences’, in The Standard of Living in Britain in the Industrial Revolution, Arthur J. Taylor, ed. (London: Metheun & Co., 1975), p. 126.
Huws, The Making of a Cyhertariat (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2003), pp. 24–5.
James Carrier, Gifts and Commodities (London: Routledge, 1995), pp. 75–9.
McKendrick, ‘George Packwood and the Commercialization of Shaving’, in The Birth of Consumer Society, McKendrick et al., eds (1982), p. 184.
Carrier, Gifts and Commodities (1995), pp. 82–3.
Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (Cambridge: Basil Blackwell, 1989), p. 101.
Thompson, ‘Standards and Experiences’, (1975), p. 139 & pp. 148–9.
William Leach, Land of Desire (New York: Pantheon Books, 1993), p. 9.
Rosalynd Williams, ‘Dream Worlds of Consumption’, in Communication in History, D. Crowley and P. Heyer, eds (Pearson: Boston, 2007), p. 173.
Leach, Land of Desire (1993), p. 9 (emphasis in original).
Filene, Successful Living in This Machine Age (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1931), p. 157 (emphases added).
Paul David and Gavin Wright, ‘Early Twentieth Century Growth Dynamics’, Oxford University Economic and Social Series, Paper #033 (October 1999) http://ideas.repec.org/p/nuf/esohwp/_033.html.
Leach, Land of Desire (1993), p. 271.
Stuart Ewen, Captains of Consciousness (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1976), p. 197.
William Leiss et al., Social Communication in Advertising (New York: Routledge, 1990), p. 102.
With advertising revenues exceeding monies generated directly from sales, many papers (and magazines) re-crafted their publications to deliver as many readers as they could to advertisers. Through this reorientation, ‘balanced’ reporting — now a principle of professional journalism — was born and the news was transformed from a forum dominated by facts (i.e. grain prices) and ‘politically-biased’ reports into a supposedly ‘objective’ portrayal of what is new, exciting and sensational. Dan Schiller, Objectivity and the News (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981).
Innis, The Bias of Communication (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1982), p. 78.
Even before the First World War, signs of American labour’s ‘bourgeoisment’ could be seen, particularly in the realm of consumption. In a speech given in 1913, William Haywood, who led the relatively radical Industrial Workers of the World, mapped out his vision of ‘the ideal society’: ‘There will be a wonderful dining room where you will enjoy the best food that can be purchased,’ he said. ‘There will be a gymnasium and a great swimming pool and private bathrooms of marble … Your work chairs will be morris chairs, so that when you become fatigued you may relax in comfort.’ Quoted in Leach, Land of Desire (1993), p. 189.
Robert Lynd, ‘The Consumer Becomes a “Problem”’, in The Ultimate Consumer, J. Brainerd, ed. (Philadelphia: Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 1934), p. 6.
Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumers’ Republic (New York: Vintage, 2004), pp. 21–2.
Also see George Ross and Jane Jenson, ‘Post-War Class Struggle and the Politics of Left Politics’, in Socialist Register 1985/86, Ralph Miliband et al., eds (London: Merlin Press, 1986), pp. 25–6.
Quoted in Ewen, Captains of Consciousness (1976), p. 80.
At the local level, in New York City for example, business interests convinced city officials to enact zoning regulations that segregated ‘factories from retail areas so that shoppers would not have to confront factory workers …’ Robbins, Global Problems and the Culture of Capitalism (Boston: Allyn & Bacon, 1999), pp. 18–19.
Leiss et al., Social Communication in Advertising (1990), p. 144.
Ross and Jenson, ‘Post-War Class Struggle’ (1986), p. 26.
Neil Postman, ‘The Social Effects of Commercial Television’, in Critical Studies in Media Commercialism, R. Anderson and L. Strate eds (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 62.
A relatively recent study confirming this trend is Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000).
Timothy Luke, ‘The (Un)wise (Ab)use of Nature’ (Unpublished paper prepared for the International Studies Association Annual Conference, Toronto, March 1997).
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© 2008 Edward A. Comor
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Comor, E.A. (2008). The Birth of Capitalist Consumption. In: Consumption and the Globalization Project. International Political Economy Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230582996_3
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