Abstract
Consumption has become a core mediator of the international political economy — structuring domestic and international relations, shaping conceptual systems used to process information and experience into reality.
Man has lost the capacity to foresee and to forestall. He will end by destroying the earth.
—Albert Schweitzer
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Notes
Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (Cambridge: Basil Blackwell, 1989), pp. 106–07.
John Kenneth Galbraith, The Affluent Society (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1958).
For a more contemporary analysis, see Vincent Manzerolle, ‘The Consumer Database, Consumer Sovereignty, and the Commercial Mediation of Identity in the United States’, MA Dissertation. University of Western Ontario (Unpublished, 2006).
Lewis, Time and Western Man (New York: Chatto and Windus, 1927).
See Scott Lucas and Liam Kennedy, ‘Enduring Freedom: Public Diplomacy and US Foreign Policy’, American Quarterly Vol. 57 No. 2 (June 2005), pp. 309–33 and Barber (2007), pp. 205–9.
For a jarring overview of the rise of anti-Americanism overseas, dating from the US invasion of Iraq, see Pew Global Attitudes Project, America’s Image Slips (13 June 2006), http://pewglobal.org/reports/displayphp?ReportID=252.
Alexander Watson, Marginal Man (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006), p. 328.
Indeed, life itself constitutes the ‘last frontier’ of this commodification process. Beyond the ownership of land and the use of animals for food and entertainment, oceans, the sky, human organs, body parts and, more abstractly, the human genome have become the subjects of private ownership and exchange. Life itself and its intrinsic values thus are being eclipsed by exchange value and, as Marx put it, ‘the icy water of egotistical calculation’. Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto (1979), p. 82.
We direct the reader to the general approach laid out in Babe, Culture of Ecology (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006).
Pietrzyk, ‘Exiting the Myopic Impasse’ (2007).
In 2007, São Paulo became the first city in the non-communist world to ban all outdoor advertising. David Harris, ‘São Paulo: A City Without Ads’, Adbusters #73 (August–September 2007) http://adbusters.org/the_magazine/73/So_Paulo_A_City_Without_Ads.html. Examples, however, also abound in which identity, meaning and, through these, happiness itself are being explicitly related to consumption by regimes embracing modernist ambitions. In Thailand, for example, in 2007, its government introduced what it called its yoo dee mee suk or ‘happy living’ policy — an effort to stoke domestic consumption through various state programmes or, to be even more explicit, a plan, similar to China’s, to wean the countries economic fortunes away from exports and towards domestic consumption. Pattnapong Chantranontwong, ‘Kosit Says Domestic Consumption Overlooked’, BangkokPost.com (30 April 2007) http://www.bangkokpost.com/News/30Apr2007_news25.php.
Quoted in Mazzarella, Shoveling Smoke (2003), pp. 35–6 (emphasis in original).
Stanley Lebergott, Pursuing Happiness (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1993), pp. 13–14.
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© 2008 Edward A. Comor
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Comor, E.A. (2008). Conclusion. In: Consumption and the Globalization Project. International Political Economy Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230582996_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230582996_7
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