Interesting Article on Consumerism

This article is not only interesting because we can see the history of how we became such consumers but also how we have been trained to work long hours so we can buy more stuff and deny ourselves a social life or spiritual life. Now, as the wheel comes to a screeching halt and we find ourselves without long hours to work or stuff to buy we wonder what value we have. Well here is how it all got started.

Consumerism: an Historical Perspective


Image The Pacific Ecologist, whence this article came, provided this editorial note: Sharon Beder explores the history of consumer societies from the 1920s when over-production of goods exceeded demand. Instead of stabilising the economy, reducing working hours, and sharing work around, which would have brought more leisure time for all, industrialists decided to expand markets by promoting consumerism to the working classes. The social decision to produce unlimited quantities of goods rather than leisure, nurtured wastefulness, obsolescence, and inefficiency and created the foundation for our modern consumer culture. People were trained to be both workers and consumers in a culture of work and spend.

Consumption was promoted through advertising as a "democracy of goods" and used to pacify political unrest among workers. With the help of marketers and advertisers exploiting the idea of consumer goods as status symbols, workers were manipulated into being avaricious consumers who could be trusted "to spend more rather than work less." But if we admired wisdom above wealth, and compassion and cooperation above competition, we could undermine the motivation to consume.

The development of consumer societies meant the erosion of traditional values and attitudes of thrift and prudence. Expanding consumption was necessary to create markets for the fruits of rising production. Ironically this "required the nurture of qualities like wastefulness, self-indulgence, and artificial obsolescence, which directly negated or undermined the values of efficiency" and the Protestant Ethic that had originally nurtured capitalism.1 Advertisers sought to redefine people's needs, encourage their wants and offer solutions to them via goods produced by corporations rather than allowing people to identify and solve their own problems, or to look to each other for solutions. 2

Read More