Prosperity for All: Consumer Activism in an Era of Globalization

Conclusion

Conclusion The Poverty of Choice Hand in hand with the rise of consumer society has been an attendant critique of it. It is of no surprise to learn that some of the foremost critics of consumer society have emerged from the country that has promoted the pleasures of consumption more than any other—the United States. Notwithstanding the anti-Americanism of European cultural elites or the new advocates of Asian and alternative value frameworks, some of the most prominent denouncers of commodity capitalism have emerged from the United States itself. There exists a rich tradition of liberal browbeating from the writings of John Kenneth Galbraith to the “crisis of confidence” suffered by Jimmy Carter in his anxieties over the acquisitive materialism of his fellow citizens.1The present-day equivalents to these ongoing critiques are those downsizers, voluntary simplicity finders, pursuers of a new American dream, and academics who assert “enough is enough!” or ask, “Do Americans shop too much?”2 They have castigated us for our shopping sins and, like those late nineteenth-century psychologists who identified the new disease of “kleptomania” among female shoppers at metropolitan department stores, they have come up with a new term to describe our diseased approach to the world of goods: “affluenza.”3 Of course there are many who are happy with the way of life in the consumer society and many books continue to be written that seek to praise the benefits that commercial goods bring to our life.4 But largely, it seems, we feel the need to express our guilt over our wealth and affluence. One can actually feel jaded by the persistent and instantaneous pleasures of commodity capitalism. But one can also feel jaded by the ongoing and often woefully unoriginal cultural and moralistic critique of it. The jeremiads of consumer culture have been in exis- tence for several centuries and, while they follow the logic of capitalism in chasing ever more novel things to condemn, there is much that is familiar to them. It seems that we have developed not much further than the “embarrassment” felt by many early seventeenth-century Dutch protestants who had just began to enjoy the riches available from the New World.5 However, what is perhaps new to the critique of consumer society is the globalization of the same concerns. For now the problem lies not only in our own spiritual malaise, but in the very real decline in the Earth’s physical environment . To the various symptoms we can see in the suffering individual shopper we must now add the potentially catastrophic consequences of environmental degradation that will ultimately be borne by all. Sustainability, in terms of one’s own lifestyle but also of the lifestyles and resources of the entire planet, has become the key element of the latest consumer critique, linking the thoughts and actions of the individual to the future direction of all. The cultural discussion of overindulgence has been augmented by an environmental discussion of the consequences of one’s actions on the rainforests, water levels, climate change, and the supply of fossil fuels. The politics of consumption has been transferred from the dilemmas over gas-guzzling Americans to the future consequences of China’s rapidly expanding market economy. In the first three months of 2007, China’s economy grew at an astounding annual rate of 11.1 percent.6 The statistics on China are almost beyond belief. But who knows for how long this will continue? Ownership of such basic consumer durables as washing machines has increased from nearly zero to over one half of all households. Big business has been eager to enter the new market; for example, in the years running up to 2006, KFC has been annually adding nearly 200 restaurants and now has a presence in nearly 300 cities. And, since the 1980s, the number of skyscrapers (over fourteen stories) in Shanghai has increased from one to four thousand. In 2006, China was home to six out of the world’s top ten shopping malls.7 These are exciting and probably nerve-racking times for Chinese shoppers , yet discussion in the West tends to focus on the consequences for the environment when 1.3 billion consumers begin to enjoy similar standards of living to those obtained in North America and Europe. As with the debate on downsizing, these are very real concerns that inevitably have to be addressed. We constantly seek a truer way of life or are alert to the grimmer reality that...