Consumption and political economy; consumption in socialist and capitalist societies
SAN261, week 3, 2018


Political economy
•explains mutual relations between political (political institutions, law, governance) and economic
(production, trade, consumption, and distribution of resources) systems
•Themes: the role of consumption in origin and expansion of capitalism (colonialism, transatlantic
trade, slavery, postsocialism); practices of consumption under various political regimes
(consumption as an example of everyday life); consumption as an act of resistance
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•Group work:
•How can political institutions/state/governance influence consumption? Describe at least 2
mechanisms
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Consumption and origin/expansion of capitalism
•Mintz, Sidney W. 1986. Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History
•Sugar becomes from luxury used sparsely by elites becomes everyday necessity for wide strata of
society
•Increase in demand related to wider accessibility related to interests of capitalist traders
•One of commodities motivating proletariat to work
•Fast energy
•Tea as “British drink” (civilized, socially safe – it is not alcohol, it is a source of energy)

Expansion of capitalism and the birth of consumer society
•McKendirck, Brewer and Plumb. 1982. The Birth of a Consumer Society.
•2. ½ 18th Century – beginning of Consumer Revolution:
• „the consumer revolution was the necessary analogue to the industrial revolution, the necessary
convulsion on the demand side of the equation to match the convulsion on the suply side“
(McKendrick. 1982: 9).
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Expansion of capitalism and the birth of consumer society
•The source of inspiration is not only the courte, but also trade: Sophisticated methods of sale
feeding status aspirations
•Wedgewood – uses aspirations of bourgoisy; produces affordable but sophisticated goods; plans
production according to consumers’ wants
ANd9GcR8kEHWoFoqrCG2hKUm7OFfGvzfai7_vtDqX33LbJXtrDEvwMLh2g wedgewood

Capitalism, consumption and alienation
•Marx, K. In Capital, but also in Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts
•Human relations are organised through relations of production (not consumption)
•Follows objects within a broader theory of development of capitalism; meaning of objects depends
on political economy
•To understand objects means to understand totality of human existence – commodity as basic unit of
analysis: Commodity as symbol of exploitation and alienation
1.

Capitalism, consumption and alienation
•Lukács:
•Reifikation – objects of consumption are bearers of capitalist ideology. Act of shopping embeddies
burgois ideology and reproduces capitalist relations.
•Frankfurt school (Addorno, Hokheimer, Marcusse):
•Consumer culture suppresses aesthetic abilities and critical thinking
• consumer desires enslave people
•new forms of social control based on controling consumer desires

Capitalism, consumption and alienation
•Miller, Daniel. 1987. Material Culture and Mass Consumption
•Material culture as „relationship through things are created as social forms“ – objectification
•Commodities and mass culture as a „dominant context through which we relate to objects “ through
mass culture we become agents of historical processes
•„consumption as work may be defined as that which translates the object from an alienable to an
inalienable condition; that is, from being a symbol of estrangement and price value to being an
artefact invested with particular inseparable connotations“ (Miller, 1987: 190)
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•Group work:
•How is consumption defined and organized in capitalist resp. socialist societies?
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Capitalism and consumption
•Early capitalism – focus on capital goods, not on consumer goods
•Fordism – mass production and consumption, commodities are material things
•Postfordism – production and consumption of services, events and information, commodities are
dematerialized, niche marketing

Socialism and consumption
•Socialism as modernisation programme – consumption as both indicator and means of modernisation
•Space for creation of relations with regime – paternalistic redistributionand dependence on state
leads to resistence, desire fore Western goods
•Economics  of shortages
•Contributes to the fall of regime – free choice and power over goods on market

Good bye Lenin
•https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iJb4efZcFUM