G Ballard’s last published novel, Kingdom Come, unfolds in a fictional London suburb called Brooklands, where a vast shopping mall fosters a bovine social docility. In the book’s wayward conceit, consumerism is a totalitarian device used to control people and their artificial wants. Fired up by dreams of wealth, Brooklanders indulge in Black Friday-style bargain hunting in their local Metro-Centre.
Ballard was not the first to see shopping as a secular religion. Émile Zola, in his 1883 novel The Ladies’ Paradise, tells the rise of a department store in late 19th-century Paris and its role in the new mass consumption. With its silk counters and perfume department, the store looks forward to our age of indiscriminate purchase and credit binge. Far from aiding the French economy, Zola’s cathedral of commerce heralds a new retail Europe of consumer anxiety, boom and bust.
Attitudes to material acquisition have varied greatly down the ages. Frank Trentmann, in his ambitious history of the subject from medieval times to the present, carefully puts the case for and against. Karl Marx, notably, viewed consumerism as morally derelict and in some ways sinful. The consumer society he decried was made flesh in London department stores such as Harrods, where beef from Argentina, sherry from Portugal and other products of the global trade explosion of the 1870s offered unprecedented levels of “commodity fetishism”.
Consumerism (from the Latin consumere, “use up”) has an overtone of waste. A century after Marx, the Italian writer and film director Pier Paolo Pasolini divined a “fascist” element in consumerism. Catholic Italy was changing fast in the 1960s Trentmann reminds us, and Pasolini caught a reactionary mood as he poured scorn on chewing gum, Coca-Cola, jeans and other trappings of American-style consumismo. Unfortunately, Pasolini did not (or could not) see that young people have always sought to express themselves through a passionate attachment to things. British mods, with their appropriation of RAF insignia, Gaggia espresso machines and Vespas, struck a blow against entrenched class and conformity. Consumer possessions can sometimes serve to undermine the status quo.
Free-trade champions tend to see consumption as embodying the individual’s right to “consumer choice”. In their neoliberal view, money spent on material goods bolsters the values of democracy and prosperity for all. British prime minister Margaret Thatcher (“the priestess of neoliberalism”, says Trentmann) sought to demolish anti-consumerist Marxist attitudes as a matter of urgency. When, in March 1987, she toured Soviet Moscow in a Cossack-style fur hat, the Russians embraced her as an emissary of barcode freedoms and wealth.
Left-leaning elements of the Catholic church continue to condemn “conspicuous consumption” and the inequalities attendant on the retail sales boom. John XXIII (the first pope to have opened up Catholicism to Marxist argument) denounced consumerist values in his 1963 encyclical Pacem in terris as anti-communitarian. On the other hand, many evangelical Christians in the US today embrace the “prosperity gospel”; Jesus may have kicked out the money changers, but shopping can bring a roseate flush of contentment.
Advertisement
Trentmann’s book is not just about shopping. The first half of Empire of Thingschronicles the “global advance of goods” in the 15th century to the resurgence of markets in Asia today. Unsurprisingly, Atlantic slavery takes up much of the story. From 1700 to 1808, sugar, the end product of British slavery, became so profitable a commodity that the prosperity of English slave ports such as Bristol and Liverpool was derived from commerce in what historian Sidney Mintz called the “tropical drug food”. A typical slave ship carried trading goods, such as beads, rifles and gunpowder, from England to Africa, then slaves from Africa to the Caribbean, and finally sugar, coffee, cotton, rice and rum back to England. It was one of the most nearly perfect commercial systems of modern times, a flawless loop of supply and demand, says Trentmann.
Trentmann, a professor of history at Birkbeck, University of London, eschews moral judgments. But in the book’s second half he appears to question the value of fair trade and other 20th century, quasi-Christian consumer movements. Affluent consumers in the west are made to feel virtuous by buying Oxfam coffee and tea. (“Those so inclined can be buried in a fair trade bamboo coffin made in Bangladesh,” he adds.) At any rate, citizen-consumers in the west have the luxury of ethical consumption, while others do not.
In densely researched pages, Trentmann asks if the Islamic revival’s aura of purity and principle is not compromised by its own alliance with consumer goods. Attacks on Coca-Cola in Iran under ayatollah Khomeini did not abolish the fizzy drink but substituted it with Zam Zam Cola and other copycat brands. On both sides, “Jihad v McWorld” antagonisms are buoyed by consumer-age technology, with Islamic State disseminating snuff videos among internet users in the infidel west. (Who is the corruptor of morality here?)
Though fraught with inelegant-sounding sentences (“We can see the schizophrenic nature of empire in this early wave of globalisation”), Trentmann’s history of five centuries of material culture is impressive in its breadth and scholarship. Anyone with compulsive buying disorder should buy a copy, or two, or three. Ka-ching! Ka-ching! Ka-ching!
Empire of Things: How we Became a World of Consumers, from the Fifteenth Century to the Twenty-First, is published by Allen Lane (£30). Click here to order a copy for £24
Since you’re here …
… we have a small favour to ask. More people are reading the Guardian than ever but advertising revenues across the media are falling fast. And unlike many news organisations, we haven’t put up a paywall – we want to keep our journalism as open as we can. So you can see why we need to ask for your help. The Guardian’s independent, investigative journalism takes a lot of time, money and hard work to produce. But we do it because we believe our perspective matters – because it might well be your perspective, too.
High-quality journalism is essential intellectual nourishment. The generosity of providing such a service without a paywall deserves recognition and support.Giacomo P, Italy
Nessun commento:
Posta un commento