Definition
The Cambridge English Dictionary states that consumerism is a state of affairs typical of “an advanced industrial society in which a lot of goods are bought and sold”. A second definition it provides observes that it is “the situation in which too much attention is given to buying and owning things”. The use of “too much” in the second definition serves as a point of departure for this entry. Consumerism is defined here as the buying of commodities at a scale that is socially and ecologically undesirable, untenable, and driven by a value system that bases personal and social evaluation on it (see Consumerism and Conspicuous/Positional Consumption). The term “political economy” indicates that our focus is on the historical and contemporary political, social, and economic factors that brought about and maintain this undesirable scale. This shifts research and policy attention away from individual choice behavior change alone to understand consumerism and extends it to consider structural explanations. For example, is choosing to drive a personal car an entirely individual choice? Or is it also a value, norm, and practice produced by social, political, and economic processes that have failed to create dignified and efficient public transport systems? The political economy of consumerism concerns itself more with the latter form of inquiry (see also Consumer Scapegoatism).
History
Consumerism as seen today is a new conceptual category in human history. It represents the mid-20th-century culmination of great historical transformations of thought and action that also produced capitalism and the industrial revolution. These changes that accrued over centuries produced entirely new concepts and practices, such as the commodity form, capital, capital accumulation, consistent technological innovation, conditions for mass production, international trade, and money as wealth and capital. Writers like Peter Stearns point out that accompanying these changes were transformations in values, the weakening of social hierarchies, the rise of secularism and individual liberty, and the resulting question of individual identity as powerful cultural drivers. However, the preoccupation of the political economy even until the 18th century was not consumerism, but inquiring into the “nature and causes of the wealth of nations” under these new conditions. For example, references to consumption – not consumerism – are tangential in Adam Smith’s famous treatise on the “wealth of nations”. His chapter discussing “taxes upon consumables” offers an insight into how consumption was then understood. Smith distinguishes commodities that are “necessaries” from those that are “luxuries”. The former was necessary for the “support of life” “which the established rules of decency have rendered necessary to the lowest rank of people”. All others were included as “luxuries”. The latter was not necessary, for “custom nowhere renders it indecent to live without them”. Yet, Smith qualifies that by “luxuries” he did not wish to “throw the smallest degree of reproach upon the temperate use of them”. Earlier in the book, Smith offers that it is when “society is advancing to the further acquisition … of riches” that the “great body of people, seem to be the happiest and the most comfortable … The stationary state is dull; the declining melancholy”. Discouraging consumption, even of luxuries, under these circumstances would be logically inconsistent. Mainstream social and economic policy continues to lean on this linkage of production, consumption, and social welfare (see also Well-being Versus Income).
Different Perspectives
Many other early political economists remained preoccupied with understanding and enabling the “causes of the wealth of nations”. Writers like David Ricardo emphasized technology and international trade in this context, and Karl Marx highlighted the social contradictions of the capitalist industrial arrangement. However, more than a century after the Wealth of Nations, we notice that consumption, not production, came into focus in political economic analysis. A key text in this regard was Thorstein Veblen’s The Theory of the Leisure Class published in 1899. It introduced the ideas of conspicuous consumption, conspicuous leisure, and pecuniary culture, to political economy. These insights emerged from the book’s focus on the corruption of capitalism such that a “leisure class” in pursuit of profit-making, and status signaling instead of usefulness, became the drivers of consumption of unessential goods, replacing the “modes of productivity and the pride of workmanship that furnish a sound society with its true necessities”.
Other writers such as W.S. Jevons offered that the “problem of economics” was not one of contest and negotiation between social classes over the allocation of capital, labor, and profits. He argued instead that it is a “calculus of pleasure and pain” where rational individuals interacting via free and competitive markets maximize their individual utility. These diverging orientations toward social structure seen in Veblen, and individual behavior and utility inaugurated by Jevons, remain a fault line between economics and political economy. Veblen worried that the lower classes would emulate the “leisure class” instead of resisting their consumption culture. This concern played out by the mid-20th century in the industrialized world and continues today globally, now as consumerism.
Application
The modern environmental movement, since the 1960s, has emerged as the key driver of critical interest in consumerism. The attribution of causality for the environmental crisis is an application of the broad fault line in the political economy identified above. Building on the utilitarian framework of writers like W.S. Jevons and Alfred Marshall, mainstream economists and policymakers concluded that the crisis resulted from the failure of prices to capture the full costs of producing, consuming, and disposing of commodities, leading to irrational decisions laden with externalities. Fields such as marketing, consumer behavior theory, and social psychology were used to produce a policy emphasis on capturing the externalities or social costs of consumerism in the prices of commodities (e.g., carbon tax to check the consumption of fossil fuels) and other efforts such as the provision of information and signals (e.g., labeling and branding) to nudge individual behavior (see Green Nudging and Ecolabeling). Such thinking, however, has mostly failed to dent consumerism and the resulting material footprint of nations. This recognition has brought attention to frameworks that engage consumerism in relational and evolutionary terms. Prominent here is the human tendency to distinguish oneself in relation to social hierarchies (as seen above in Veblen and in Bourdieu’s Distinction). Applying these insights, efforts to address consumerism now include proposals such as the solidarity economy and the sharing economy. In both instances, the idea is to emphasize values of care and sharing as opposed to individual utility maximization as drivers of consumption decisions.
The political economy of consumerism also brings attention to the fact that, as noted by Moore (2015), the latter is enabled by a production system in which labor and nature are appropriated on the “cheap” and even via a “supply chain of violence” to enable mass production of affordable, often low-quality commodities (e.g., fast fashion, fast food) or those designed for rapid obsolescence (e.g., textiles, consumer electronics) (see also Ecodesign and Extended Producer Responsibility). Power, politics, and justice emerge as variables of central analytical importance and interest here – an insight that is now also recognized by Working Group III of the IPCC in its Sixth Assessment Report. It led Schandl et al. (2018: 834) to recognize that “the level of well-being achieved in wealthy industrial countries cannot be generalized globally based on the same system of production and consumption” (see Carbon Inequality, Climate Justice). This realization calls the mainstream development discourse and its promise of liberalism and national or state sovereignty built on open-ended economic growth and technological innovation into question, as recognized by international development scholar Sachs (1992) over three decades ago. It critiques the development path of the “developed world”, even as it questions the direction of the “developing world”.
In sum, the political economy of consumerism is a necessary corrective engagement with development studies, which offers a robust literature, policy, and practice that appears to have developed thus far in parallel to, and without much apparent interest from, the literature on sustainable consumption.
Further Reading
Guha, R. (2006). How much should a person consume? Environmentalism in India and the United States. University of California Press.
Mathai, M.V., Isenhour, C., Stevis, D., Vergragt, P., Bengtsson, M., Lorek, S., Mortensen, L.F., Coscieme, L., Scott, D., Waheed, A., & Alfredsson, E. (2021). The political economy of (un)sustainable production and consumption: A multidisciplinary synthesis for research and action. Resources, Conservation and Recycling, 105265. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.resconrec.2020.105265.
Moore, J.W. (2015). Capitalism in the web of life: Ecology and the accumulation of capital. 1st ed. Verso.
Sachs, W. (Ed.). (1992). The development dictionary: A guide to knowledge as power. Zed Books Ltd.
Schandl, H., Fischer-Kowalski, M., West, J., Giljum, S., Dittrich, M., Eisenmenger, N., Geschke, A., Lieber, M., Wieland, H., Schaffartzik, A., Krausmann, F., Gierlinger, S., Hosking, K., Lenzen, M., Tanikawa, H., Miatto, A., & Fishman, T. (2018). Global material flows and resource productivity: Forty years of evidence. Journal of Industrial Ecology, 22(4), 827–838. https://doi.org/10.1111/jiec.12626.