Consumption. Mark Hudson
who were accustomed to a more relaxed, less acquisitive lifestyle. The moral authority and socializing influence of organizations such as churches and schools had to be brought to bear to shame people out of “sloth,” as they insisted on sleeping in when they were tired, taking customary holidays (such as “Saint Monday”), or knocking off early to go to the pub or to spend time with their children rather than keeping their noses to the grindstone to improve their material standing (Princen, 2005).
The second source of dispute revolves around whether consumption is driven by those who buy or those who make. Perhaps the most transparent title given to these two camps might be productivist and consumerist, although the more alliterative titles of “sucker” (productivist) and “savvy” (consumerist) might be more memorable (Paterson, 2017: 142–3). We will return to many versions of this argument in the rest of the book, but the general idea of the productivist camp is that both the income and the desire to consume are heavily influenced by the political economies that govern production. In the period between the seventeenth and the twentieth century, many European countries saw a transformation in the economic system from feudalism, in which the aristocracy ruled over its serfs in a largely agricultural system with joint rights for the use of land, to capitalism, in which land – along with all other inputs in production, except labour – is largely privately held.
Many productivists argue that this transformation revolutionized how people consume and the manner in which products are provided in several important ways. First, as much of the population shifted from having access to goods and services produced on their land, or in the broader non-market context of the feudal manor to which they belonged, to working for wage income, they relied much more on purchasing items from the market. The move between feudal agriculture and capitalist wage labour was not always voluntary or peaceful. In England, people were forced out of agriculture and into the wage labour market through the enclosure movements, which privatized common lands on which the feudal peasants relied as additional land for things such as raising livestock, making an agricultural livelihood almost impossible for many.
For productivists, the income that permits consumption is dependent on the amount and distribution of the spoils of the production process. While McKendrick et al. were correct in claiming that, in the eighteenth century, England was more affluent than other nations, it was also true that the limited national income and the uneven manner in which it was distributed meant that even in the nineteenth century many in that nation, especially those in the urban working class and in rural areas, earned so little that consumption activities, as we now know them, would have been a remote dream.
In the town of Preston in 1851, 52 percent of all working-class families with children below working age could not earn enough to rise above the poverty line even if they were employed full time for the year, which would have been a rarity (Hobsbawm, 1975: 221). Here is a description of the consumption of workers in England in 1844: “The potatoes which the workers buy are usually poor, the vegetables wilted, the cheese old and of poor quality, the bacon rancid, the meat lean, tough, taken from old, often diseased, cattle, or such as have died a natural death, and not fresh even then, often half decayed” (Engels, 1850: 68).
Competition for a customer base with very limited incomes coupled with a lack of government regulation over production practices resulted in serious quality issues for many products. A common practice at the time was to cut bread with sawdust as a cost-saving device. A study published in the medical journal The Lancet found that, in England during the 1850s, all of the bread, all the butter, half of the oatmeal, and just under half of the milk sampled were adulterated (Hobsbawm, 1964: 84–7).
Consumption is determined not only by income but also by prices, which are influenced by the system of production. The price reductions after the 1600s that were so important in the democratization of some long-distance goods – coffee, sugar and tobacco, for example – were the result of the despicable system of slave labour, which had a devastating long-term impact on the African countries from which slaves were captured (Nunn, 2008).
Further, according to the productivists, the desire for consumption is not independent of the process of production. People’s wants and needs do not originate with themselves. Rather, consumers are manipulated into purchases that they would not have desired if not given a nudge by the seller. This is not a new phenomenon. As a widespread activity, advertising appeared in newspapers in the UK as early as the eighteenth century, but it has evolved and been considerably refined over time (Stillerman, 2015). As an article in the Printers’ Ink journal in the 1920s approvingly noted, “advertising helps to keep the masses dissatisfied with their mode of life, discontented with ugly things around them. Satisfied customers are not as profitable as discontented ones” (Bonneuil and Fressoz, 2015: 155).
At the turn of the twentieth century, advertising was an unregulated wild west, where fantastical falsehoods were used to lure consumers (Dawson, 2003). This was especially common in health-improving products, which often advertised the curative properties of cocaine, laudanum and alcohol. To take one example, in 1905 Anheuser-Busch advertised Malt-Nutrine as a “scientific preparation of malt and hops” that “your physician will tell you … will aid materially in the digestion and assimilation of food eaten. Dyspeptics, invalids and convalescents especially are benefited” (Figure 1.1).
Figure 1.1 Anheuser-Busch advertisement, from Theatre Magazine, February 1905; www.bonkersinstitute.org/medshow/buschtonic.html
Consumer rebellion against blatantly false claims, and the increased regulatory oversight of advertising that followed, changed the message but not the degree of manipulation, a topic to which we will return throughout the book. To provide just one example of how productivist scholars worry about the impact of more modern advertising, according to economist Juliet Schor’s study of advertising to children at the turn of the 2000s, “by 18 months babies can recognize logos … During their nursery-school years, children will request an average of 25 products a day … children between the ages of six and twelve spend more time shopping than reading, attending youth groups, playing outdoors or spending time in household conversation” (quoted in Paterson, 2017: 211).
Finally, productivists often point out that what at first appear to be decisions around consumption may actually be decisions about production. In the early Industrial Revolution families increased their consumption of tobacco, tea, sugar and candles. This could be interpreted positively, as people having sufficient income for the consumption of life’s little luxuries. Productivists, however, point out that all of these items were crucial to maintain energy and provide light to help poorly nourished workers toil incredibly long hours, many of which, especially for women, were in the home under the “putting-out system” that paid per unit produced (Trentmann, 2016). Some productivists also argue that consumption fills a void in people’s lives created by the current system of production. Workers’ inability to lead fulfilling work lives in the harsh, regimented, top-down control structures of wage labour led to consumption as an alternative sphere in which they could exercise control and express creativity (Bauman, 2008: 59–60). As the “sucker” nickname for consumers implies, it is probably also fair to say that the productivists are more pessimistic and critical of the role of consumption in society than the consumerists.
Consumerists tend to view people as much more “savvy” in their consumption activities. This is not to deny that sellers frequently attempt to influence and manipulate their customers but to stress that the final decision in any act of consumption belongs to the consumer. Consumerists point to the fact that people consume in order to express their “own sense of identity” (Paterson, 2017: 143) through assemblages of commodities, cannily providing for their families, liberating themselves through transgressive displays, and engaging as savvy co-producers of brands. James Twitchell (1999), to whose writing we return in chapter 6,