If white radicals are serious about revolution, they are going to
have to discard a lot of bullshit ideology created by and for
educated white middle-class males. A good example of what has to go
is the popular theory of consumerism.
As expounded by many leftist thinkers, notably Marcuse, this theory
maintains that consumers are psychically manipulated by the mass
media to crave more and more consumer goods, and thus power an
economy that depends on constantly expanding sales. The theory is
said to be particularly applicable to women, for women do most of
the actual buying, their consumption is often directly related to
their oppression (e.g. makeup, soap flakes), and they are a special
target of advertisers. According to this view, the society defines
women as consumers, and the purpose of the prevailing media image
of women as passive sexual objects is to sell products. It follows
that the beneficiaries of this depreciation of women are not men
but the corporate power structure.
First of all, there is nothing inherently wrong with consumption.
Shopping and consuming are enjoyable human activities and the
marketplace has been a center of social life for thousands of
years.
The locus of the oppression resides in the production function:
people have no control over which commodities are produced (or
services performed), in what amounts, under what conditions, or how
these commodities are distributed. Corporations make these
decisions and base them solely on profit potential.
As it is, the profusion of commodities is a genuine and powerful
compensation for oppression. It is a bribe, but like all bribes it
offers concrete benefits—in the average American’s case, a degree
of physical comfort unparalleled in history. Under present
conditions, people are preoccupied with consumer goods not because
they are brainwashed but because buying is the one pleasurable
activity not only permitted buy actively encouraged by our rulers.
The pleasure of eating an ice cream cone may be minor compared to
the pleasure of meaningful, autonomous work, but the former is
easily available and the latter is not. A poor family would
undoubtedly rather have a decent apartment than a new TV, but since
they are unlikely to get the apartment, what is to be gained by not
buying the TV?
The confusion between cause and effect is particularly apparent in
the consumerist analysis of women’s oppression. Women are not
manipulated by the media into being domestic servants and mindless
sexual decorations, the better to sell soap and hair spray. Rather,
the image reflects women as they are forced by men in a sexist
society to behave. Male supremacy is the oldest and most basic form
of class exploitation; it was not invented by a smart ad man. …
For women, buying and wearing clothes and beauty aids is not so
much consumption as work. One of a woman’s jobs in this society is
to be an attractive sexual object, and clothes and make up are
tools of the trade. Similarly, buying food and household
furnishings is a domestic task; it is the wife’s chore to pick out
the commodities that will be consumed by the whole family.
Appliances and cleaning materials are tools that faciliate her
domestic function. When a woman spends a lot of money and time
decorating her home or herself, or hunting down the latest in
vacuum cleaners, it is not idle self-indulgence (let alone the
result of psychic manipulation) but a healthy attempt to find
outlets for her creative energies within her circumscribed role.
… Consumerism as applied to women is blatantly sexist. The
pervasive image of the empty-headed female consumer constantly
trying her husband’s patience with her extravagant purchases
contributes to the myth of male superiority: we are incapable of
spending money rationally: all we need to make us happy is a new
hat now and then. (There is an analogous racial stereotype—the
black with his Cadillac and magenta shirts.) Furthermore, the
consumerism line allows Movement men to avoid recognizing that they
exploit women by attributing women’s oppression solely to
capitalism. It fits neatly into already existing radical theory and
concerns, saving the Movement the trouble of tackling the real
problems of women’s liberation. And it retards the struggle against
male supremacy by dividing women. Just as in the male movement, the
belief in consumerism encourages radical women to patronize and put
down other women for trying to survive as best they can, and
maintains individualist illusions.
If we are to build a mass movement we must recognize that no
individual decision, like rejecting consumption, can liberate us.
We must stop arguing about whose life style is better (and secretly
believing ours is) and tend to the task of collectively fighting
our own oppression and the ways in which we oppress others. When we
create a political alternative to sexism, racism, and capitalism,
the consumer problem, if it is a problem, will take care of itself.
—Ellen Willis (1969): Women and the Myth of Consumerism
Hope y’all had a happy Thanksgiving, and bought something worth having.