[lbo-talk] "Consumers" (was pomo prince)

[Michael Dawson -PSU]

> I've been reading your book in prep for our interview tomorrow, and I
> see that you reject Marcuse and Ewen in favor of straightforward
> explanations - that the masses are coerced, cajoled, seduced, and/or
> hoodwinked by their masters. In the specific case of you're book,
> they're forced or lured into overconsuming. But I think this
> underestimates the degree to which people are complict in their own
> subordination, and even come to enjoy it. Or, worse, don't even
> experience shopping as a compulsion or a form of subordination, but a
> pleasure. But we can take this up tomorrow.
>
> Doug

To facilitate tomorrow's interview [and not because I'm a gluttonous
narcissistic windbag ;-)], I post again.

I reject Marcuse and Ewen because they fail to provide a coherent account of
the means of ruling-class intervention in product-usage and its
socio-environmental determinants.  They trash "consumers," but provide them
with no real ammunition for fighting back.

I actually don't think ordinary folks are either very much brainwashed or
very much complicit in "their" malconsumption.  I believe the real problem
is lack of democractic access to commanding-heights economic decisions,
which I call "macro-choices."  I would contend that both Marcuse and Ewen
portray "consumers" as being much more robotic and brainwashed than I do.

As you'll see in the last two chapters, I don't think big business marketing
campaigns have deep psychological effects on ordinary folks.  Quite the
contrary.  The controversy lies not there, but in the financial and social
costs of the marketing juggernaut, and in the capitalists' outdated
dictatorship over the biggest economic decisions.  Marketing's main function
is to preserve this dictatorship and the profits it facilitates.

The point of explaining the details of marketing is to arm ordinary people
with accurate information about how big businesses view and treat them, not
to tell people they're robots.  As I argue in Chapter 9, the actual direct
impact of marketing tactics is minute, and matters much more in the
aggregate than in the individual case.

Marcuse and Ewen make me want to slit my wrists.  They reveal virtually
nothing about how and why power impinges more and more upon our "free time,"
and much of what they do reveal is taken way out-of-context.  "You're
robots, so rebel!," is their message.  Rebel against what, and for what?