I know who Pankhurst was and her, quite proper concerns with eugenics, I would hope that most of the folks here have read Marx on Malthus and Harvey on the Ehrlichs and Hardin as well as Lappe and Schurman's translation of those arguments in to a feminist power perspective.
>
> I don't own a car, and I live in a terraced house, but I don't think that
> working people in general are consuming too much, and I prefer not to mock
> the consumer society at a time when incomes are being held down.
I do own a car and live in a freestanding house and think working people - myself included - spend way too much having no choice but to consume wasteful commodities - in lieu not only of less wasteful commodities but also, often, as compensation for living in unhealthy places, working under alienating conditions, with exhausted bodies experiencing limited self-fulfillment in anomic communities with shitty infrastructures. You seem to be working with the definition of consumption presented by consumer society instead of one which sees how much more lower income people have to spend than upper income folks... Barbara Ehrenreich's exploration of the nobility of work thesis which was said to undergird Clinton-era welfare reform comes immediately to mind as does the clear way she lays out the myriad of additional costs the working poor have, relative to folks with lower-middle incomes and above. The more money you have the more you can lower your costs in hundreds of ways, including buying more-efficient, long-lasting and actually-satisfying things (even if you don't or if you respond to those savings, knowingly or not, by buying more crappy stuff).
I'm not an idiot, I know full well there are huge numbers of folks who need, deserve or ought to have a right to more stuff but your presentation suggests that you see no problems with pursuing that stuff through the very same economy that's robbing them of the capacity to consume by making them redundant, powerless, unhealthy and, often, self- or other-hating.
Conspicuous consumption? That was Vance Packard and Thorstein Veblen's
> criticism of capitalism. I prefer Marx's point that needs are plainly
> social, and comparative.
If all you want is more, or the earth, or more than everyone can consume, why shouldn't I think that you're not opposed to conspicuous consumption? How would I know whether or not, if someone - who owns a Hummer, builds a McMansion next to my house, you think it perfectly reasonable for me to want and get to a Hummer and McMansion, too?
>
> 'A house may be large or small; as long as the surrounding houses are
> equally small it satisfies all social demands for a dwelling. But let a
> palace arise beside the little house, and it shrinks from a little house
> into a hut. ... Our desires and pleasures spring from society; we measure
> them, therefore, by society and not by the objects which serve for their
> satisfaction. Becuase they are of a social nature, they are of a relative
> nature.' Wage Labour and Capital, Peking, 1978, p 35
>
> Or as my daughters say, if I buy one a comic and not the other, 'that's not
> fair!'
>
Neither you nor your daughters seem to be aware (any more than my sons are) that the production of commodities produces the need for those commodities and that if you find an embrace of the unlimited pursuit of consumption dictated by the unlimited production of commodities by capitalism as a non-problematic strategy then I think you have real issues since Marx's whole point was to build a movement that would break from that trajectory given its social and material costs, crises and contradictions.... since those commodities serve as fetishized relations between real people... and what we need is real, intentional relations with people and things, not more fetishized crap.
Also, given your quote from Marx, where does this issues of "beside" end, given modern media and the extensive travel folks engage in? If I see the manions on Dallas or Beverly Hills 90210 or some other more updated peice of crap TV show beamed all over the planet, isn't all of that now right beside me? Have I no responsibility but to want everything the folks who have the most have as soon as I feel that it is besides me? Do you see how this is a very different question than whether or not folks we can all agree on have too little ought to have more?
Again, this is not to say that people don't need and deserve more than they have, it is to say that - if you are going to quote Marx - its a good idea to provide a more complete account.