Consumer empowerment/worker emancipation

[Red Noob]

So school is teaching me about consumerism, and how to be a smart consumer. Goes to show how much my school and government loves me.

On a serious note, is consumer empowerment sort of opposing to worker emancipation? A lot of the message involves the 'competition' and 'competitive pricing' message. But being a consumer doesn't technically mean you work or produce, in fact more consumption could arguably be the result of exploitation.

It seems like bourgeois propaganda, giving the "power to people" message, just in a twisted capitalist way.

Thoughts?

[daft punk]

Yeah, it is bourgeois propaganda. That's not to say you shouldn't try to make the best of things and do what you can as a consumer.

[Zulu]

Modern capitalism has shifted from the exploitation of labor, to the exploitation of consumption as the primary means of sustaining itself. Basically, they shove that new iPhone model down your throat every year... However, this model required creating huge credit bubbles, and that is not working anymore, so your school is wasting your time. There will be only less to consume in the coming decades.

Fun fact: this consumer society thing was originally a response to the rising standards of living in the socialist countries. In the 1950s the capitalists were really afraid people would be fleeing to the East... But then there was revisionism, the Sino-Soviet Split, all that. *Sigh*

[commieathighnoon]

Modern capitalism has shifted from the exploitation of labor, to the exploitation of consumption as the primary means of sustaining itself. Basically, they shove that new iPhone model down your throat every year... However, this model required creating huge credit bubbles, and that is not working anymore, so your school is wasting your time. There will be only less to consume in the coming decades.

So we should throw Capital out the window, I guess?

All capitalist profit, in 1840 or 2012, is premised upon the exploitation of labor. There has been no fundamental "shift" in capitalist accumulation, the circuit of capital. This just sounds like a lazy gluing of petty bourgeois anti-consumerism, Naomi Klein and NoLogo nonsense, to "socialism."


Fun fact: this consumer society thing was originally a response to the rising standards of living in the socialist countries.

Actually, the 1920s, particularly in the United States, mark the origin. Capitalist production by the early 20th. c. had succeeded in massively reducing the marginal cost of food (and thus what percentage of the total worker's wage bill it consumed), as well as that of "consumer durables," which meant that they could consume freed up room in the workers' wage bill/consumption allotment.

Certainly, its ideological value was exploited, but only post hoc and on an opportunistic basis. The political economy of the Stalinized states consistently failed to produce sufficient availability of consumer products at acceptable quality levels, and this plagued every so-called "central planning" system for the duration of their existence and could be said to be one of their defining social contradictions in the sphere of production, allocation, and distribution.

Fun fact: "In the mid-1970s, the Soviet press reported that its citizens spent 30 billion man-hours each year just buying merchandise."


In the 1950s the capitalists were really afraid people would be fleeing to the East... But then there was revisionism, the Sino-Soviet Split, all that. *Sigh*

The fear retreated because Eastern Bloc economic performance turned out to be very poor, the Western economic depression that was predicted by many on either side of the Iron Curtain never came to pass, and the consumer improvements in the Eastern Bloc reflected just that "anti-revisionism" you speak of, which began under Stalin's rule, not Khrushchev's.

Lastly, it seems extraordinarily anti-Marxist to appraise a macrohistorical event as sliding to one way or another merely on the basis of "which men" and "which ideas" come to the fore. Marx and Engels proposed that these were in fact symptoms (the superstructure) of movements in the base of society.