Socialisms intended to free man from the cult of commodities and the individualist incentive to consume. Over time, they imagined societies where abundance and material comfort shared justly would lead to happy societies. Does this ideal still exist? ?
Attacking abundance is a small manual which challenges the idea according to which socialisms were more concerned with the question of work than with that of consumption. This clear work covers more than two centuries of history, a little quickly sometimes, but with very high quality synthesis. The interest of the approach is that it invites us at every moment to return to the great texts and to revise our analyses.
The last reference mobilized is William Morris, British entrepreneur, creator and socialist thinker of XIXe century. In a lecture he gave in November 1887 entitled “ The society of the future “, he asserted: “ (the) good life (of workers) will be the antipode of the life of the rich today ; (…) the life of the rich is only the dark side of their own misery ; and since it is certainly the cause of (their) misery, there is nothing enviable or desirable about it » (p. 25). “ In the utopian society that he depicts, comments Alexia Blin, clothing, housing and everyday objects must be beautiful and they are so because they are produced freely in workshops owned collectively by workers who fully enjoy their work. » (pp. 34-35). Socialist consumption is characterized by the search for pleasure and beauty as well as the satisfaction of real and non-superfluous needs.
Communal luxury and the splendors of the future
In 2015, the American professor of comparative literature Kristin Ross devoted a stimulating little book to The imagination of the Commune. Analyzing the manifesto of the Federation of Artists written by Eugène Pottier in April 1871, she dwelled at length on the famous formula which concluded it: “ communal luxury and the splendors of the future » ; namely, freeing work and exalting beauty ; enjoy simple and useful objects that would have given pleasure to those who freely produced them ; make profit, accumulation and competition disappear ; achieve harmony – the great word of the first socialists – through the end of capitalism.
“ In the absence of general works relating to the relationships of socialists to consumption », writes Alexia Blin, it could be useful to “ bring together scattered studies and draw a coherent narrative » (p. 15-16), a story which she recognizes, however, necessarily contains gaps, including on subjects central to the social sciences, but for which there is little work relating to socialist consumption: war, transnational logics, relations between the West and the countries of the South, colonized then third world, the place of women… Other books will therefore be needed. However, women are not absent from his remarks. They appear occasionally, housewives, hosts of communist soups (the name of the meals prepared for the strikers at the end of the XIXe century) and cooperatives, feminists and active members of consumer associations, in all kinds of places, therefore, which were places of social vigilance and contestation of the market economy.
The caricature, explains the author, reduces socialism to sad and frugal experiences while on the contrary “ socialists also carry a project of collective emancipation and are therefore concerned with the advent of material comfort which necessarily involves consumption » (p. 12). It does this by following a three-step chronological plan, taking up the major theories and presenting concrete achievements.
How to prevent the business of depoliticizing capitalism ?
The first period covers the entire XIXe century (1810-1914). The context and general developments are known, as are the birth and transformations of socialism. At the beginning of the century, the question of impoverishment led to both large utopias » in which the “ just consumption » always occupies a central place – the common dining room of New Harmony, the ideal city of Robert Owen, the Fourierist gastrosophy, the Icarian refectory of Étienne Cabet – and, in a more practical way, beyond ordinary philanthropy, on collective experiences which are concerned with satisfying the fundamental needs pointed out by the first social studies: to eat, to dress, to shelter. But the century is long, the working class is growing, capitalism is transforming, the standard of living tends to increase and the first protective social legislation is put in place. Eduard Berstein can make the observation at the end of the century that capitalism has not collapsed under the weight of its contradictions as Marx had announced. Part of the working classes can access diversified consumption, which contributes to demobilizing it, or even depoliticizing it, a central motif of the work: how “ prevent the enterprise of depoliticization of capitalism ? » (p. 244). Marx himself had posed, from the first pages of Capitalthe question of “ commodity fetish » and suggested that another form of alienation was added to that of work. He was not hostile to consumption, comfort, abundance and a certain form of luxury, an element of “ civilization “, provided that it is based on a principle of equality.
The failure of the experiments of the first socialisms was, in reality, fruitful. Alexia Blin recalls what consumer cooperation owes to Robert Owen, who is said to have been its inventor with the Plowing exchanges of the 1830s. We also know, thanks to Bernard Desmars, what the Fourierists contributed to shaping on their side. The end of the century saw the rise of cooperatives which, if not a strictly socialist reality, became an important part of their militant system. The people’s house, which then appeared, was a place of popular education, social struggle and political remobilization. It is organized around a store.
The end of the century is also that of a “ municipal socialism » in the towns conquered around shops, musical or sporting associations and multiple cultural activities which had to be made educational by removing them from commercial logic. It is also that of “ the egg war “, that is to say the struggle of housewives who organize themselves into consumer associations against the high cost of living. These forms of activism give rise to debates and tensions in a very masculine union and political world which tends to favor strikes and the fight for wages and reductions in working hours. Production versus consumption… But the repertoire of action is enriched.
A consumer counter-society
The second part of the work again covers a long period, from 1917 to the 1970s, which corresponds to both the flourishing of consumer society and the birth of the alternative Soviet model. Alexia Blin’s objective is to take stock of the critical thinking that is developing in the socialist galaxy, which is not limited to dominant Marxism, against consumption and mass culture. The concept of alienation through merchandise, suggested in the previous period, flourished. The consumerist trap was denounced in the 1920s and 1930s by Gramsci, the Frankfurt School, then after the war by the Marxist philosopher Henri Lefebvre, Marcuse and his one-dimensional man, the situationists, Jean Baudrillard, etc. The central idea that emerges from this moment is that the strength of capitalism is to separate the sphere of work and that of consumption, offering as a solution to alienation through work entertainment through consumerism, the fashion system and the cult of the object. Marcuse explains that, “ in the “society of abundance”, the sale of goods goes hand in hand with stupidity, the perpetuation of labor and frustration. (…) The industrial working class integrates without being able to protest into the capitalist system and even contributes to its stabilization » (quoted p. 99-100). But this critical thinking is not without nuance. In the late 1950s, Richard Hoggart and the Cultural Studies point out that, while ultimately trapped, “ most members of the working classes are not reduced to the state of passive consumers of mass culture (…) because they live in another universe where they can remain faithful to their concrete certainties »: family solidarity, social assistance, common language and references, own leisure activities and criticism of elites (quoted p. 118).
Under these conditions, collective consumption activities are set up which constitute as many places of resistance to the individualist cult of the commodity: cooperatives are at their peak, popular festivals, cinema, summer camps, sports clubs, travel are supported by the socialist and communist parties of the 1920s and 1930s, sometimes giving birth, as in the case of the Communist Party in France and Italy, to “ a consumer counter-society » (p. 125) which has been well studied. Effective and reassuring for activists, it is an extension of the people’s house of the 1900s.
Deradicalization of socialism and ecosocialism
But this counter-model collapsed in the 1970s and 1980s as the crisis modified the conditions of growth and the logic of consumer society. It is the time of globalization and neoliberalism: increasing inequalities, individualism, search for personal fulfillment and compensatory pleasure. More than ever, consumption is becoming depoliticized and the social democratic parties that come to power are converting to the market economy in a logic of “ deradicalization of socialism » (p. 177). They theorize the role of the consumer and rely on simple regulation of consumption by consumer associations. Faced with this turning point, critical thinking was regenerated in the 2000s. Liquid life (2005), Zygmunt Bauman, heir to the Frankfurt School, explains that the individual is no longer defined by what he produces, but by what he consumes, in an individualist logic, which makes class logic disappear. The individual plays with consumption, but there is an alienating injunction to constantly adapt and present oneself in social life and on social networks. All those who cannot keep up, consume and adapt are made responsible for their inability to keep up, which gives rise to discontent, anxiety and political destabilization.
More generally, and beyond even regenerated Marxism, we are witnessing in the 2000s a return to socialist fundamentals, that is to say the search for an alternative to the consumer society, even regulated, into which the socialist parties had strayed. It’s time for a “ of an ecological redefinition of socialism, beyond productivism “, with a “ ecosocialism », which is part of a much broader ecological movement. Alexia Blin quotes André Gorz and Ivan Illich extensively, but political ecology refers to a much broader and older theoretical corpus. This movement reflects on decline and deceleration and the reference to Hartmut Rosa would be essential. We then understand that it is quite natural that we return to reading William Morris who had imagined, in his quiet, just and beautiful world, of transforming Trafalgar Square into an immense orchard.