Marx on Consumption and Consumerism (Excerpts from the 1844 Manuscripts, 4 Sections, 2,000 Chinese Characters)

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Author: Su Huoyi (from Douban)
Source: https://book.douban.com/review/16565375/

I. People Sell Alienated Labor to Satisfy Alienated, Inhuman, Consumerist Needs

Under socialism, a new mode of production has tremendous emancipatory significance: a new demonstration of humanity’s essential powers and a new enrichment of human nature. Under private property, however, the opposite is true. Everyone strives to awaken some new need in another person, to place them in a new position of dependence, and to entice them into pursuing new forms of enjoyment, thereby compelling them to make new sacrifices. Everyone seeks to create an alien essential power that dominates others, so as to find in it the satisfaction of their own selfish needs. Thus, as the number of objects increases, so too does the realm of alien powers that oppress human beings, and every new product is a new potential force for mutual deception and mutual plunder.

On the subjective side, the continual expansion of the range of products and needs becomes the ingenious and perpetually calculating slave of inhuman, excessively refined, unnatural, and imaginary desires. Just as a eunuch seeks, through base means, to stimulate a ruler’s numbed capacity for pleasure in order to win the ruler’s favor, the eunuch of industry panders to the consumer’s basest notions, acts as a go-between for the consumer and their needs, arouses their morbid desires, watches for their every weakness, and then demands payment for these attentive services.

You must turn everything you have into something that can be sold—that is, into something useful. If I ask the political economist: am I obeying economic laws when I earn money by selling my body to satisfy someone else’s lust (French factory workers call the prostitution of their wives and daughters “extra working hours,” and they are entirely right to do so)? And am I acting in accordance with political economy when I sell my friend to the Moroccans (while the direct trafficking of human beings, through the buying and selling of recruits and similar practices, exists in every civilized country)?

II. The Refinement of Needs VS Their Reduction to Animality and Extreme Crudeness

This alienation is also expressed, in part, in the following way: on one side, the refinement of needs and of the means of satisfying them; on the other, the reduction of human needs to animality, extreme crudeness, and abstraction. The worker’s need for fresh air and light disappears, and the human being retreats into a cave, now polluted by the poisonous fumes of civilization. Moreover, if workers cannot pay the rent, they risk being driven out of the cave every day. They cannot live securely in it, as though it were an alien power that might break away from them at any moment. Even the sense of security and home that the person living in the wild finds in a cave is denied to the worker. The worker must pay rent for this mortuary. Even people in a state of barbarism and animals still have a need to hunt, to move about, and so on, as well as a need to associate with their own kind. Yet countless workers, such as the Irish, can eat only the poorest potatoes. Machinery develops continuously, yet the crudest and most barbaric tools reappear: the treadmill used by Roman slaves, for example, has once again become a mode of production and existence for many English workers. Machinery develops continuously, turning children into workers, just as workers are turned into neglected children. Machinery adapts itself to human weakness in order to turn the weak into machines.

Among the upper strata, needs always appear refined, concealed, and ambiguous: they are an appearance. Among the lower strata, they appear crude, naked, and frank: they are the essence. The crude needs of workers are a far greater source of income than the sophisticated needs of the rich. Heavy drinking, the apparent satisfaction of a crude need, is an intoxication amid barbarism, a civilized pleasure. English public houses are therefore an obvious symbol of private property.

Vulgar political economy turns the worker into a being without feeling or needs, calculating their needs and standard of subsistence at the bare minimum. It regards any luxury on the worker’s part as unforgivable, so it is both the science of wealth and the science of abstinence, poverty, and thrift. The worker may possess only the little necessary to go on living, and has the right to go on living only in order to possess this little. Its fundamental doctrine is self-denial: restraint in living and in every human need. The less you eat, drink, buy books, go to the theater, dances, and restaurants; the less you think, love, discuss theory, sing, paint, fence, and so on, the more you can save, and the greater your treasure—which neither moths can consume nor thieves steal—that is, your capital, will become. The less significant your existence, the less you express your life, the more property you have, the greater your externalized life becomes, and the more of your alienated essence you accumulate.

The restriction of needs, as a principle of political economy, finds its clearest expression in its theory of population. There are too many people. Even human existence is an outright luxury. The production of human beings appears as a public misfortune.

III. Rentier Capitalists, Industrial Capitalists, Consumption, and Luxury

Luxury and extravagance. The first aspect is alienation: becoming estranged from one’s own human nature and existing merely as a transient, self-indulgent individual. The second is identification with and worship of alienation: treating other people’s slave labor, blood, and sweat as spoils captured by one’s own greed, and thus treating human beings themselves, including oneself, as worthless sacrificial victims. Contempt for human beings; the reckless squandering of what could sustain hundreds of people. Such a person sees the realization of humanity’s essential powers merely as the realization of their own unbridled desires, eccentric tastes, and bizarre notions. The third aspect is the denial of alienation: through extravagance, one seemingly becomes the master of capital, evading the fact that one is its slave.

The decline in the rate of interest is an inevitable consequence of industrial development. The spendthrift inevitably faces the diminution and disappearance of their capital and is eliminated from the overall system of production. The decline in the rate of interest—which Proudhon sees as the supersession of capital and a tendency toward its socialization—is, rather, the direct symbol of working capital’s complete victory over extravagant wealth, that is, of the transformation of all private property into industrial capital. The rentier class can become only working industrial capitalists or proletarians. This is the complete subordination of private property to labor. And contemporary political economy has already demonstrated that the landowner is the only wholly unproductive rentier.

Industrial capitalists also enjoy themselves, but careful calculation ensures that the amount they spend never affects production or the reproduction of capital. Enjoyment is subordinated to capital, and the individual who enjoys is subordinated to the individual who accumulates capital.

IV. Money Rules Everything

Alienation manifests itself in the fact that my means of subsistence belong to someone else, and that what I desire is something I cannot obtain, something owned by another; everyone’s activity is something other than themselves, including that of the capitalist, and an inhuman power rules everything.

The vulgar political economist compensates you with money and wealth for all the life and humanity taken from you. Everything you yourself cannot do, your money can do: it can eat, drink, attend dances, go to the theater, acquire art, learning, historical treasures, and political power, and travel. It can take possession of all these things for you; it can buy them all; it is the true power. Yet although money is all these things, it wishes to create nothing and buy nothing except itself, because everything else is merely its servant. Thus, every passion and every activity must be submerged in the desire to get rich.