Conceptualising the Consumer: British Socialist Democratic Political Economy in the Golden Age of Capitalisms

Abstract

The article considers the conceptualisation of the consumer by British social democratic writers in the ‘golden age’ of post-war capitalism. It examines in particular their discussion of the neo-classical concepts of rationality and sovereignty and highlights the diversity and complexity of their positions in relation to these. It illustrates how these carried within them a particular view of individuals: their capacity for rational choice, their autonomy and their motivations, which informed in important and profound ways how different writers, and different groups of writers, viewed the nature and means of realising the social democratic project in an age of affluence.

Keywords:

• Social Democracy
• Political Economy
• Consumer
• Consumption

Notes

Noel Thompson is a Pro Vice Chancellor at Swansea University and has published widely in the field of the history of anti-capitalist and socialist thought. He is the author of a number of monographs including Left in the Wilderness, the Political Economy of British Democratic Socialism since 1979, (2002). Robert Owen and his Legacy, a collection of essays edited with Professor Chris Williams is due to be published by the University of Wales Press later this year.

  [1] Williams, ‘The Magic System’, 28: ‘consumption tends always to materialize as an individual activity’.

  [2] See, for example Hall, ‘The Supply of Demand’, 70: ‘The vision of community responsibility and common ownership has been abandoned. The aspirations of a skilled working class have been diverted into the satisfaction of personal wants.’

  [3] Such views have of course a long pedigree and are not confined to the social democratic Left. As one commentator has pointed out ‘throughout the industrialised West, scholars on both the left and the right have accepted Sombart's notion that economic abundance exerts a fundamentally depoliticizing and privatizing influence’, Jacobs, ‘The Politics of Plenty in the Twentieth-Century United States’, 223.

  [4] Westergaard, ‘Capitalism without Classes?’, 12.

  [5] ‘Labour's enthusiasm for both planning and science implicitly reinforced the party's preference for rationalism and order in personal behavior’, Francis, ‘The Labour Party, Modernisation and the Politics of Restraint’, 157.

  [6] Crossman, Socialist Values in a Changing Civilisation, 4.

  [7] There is a formidable literature on this but see, in particular, Berry, The Idea of Luxury, a Conceptual and Historical Investigation.

  [8] On this see Thompson, ‘Social Opulence, Private Asceticism’, 51–68.

  [9] On this see Thompson, ‘Socialist Political Economies’, 230–56 and also Waters, British Socialists. For a broader study of the attitudes to the rise of consumer society in the United States in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries see, for example, Horowitz, The Morality of Spending, and for Britain, Gurney, Co-Operative Culture.

 [10] Thompson, ‘The Reception of J.K. Galbraith’, 50–79. More recently such critical reflection on the nature of mass consumption made possible by affluence has been sustained by writers such as Schor in The Overspent American, Upscaling, Downshifting and the New Consumer and Do Americans Spend too Much?

 [11] As one commentator has put it with regard to post-war America, ‘despite an early confidence in the universal benefits of selling to the “mass”, before very long a post-war economy and society ostensibly built on “mass consumption”, created a reality of economic and social segmentation that was only reinforced by marketing and advertising’, Cohen, ‘Citizens and Consumers in the United States in the Century of Mass Consumption’, 219.

 [12] Vartiainen, ‘Understanding Swedish Social Democracy’, 22.

 [13] Between 1950 and 1995 public expenditure as a per centage of GDP rose from c. 25 percent to c. 60 per cent with the public sector absorbing most of the growth of the labour force, Vartiainen, ‘Understanding Swedish Social Democracy: Victims of Success?’, 21.

 [14] ‘Government fiscal policy [post currency reform] offered large tax incentives for private investment but held domestic consumer demand in check’, Scharf, Crisis and Choice, 117.

 [15] Streeck, ‘German Capitalism: Does it Exist? Can it Survive?’, 39, 40.

 [16] Heldmann, ‘Negotiating Consumption in a Dictatorship’, 187, 191–2.

 [17] Chun, The British New Left, 27; Chun's work considers how these challenges were perceived and addressed by the New Left. See also Kenny, The First New Left.

 [18] Black, The Political Culture, 8, 13.

 [19] As Favretto has shown ‘moral reproach as a response to the onset of prosperity’ was an attitude characteristic of ‘many sections of the European left’, ‘“Wilsonism Reconsidered”: Labour Party Revisionism, 1952–64’, 61.

 [20] Francis, ‘The Labour Party’, 153.

 [21] Black, The Political Culture, 21.

 [22] Black notes ‘socialism's affinities for the idea of a simple life … It was a basic socialist tenet to master not to be enslaved by material things’, Black, The Political Culture of the Left, 28.

 [23] See, for example, Black, The Political Culture of the Left, 74, 80.

 [24] Burns, Brains Better than Bets or Beer, 13; see Black, The Political Culture, who attributes the phrase to Ernest Bevin.

 [25] Hacker, ‘Introduction’, ix. Running parallel to this there was also a tendency to ‘sentamentalise working class life’ or, as one contemporary commentator put, it to eulogise ‘Hoggartsville’, Gavron, ‘Hoggartsville and All That’, 19.

 [26] Black, The Political Culture, 86.

 [27] Black, The Political Culture of the Left, 122.

 [28] Schwarzkopf, ‘They Do it with Mirrors’, 133–50.

 [29] On the Right commentators such as Arthur Seldon and Ralph Harris provocatively portrayed advertising as ‘hold[ing] a high place as an instrument of progress’; ‘sharpen[ing] competition … in providing the consumer with greater choice in style, prices, quality, service, convenience and other product attributes’, Harris and Seldon, Advertising and the Public, 66, 59.

 [30] Hilton, Consumerism in Twentieth-Century Britain.

 [31] Hilton, Consumerism in Twentieth-Century Britain, the Search for an Historical Movement, 203. In general, ‘the pressure for the incorporation of consumerist concerns’ in a Left agenda ‘came from the social democratic or centre-right wing of the Labour Party’, Hilton, ‘The Fable of the Sheep’, 235.

 [32] See below n. 33.

 [33] See below n. 33, 230.

 [34] Speight, Economics, 109.

 [35] Benham, Economics, 5, 11.

 [36] Benham, Economics, 42.

 [37] Lipsey and Steiner, Economics, 8; Samuelson, Economics, 44.

 [38] Benham, Economics, 7, 42, my emphasis.

 [39] Samuelson, Economics, 48; Benham, Economics, 43; Speight, Economics, 109, my emphases.

 [40] Benham, Economics, 7.

 [41] Benham, Economics 43, my emphasis.

 [42] Quoted in Black, The Political Culture, 107.

 [43] Potter, The Glittering Coffin, 52; Millar, The Affluent Sheep, 39; Fabian Group, The Future of Public Ownership, 27.

 [44] See, for example, The Labour Party's Let Us Win Through Together, on an Independent Consumer Advice Centre; Forward with Labour , on the establishment of a Consumers' Advisory Service; Britain Belongs to You , on the encouragement of existing consumer protection organisations; and Time for Decision , on a Bill to protect the consumer from ‘false advertising’ in Craig (ed.), British General Election Manifestos, 1918–1966, 131–32, 178, 202, 272.

 [45] On this see Thompson, ‘The Reception of J.K. Galbraith’.

 [46] Galbraith, A Life in Our Times, 336.

 [47] Crossman, Labour in the Affluent Society, 1.

 [48] Shore, ‘In the Room at the Top’, 44.

 [49] Samuel, ‘Bastard Capitalism’, 50.

 [50] See for example Clarke, ‘Scientific Optimism’, 351.

 [51] On this see Reisman, Galbraith and Market Capitalism, 96.

 [52] Schwarzkopf, ‘They Do It with Mirrors’, 137.

 [53] Schwarzkopf, ‘They Do It with Mirrors: Advertising and British Cold War Consumer Politics’, p. 137

 [54] Jay, Socialism in the New Society, 350.

 [55] Jay, Socialism in the New Society, 351.

 [56] Gorz, ‘Work and Consumption’, 348.

 [57] Burton, The Battle of the Consumer, 7.

 [58] Fabian Group, The Future of Public Ownership, 27.

 [59] Socialist Union, Twentieth Century Socialism, 43.

 [60] Socialist Union, Twentieth Century Socialism, 44.

 [61] Crosland, The Conservative Enemy, 53.

 [62] Crosland, The Conservative Enemy, 63, 54.

 [63] On this see Mort, ‘The Commercial Domain’, 69.

 [64] Mort, ‘The Commercial Domain, Advertising and the Cultural Management of Demand’, p. 69, 383.

 [65] Gorman, Knocking down Ginger, 95.

 [66] Samuel, ‘Bastard Capitalism’, 49, 51.

 [67] Hall, ‘Crosland Territory’, 4.

 [68] Hall, ‘The Supply of Demand’, 71.

 [69] On this see Chun, The British New Left, 37. ‘Thompson viewed the book [The abuses of literacy] as a failure’.

 [70] Hoggart and Williams, ‘Working-Class Attitudes’, 28.

 [71] Williams, Culture and Society, 300.

 [72] Crosland, The Conservative Enemy, 197.

 [73] Hall, ‘The Supply of Demand’, 83.

 [74] Hall, ‘The Supply of Demand’, p. 83, my emphasis.

 [75] Williams, ‘Towards a Socialist Society’, 382.

 [76] Williams, ‘Towards a Socialist Society’, 383.

 [77] Bevan, Democratic Values, 11.

 [78] Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy, 277.

 [79] Cole, A Guide to the Elements of Socialism, 8.

 [80] Cole, A Guide to the Elements of Socialism, 92.

 [81] Priestley, Thoughts in the Wilderness, 128.

 [82] Crosland, The Future of Socialism, 165.

 [83] Crosland, ‘The Future of the Left’, 2, 4.

 [84] Wollheim, Socialism and Culture, 20.

 [85] Crosland, The Future of Socialism, 524, 522.

 [86] Crosland, The Future of Socialism, 243, 290.

 [87] In terms of his own lifestyle Crosland was part of a ‘Hampstead set’ within the Labour Party with a ‘love of nightclubs, jazz and parties … keen to keep up with the younger generation’. In this regard, he lived his political economy, Francis, ‘The Labour Party’, 169.

 [88] Socialist Union, Twentieth Century Socialism, 39–40.

 [89] Socialist Union, Twentieth Century Socialism, 40, 43.

 [90] Socialist Union, Twentieth Century Socialism

 [91] Crosland, The Future of Socialism, 293.

 [92] Crosland, The Future of Socialism, p. 293

 [93] Crosland, The Future of Socialism, p. 293

 [94] Hall, ‘A Sense of Classlessness’, 26.

 [95] Hoggart, ‘Speaking to Each Other’, 122.

 [96] Hall, ‘A Sense of Classlessness’, 26.

 [97] Gorz, ‘Work and Consumption’, 348.

 [98] Gorz, ‘Work and Consumption’, 345, my emphasis.

 [99] Gorz, ‘Work and Consumption’

[100] Gorz, ‘Work and Consumption’, 349.

[101] Crosland, The Future of Socialism, p. 177.

[102] Crosland, The Future of Socialism, 284.

[103] Crosland, The Future of Socialism, 226.

[104] Crosland, The Future of Socialism, 177.

[105] Crosland, The Future of Socialism, 226.

[106] Crosland, The Future of Socialism, 284.