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Consumed: How markets corrupt children, infantilize adults and swallow citizens whole
Benjamin R. Barber
WW. NORTON & CO, 2007
Reviewed by Michael Calderbank
Shopping is taking over our lives. If, from the vantage point of 2007 this does not strike us an entirely surprising claim, it is nevertheless worth pausing to consider the irony that - scarcely two decades since the collapse of the Communist bloc - it is the very 'freedoms' which were claimed to demonstrate the unsurpassable virtue of the capitalist free market that now stand accused of corrupting, perhaps fatally, the very notion of a democratic public realm.
At one level we have never had more choice, beset as we are with relentlessly expanding options on which cash may be splashed. And yet these millions of individual micro-choices do not aggregate into collective liberty or autonomy, far from it. The freedom of the consumer comes at the expense of the erosion of civic space, since individuals are no longer concerned with strengthening the bonds which sustain a society governed by democratically agreed norms. As privatised citizen-consumers we are witnessing a steady disintegration of our ability to determine collectively those goods from which we all benefit.
And yet if any progressive politics worthy of the name must therefore contest the desirability of neo-liberalism's rampant consumerism, there is also a huge challenge to be faced. We can have no ready recourse to a supposedly 'authentic', reach-me-down model of democratic-mindedness, as though a good dose of right-thinking would suffice to dispel today's infatuated worship in today's temples to consumerism. For just as the ill-tempered polemics of a Richard Dawkins or a Christopher Hitchens fail to properly engage with, let alone shift, the faith of the religious believer, so simply indicting the false consciousness' of today's shopper is equally ineffectual. To appreciate the depth of affective commitment that grips the individual consumer today, we must appreciate the mechanisms through which our desires take shape.
The latest in a series of salvos at our contemporary predicament, Benjamin R. Barber's critique of consumerism lies in his recognition of its power to play upon the desires and anxieties which attend the constructions of our identity. Today's subjects are bombarded from birth with millions of commodified images of wish-fulfilment, and...