The Role of Consumerism

“The morbid and dangerous habit the work ethic was meant to fight, destroy and eradicate at the time it entered into the public debate, was rooted in the traditional human inclination to consider one’s own needs as given and to desire no more than to satisfy them. Once their habitual needs had been met, the

traditionalist workers saw no rhyme nor reason to go on working, or for that matter to earn more money; what for, after all? There were so many other interesting and decent things to do, things one could not buy

92

but could well overlook, neglect or lose if one was running after money from dawn to dusk.” Zygmunt

Bauman, Work, Consumerism and the New Poor (2005:6)

Key to capital’s resistance to work reform was the proliferation of consumerism, a strategy that was initially targeted heavily at the growing role of women in the household and the workplace – who in the middle of the 20th _{century were the key purchasers of goods in the retail market. Writing on women in post-war West} Germany Harsch (2002:749) contends that “they scrimped, made choices, and restricted the immediate consumption of their family and, especially, themselves in order to invest family resources in a domestic infrastructure whose construction helped to feed the [consumer] boom.” The new need for products over sustenance (which seemed to have been largely secured) would further exacerbate the division of wealth in society and made it more obvious who was doing well and who was not. Key to this was diminishing the importance and perceived quality of domestically produced goods and services, replacing them with commercially available technology and utilities. Hunnicut (1988:50) refers to this period as following a ‘gospel of consumption’ that was purposefully constructed in order to focus minds and time on wage labour and the growth of industry. As the trend for consumer led societies limited the power of traditional values of prudence and thrift (as theorised by Weber, 2010), consumption grew, creating new markets for those engaging in rising levels of production. This process however fostered attitudes which were not conducive to the form of disciplined and non-individualised work practices capital wanted us to follow. This process “required the nurture of qualities like wastefulness, self-indulgence, and artificial obsolescence, which directly negated or undermined the values of efficiency” (Marchand, 1985:158), and ultimately led to a mass of workers who were much less able to accept the limited lot they had been given. The consumerist revolution also drew young people ever away from education and into the world of work, a process which has been reversed as the economy has declined.

The nature of consumerism as inherent to the development of the work culture we see today was best theorised by Gorz, who explicitly linked the increase in consumer goods with a new abundance of poverty (Little, 2013). Following the conventional Marxist critique of alienation, Gorz (1989) theorises that the use value of luxury goods is not readily apparent and the moment they become affordable to the common worker, they lose their luxury status, a phenomenon equally apparent in the acquiring of skills by young workers, most commonly attributed in the UK to the proliferation of degrees which are readily dismissed as having been devalued by the increasing number of ordinary working people who are able to acquire them (Naylor et al, 2015). Consumerist goods therefore, much like automation, are proliferated with the intention of reducing poverty yet fundamentally leading to the exact opposite effect.

93 3.3.3 The End of Work?

In the contemporary era the celebration of new work opportunities due to automation and technology is by no means exclusive to the left of the political spectrum, and fear of it not exclusive to the right. This is epitomised by the fact earnings have decoupled from productivity and this has been the case for the last decade, as such raising productivity is no longer sufficient to raise real wages for the typical worker, causing a considerable problem for the core arguments of both traditions (Schwellnus et al, 2017).Tamny (2018) visualises the end of work as a period of growing individual and economic liberty, where we are able to make our hobbies and interests our day-to-day jobs. In this understanding the freedom from work is a method by which the controlling hand of government can be decreased and the opportunities of the market allowed to expand. Whereas socialist thinkers fear that such technological advancement will lead to the erosion in the quality of work available as well as from the loss of jobs. Ultimately for the trade union led left, the security of workers of all forms depends on broader changes in ownership rather than methods of production (Spencer, 2018).

In his book Bullshit Jobs, Graeber (2018) has taken a much more relaxed approach to the rise of automation and sees it as an opportunity to free us from the monotony of pointless employment that serves no one in the present day. Graeber believes that in technological terms many western countries are more than capable of vastly diminishing the amount of work that is done by people across the globe, yet instead new and largely meaningless jobs have been created to prevent that happening. The onset of automation, and the continuing existence of cheap labour in the East, has swallowed up the majority of productive jobs which in turn has created entire new industries such as telemarketing, corporate law, vast swathes of administration, and human resources to fill the void. He sees this phenomenon as having a profoundly negative effect on the moral and spiritual existence of humanity. This surfeit of meaningless and poorly paid jobs is not supposed to happen in the innovation based capitalist society we live in, yet it does.

We are told that we live in times of overwhelming material abundance, yet this abundance rarely trickles down to those who have spent their life without it. This, alongside automation, is at the root of the debates around the future of work post the financial crisis. Whereas Bell (1999) theorised the post-industrial

society, it is pertinent to consider whether we now live in a post-career society. This is typified by the reliance of the gig economy on advanced algorithms and software development to foster productivity, with much of the net job growth in recent decades accounted for by these alternative work arrangements (Katz & Krueger, 2016). The most well-known gig employers such as Uber, Deliveroo etc. are only a tiny

proportion of this growth, with almost every sector of the economy utilising and fostering such practices. This includes the steady rise in not only self-employment but bogus self-employment too, particularly in the construction industry (Briscoe et al, 2000), and logistics and distribution (Haidinger, 2015).

94 Beck (2008) foresaw the trend towards casualised working and argues that we are rapidly moving from a work society to one based around knowledge. This knowledge society has done away with the old Fordist regime and replaced it with a regime based on risk and insecurity. The Fordist form of production required a lot of human power to work effectively, yet as the century wore on many of these tasks were replaced by machines. The robust trade unions and collective bargaining arrangements that existed due to such a high frequency of labour were further dissolved by the loss of these jobs. The traditional socialist/social- democratic goal of full employment was now neither possible nor particularly desirable for many of its former champions. Beck (ibid:77) characterises this as is a destandardised and fragmented,

‘underemployment system’ heavily reliant on precarious and underpaid labour. Through the fragmentation of the labour force a future return to true full employment appears to be unlikely. We currently technically enjoy full employment, yet the vast swathes of underemployed are often considered as working to similar levels as those who work 36 hour weeks, an attempt according to some to deliberately finesse the statistics (Wilkins, 2007). Beck has opined that a more likely scenario is the ‘Brazilianisation’ of the West (Munck, 2002:4), an outcome which in essence means that stable and secure employment has become scarce and has been replaced by a casualised and precarious workforce, leading to a clear division between a

permanent and temporary class of workers, creating a new dynamic that inflates the insecurity already seen in society. Here is a vision of the future that both conflicts with traditional notions of work bringing security, and the dominant Protestant work ethic of the 20th _{century. The two simply cannot sustain under} such a system where current wages are barely meeting subsistence levels and state support is required just to get by in Scotland (Bailey et al, 2018).

Gorz (1999) believes that this strain is caused by an evolution of the Protestant work ethic which is a feature of work-based societies, which readily consider work not only as an economic imperative but also as a key element of our moral duty. The reason for such an emphasis is that personal success is viewed as the epitome of the good life and anything derived from that pursuit inherently has value. The Protestant work ethic is culturally prominent in the output of American cinema, which remains globally popular, and critically evidenced in such contemporary films as There Will Be Blood (2007), based on Upton Sinclair’s Oil! (2008), and The Founder (2016), detailing the founding father of the McDonalds fast food empire. In a precarious or so called Brazilianised model of employment these archetypes of the hard working individual simply collapse.

As an example of how pervasive the aforementioned ethic is in the UK, the well recorded antipathy

towards benefit claimants is a matter of record (Hancock & Mooney, 2013; Mooney, 2009). Ideology of this kind is deeply ingrained in many global societies and transcends common reference points of the political left and right. The dominant ethos follows that if we are to beat unemployment then we must work more, not less. For Gorz (1989; 1999), that work ethic has become largely obsolete even if its prominence

95 remains. Increases in production and the drive towards Stakhanovite (i.e. exceptionally assiduous almost zealot like fervour for work) work practices bears little relation to living a better and more fruitful life. The needs of most individuals within western society have been met many times over; it is only through avarice and unequal distribution that deficits occur. In order to meet the needs of all we need not produce more but produce differently, and in order to do this we must reimagine the method of that production i.e work. The onset of automation therefore provides us with an opportunity to cast off that work ethic and work less.

3.3.4 Conclusion

The literature assessed here shows that various forms of social organisation (capitalism, social democracy, communism, and feudal societies) have all in different ways failed to understand the inherent human desire for creativity and autonomy. Contributions from Illich (1981), Graeber (2013), Castells (2009) and Gorz (1999) reveal the alienating nature of capitalism in the contemporary age not only in the workplace but in the sense that individuals are alienated from their own future through threats to their ability to work, in this case automation. This reflects what Marx (2000) identified in his Economic and Philosophic

Manuscripts of 1844 i.e. the assumption that freedom from work will be freedom in all senses is wrong,

identifying as others have since that it is not only work that alienates individuals from control over their own lives but the very reality of living in late capitalism itself. Inevitably forces of this kind manifest in competing suggestions to rebalance the divide, detailing a debate we have come to refer to as the future of work. Many ideas related to the future of work are defined as utopian, yet the level to which they meet a notion of far off possibility has decreased considerably since the advent of the post-industrial age, in particular with the onset of a younger generation less wedded to 20th _{century notions of how to conduct} resistance to overarching norms.

Undoubtedly the diminished reliance on human labour going forward, which some writers deem to be inevitable (Kaplan, 2015), has presented the opportunity to revisit these arguments, but it must first be seen to be feasible and desired. The space where that possibility is most likely to be visible is in the

attitudes and behaviours of young people, particularly those leaving school straight for the world of work, a generation which has been raised on the predominance of technological solutions. If indeed it is not visible here, then the hoped for reforms of many of the voices detailed above require revision. Indeed, it may be the case that young people have already internalised and accepted individualist narratives regarding the inequality they suffer (Cote, 2014; Pimlott-Wilson, 2015). The assumption that the future of work is

dependent only on technological development and not the shared will of communities and wider society as such is potentially short sighted.

96 Leading on from this we can shine a light on a building block of the theoretical framework present in this research, that of the dual society. If heteronomous forces from outwith the individual begin to

predominate then any attempts to reshape work towards the needs of individual expression will be limited in their capacity to succeed. It should be stated however, that awareness among the general population of this changing environment is minimal, despite the great importance placed on it by elite commentators such as Davidow & Malone (2014) who have said that “we will soon be looking at hordes of citizens of zero economic value. Figuring out how to deal with the impacts of this development will be the greatest

challenge facing free market economies in this century.”

Despite this oncoming reality it is clear that there has been no let up in the desire of governments to diminish the societal predominance of wage labour. Through the process of glorifying work and demonising non-work, the system of capital has encouraged people to risk a great deal of their own happiness to find a paid position, a process through which competition drives down the costs of labour, as stated by Bauman (2005) and Barany & Siegel (2018). This is in essence an attempt to revitalise an industrial revolution era mentality and once again capitalise on that base of opportunity. The ability of communities to adapt this mentality to an age of automation and reduced public expenditure is fundamental in understanding what it means to have a meaningful transition going forward, and the stresses that expectation puts on young people. If however evidence can be found that young people, even in a partial sense, are not conforming to this then a different future may be realised, and that non-conformity may in some way be derived from our educational approach. In the following section this paper will contemplate literature which contends with this possibility.