Freedom and Consumerism by Mark Davis

Author:Mark Davis [Davis, Mark]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Sociology, General
ISBN: 9780754672715
Google: I0QINMoSGykC
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
Published: 2008-01-15T03:25:42+00:00

The criminalization of the ‘flawed consumers’ has led ‘liquid modern’ society to be interpreted as a ‘prison industry’ (Bauman 1998b, 75; Christie 1993). The exponential increase in the forms of behaviour that exist beyond the constructed boundary of acceptable conduct, and into the realm of criminality, are seen as the essential prerequisite and natural accompaniment of the consumer society’s mechanism of social control (Bauman 1997, 42). The excluded ‘flawed consumers’ are of no economic value to the specifically consumer-oriented markets due to their lack of resources. And, unlike in modern times, they are no longer primarily defined as an exploitable labour force producing a surplus value to be transformed into capital and privately appropriated by a ruling class elite. Neither can they be deemed a ‘reserve army of labour’ to be maintained and trained in order that they may be reintegrated into capital production at the behest of economic fluctuation. It is for this reason that the ‘new poor’ are understood to be fully redundant as there is no economically rational reason for their continued presence.

Their exclusion from society is, thus, essential to the perpetuation of the consumer society. Their exclusion is a means of protecting the successfully seduced consumers and allowing them the peculiar type of freedom afforded by that very society itself. Bauman goes as far as to suggest that this criminalizing tendency is the direct replacement for welfare provision in the consumer society. Expressing the futility of purifying a ‘waste product’, he explicates that the years of welfare deregulation and the dismantling of such provisions coincide directly with the years of rising criminality, a growing police force and prison population (Bauman 1998b, 75). Citing the vast numbers of death row inmates in the USA, he notes how this trend rises out of the need to deal with the exponential increase in the storage of ‘flawed consumers’, the ‘waste product’ of the ‘liquid modern’ world. The spectacle of exclusion serves to terrorize both the ‘flawed consumers’ for being outside of the normative framework of consumer society, as well as the ‘free consumers’, who fear castigation if not being seen to be included fully enough by its seductive allure. Thus, the dehumanization of the ‘new poor’ serves to act as a most effective deterrent to both the flawed consumers-as-criminals as well as

… to the possible rebellion of the well-off against the tensions endemic to consumer life; the horrors of the alternative to the ‘free consumer’ life render palatable and enduring even the most vexing stresses for which that life is notorious. (Bauman 1997, 60)

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