Zadok Paper S101 Winter 1999
The Abuse of Consumerism
by Dave Collis

The paper: This paper was born out of two questions I faced while working in an inner city soup van: "What makes people turn away from poverty?" and "How can otherwise loving and compassionate people simply walk past cold and hungry people?" These questions led me away from an analysis of poverty and into the heart of consumerism, a culture which systematically predisposed people toward a restricted horizon of compassion through a kind of psychic confusion or fatigue. Drawing from narrative theory, this paper seeks to link the fragmented machinations of consumerism to the fragmented poverty of identity which characterises the consumer.

I will analyse this thesis in three main parts. I will, firstly, introduce consumerism as the voice which narrates a fragmented story full of myths centred around money. By drawing on literature concerning sexual abuse, I will examine structural similarities between the relations within sexual abuse and the relations within consumerism. Second, I develop this theme by examining how consumerism blurs the reality/illusion boundaries through imposing a type of hyper-reality. Third, I take the fragmented and abusive story of consumerism and look at its implications for a sense of personal identity. Drawing on Paul Ricoeur's formulation of narrative identity, I will argue that in the narrativeless and fragmented consumer story people are only able to draw a depthless and fragmented sense of personal identity.

The author Dave Collis is project worker for Jubilee 2000 Campaign in Australia, and is involved with street ministries with the Urban Mission Unit of Collins Street Baptist Church and the St Vincent de Paul Society.

Introduction

THE PURPOSE OF THIS paper is to outline the abusive nature of consumerism. Associated with the latest stage of capitalism, consumerism is a 'thin' collection of story fragments describing the attainment of happiness and success through material accumulation and consumption. Short of fulfilling this promise, however, the collection of myths imposed by consumerism leave the consumer with a heightened sense of inadequacy and need which, they are told by advertising, can only be alleviated through increased purchasing and consumption.

Before beginning, however, it is worth delimiting the meaning of story and consumerism. By story, we will mean a set of events and characters described in such a way that an intelligible configuration and temporal ordering can be discerned.[1]  Consumerism, on the other hand, is best understood in terms of its relationship to capitalism. Although consumerism clearly stems from capitalism, this paper argues that consumerism is more than an inflated term for describing one psycho-social adjunct of capitalism. It is, rather, a substantive ideological and behavioural pattern in its own right and ought not be considered as merely epiphenomenal to the deeper political and economic reality of capitalism.

Consumer habituation to intensive and extensive consumption through accelerating market purchase might be inconceivable without the economic system of capitalism, but its powers and its effects are as real as systematic capitalism itself and possibly more visible, more corrigible, more amenable to individual and collective transformation through political and social action. It is in this sense, and with this possibility in mind, that consumerism is analysed in this thesis as an ideological and sociological formation which is at once a set of habituated acts and beliefs as well as a set of stories and meanings that give point and purpose to those who live as consumers.

To: The consumer spectacle speaks in an abusive voice