Our politics are faint echoes of things happening elsewhere, everywhere: the thud of flesh double-tapping glass, precisely simulated clicks, the brush of magnetic strips through plastic, faceless voices from inside gas pumps chiding us to know things we don’t care about as we fill the tank with guilt. In other words, politics follows the forces that are actually transforming our world: production and consumption. Not the reverse.
Yet many believe politics determines the rest. So they rage against inept politicians, corruption, or policies as they watch new TV shows, buy sustainable food (or not), support local businesses (or not), and follow content that resonates with how they feel. I don’t mean this as a critique of consumerism in and of itself. Rather, I am unsure of whether there is any way to understand the political outside of consumption. The language of marketing—target audiences, branding, messaging, key performance indicators (KPIs), campaign objectives—and that of politics are indistinguishable from each other. How businesses and political organizations relate to individuals are strategies based on the same fundamental assumptions about human behavior. Namely, that we seek complete identity with what we consume.
Jean Baudrillard’s early work The Consumer Society suggests that the reasons we buy today are entirely divorced from use value (referencing the first volume of Marx’s Capital). Our purchases are signifiers, he claims, signaling the direction that his thought will take during the Seventies. He sees them as signifiers of happiness and affluence, and argues that consumption, then, is the basis for social class, not production. But depending on what happiness is defined as, it is easy to add that consumption today increasingly is the theater of our values, our political convictions, our very identities.
Perhaps the most obvious, but I think the best, observation that Baudrillard makes in The Consumer Society is that consumption is the norm, not the exception. He doesn’t denounce the ills of consumption, though he does have his snobbish moments (much like his mentor Henri Lefebvre). Rather, he considers it dialectically: “Just as consumption was counterbalanced by the Devil in the Middle Ages, so our age offsets consumption with its denunciation.”
The path forward, then, isn’t anti-consumerism. Decrying Satan’s influence or condemning people as “mindless consumers” with a virtuous gestures of self-sacrifice amounts to the same thing: unwelcome moralism. It’s not always easy to bike, but I do it. Living out my values isn’t easy. I don’t agree with most of Baudrillard’s conclusions, and I think what I like about the book is more or less an application of Guy Debord: In a society where the appearance of things dominates, appearing-to-be becomes the most fundamental source of meaning.
Two lines of thought take commodity seriously: Marxism and business finance. The notion of value that we take for granted each day—expressed best in the form of the commodity—is an alienating force. It separates us from one another, makes a mockery of us as it sparkles one moment to win our most basic trust, only to abandon us and move on to another profitable venture. Commodity leaves us with empty retail spaces, collapsing roofs, addictions, anger, debt, and other artifacts of loneliness and the collapse that comes with realizing that you’ve been tricked. The imperative to stardom—which is to say the never-ending call to be entrepreneurial, creative, unique, and so on, to get likes and feel one of the most sought-after commodities today, popularity—leads most of us to a sense of failure.