For Ricardo and Mill, the value of goods was determined by their cost: a coat was worth the cloth and sweat that went into making it. Jevons turned the matter inside out. Value was created by the consumer, not the producer. What a coat was worth depended on how much an individual desired it. And that desire was variable. One loaf of bread was essential, a second might be desirable, but a third was superfluous. Goods had a ‘final utility’: each additional portion had less utility than the one before because the final one was less intensely desired. On the continent, Carl Menger and Léon Walras were independently coming to similar conclusions. ‘Marginal utility’, as it became known, introduced a radically new way of looking at economic life. It moved the individual consumer to the centre. Jevons bolted together Bentham and calculus; he had passed through University College School, set up by Bentham’s disciples. Pleasure and pain were the ‘springs of human action’. Their ratio, however, changed in the course of consumption, as in the case of the first loaf and the third. And this could be measured. Economics was becoming a mathematical science.80
In the twentieth century, this approach would be christened the ‘neo-classical revolution’. Given the ultimate triumph of mathematical formulae in economics, it is tempting to see the 1870s–’80s as the birthplace of the ideals of consumer sovereignty, choice and markets which would reach their apex with neoliberalism a century later. This would be misleading and teleological. At that time, the wind was blowing in the opposite direction: away from leaving everything to markets and towards a belief that consumers deserved public aid and protection.
Jevons and his contemporaries did not look to choice and the utilitymaximizing consumer as a panacea. ‘If the pattern of a dress is pleasing to the intending wearer,’ Jevons acknowledged, ‘that settles the matter; no government inspector can make it unpleasing.’ But a lot of life was not like this. It was full of risk, ignorance and natural monopolies, such as gas and water. ‘He who selects the greenest pickles may be unaware of the copper which gives the attractive tinge.’81 These sentences are from the last book he would write: The State in Relation to Labour (1882). In August that year, Jevons took his wife and children for a holiday on the English coast, near Hastings. He went for a swim in the cold sea and drowned, at the age of forty-six; it was probably suicide.
The English sea took with it his planned Principles of Economics. The economist Lionel Robbins later noted that Jevons ‘formed no school. He created no system.’82 This was left to Alfred Marshall, who not only established economics as a proper discipline at Cambridge in the 1890s but softened the harsh image of the ‘dismal science’ by adding a sense of duty and caring for others to the existing catalogue of selfish motives. Marshall used Jevons’s core idea: the consumer was the ‘ultimate regulator of all demand’. He then gave it an evolutionary twist. Jevons’s theory had focused on wants. This was too static. While ‘wants are the rulers of life among lower animals,’ it was ‘the changing forms of efforts and activities’ that revealed ‘the keynotes of the history of mankind’. Marshall’s argument was as brilliant as it was simple. Human wants and desires, he wrote, were ‘generally limited and capable of being satisfied. The uncivilized man indeed has not many more than the brute animal.’83 Progress increased both their variety and the effort devoted to satisfying them. Material satisfaction was guided, or ennobled, to use a Victorian term, by a natural urge for self-improvement. Leisure was ‘used less and less as an opportunity for mere stagnation’, such as idleness and drink, and more and more for sport and travel. Consuming was like climbing a ladder of ever higher tastes and faculties, with each activity releasing new energy to move up to the next rung. It was an optimistic view in keeping with ideas about social evolution that characterized the period. The ‘neo-classical’ discovery of the consumer, however, was accompanied by a socio-cultural critique of unrestrained mass consumption. ‘The world would go much better,’ Marshall wrote, ‘if everyone would buy fewer and simpler things, and would take trouble in selecting them for their real beauty; . . . preferring to buy a few things made well by highly paid labour rather than many made badly by low paid labour’.84
Consumption was attracting growing attention from economists of all stripes, but there remained a vehement disagreement about exactly what it was. Some wanted to limit it to physical goods; others included services, taste and experience; some even clung to Jean-Baptiste Say’s concept of ‘reproductive’ or ‘technical’ consumption, which included the coal and materials used up in a factory. Historical economists turned to consumption as an indicator of national power. German writers were especially sceptical about individual choice. On the eve of the First World War, Karl Oldenberg worried that affluence had brought in its train the civilizational diseases of drink and tobacco. New desires eroded customs. Peasants wanted soft white bread instead of solid German rye. In cities, the ‘cult of meat’ caused arterial sclerosis, rheumatism and nervous dyspepsia. And yet, he stressed, consumption played a vital role in raising nations to a higher level of civilization. Pure, self-centred satisfaction of desire existed only at the rawest stage of civilization. After that, nation and family harnessed their energy for collective strength. Unlike for the liberal Marshall, the movement was not all ‘upwards’ and peaceful, though. It was a struggle between rising and declining nations. Resources were limited. Two kinds of nations would survive, Oldenberg speculated: those whose growing needs generated high energy, and frugal ones with barely any needs at all. Nations with middling needs would go to the wall.85
The first general account of a society of abundance came from the place with the highest standard of living: the United States. In 1889, Simon Patten announced ‘a new order of consumption’.86 Patten was the chair of the Wharton School of Business and, as was true for so many leading American scholars of his generation, was inspired by the German historical school of economics; he himself had studied at the University of Halle. The economy, in this view, was the product of historical evolution and enmeshed in social and political life, rather than a timeless system of universal laws. The big change that occupied Patten was that, for the first time, modern societies were producing more than enough to secure a basic existence. The task now was to organize wealth in ways that maximized welfare for all. People had a right to leisure. Libraries and parks would cultivate a love of beauty and nature. Tariffs and taxes on tobacco would discourage ‘bad’ wants. The battle against ‘vice’, however, would be won not by restraint but by greater welfare and greater pleasure: ‘society is not safe until to-day’s pleasures are stronger than its temptations.’87
Material desire had found a new evangelist. To get a sense of what this sounded like, let us listen in on a speech Patten gave at a Philadelphia church in 1913: ‘I tell my students to spend all that they have and borrow more and spend that . . . It is no evidence of loose morality when a stenographer, earning eight or ten dollars a week, appears dressed in clothing that takes nearly all of her earnings to buy.’ Quite the contrary, he said, it was ‘a sign of her growing moral development’. It signalled her ambition to her employer. A ‘well-dressed working girl . . . is the backbone of many a happy home that is prospering under the influence that she is exerting over the household’. This was not exactly what the congregation of the Spring Garden Unitarian Church was used to. There were cries from the floor: ‘absolutely untrue’. How could Patten be so naïve? one member asked. ‘The generation you’re talking to now is too deep in crime and ignorance . . . to heed you.’88 Whether they liked it or not, that day in 1913 the audience had been witness to a historic shift: abundance had begun to create its own morality.
The intellectual discovery of the consumer was the crest of a rising wave of social activism that swept across industrial societies around 1900. Received wisdom is to see citizenship as a series of steps, from civil liberties in the early modern period, to the political right to vote in the nineteenth century, to the social rights established by the welfare state in the middle of the twentieth century.
89 This story misses a critical stage: that of the citizen-consumer. The 1890s and 1900s were not just the golden era of the department store and shopping for pleasure. They were also the time when social movements began to mobilize consumers to reform society. Rather than seeing this period as a flight into selfish materialism, then, we should recognize that individual spending and civic activism propelled each other forward. For every new department store, there was a group of ethical shoppers outside who attacked the exploitation of its shopgirls. Organizations ranged from the millions of workers in the co-operative movement to the 6,000 middle-class Britons in the Christian Social Union who boycotted sweatshop tailors in Oxford. In France in 1902, reform-minded bourgeois Catholics formed the Ligue Sociale d’Acheteurs. Similar buyers’ leagues mushroomed elsewhere.
Ethical consumerism was a metropolitan affair, in the sense both that it involved mainly middle-class women in European and American cities and that their causes were local. The moral energies devoted to the plight of slaves during earlier consumer boycotts were now redirected to exploited wage-workers at home. There was more than a bit of irony in this, since caring consumers burst on to the scene in Paris, London and Berlin at the very time when imperialism and globalization moved into top gear, and since it was the cheap palm oil, cotton, coffee and rubber from colonies and overseas plantations which underpinned mass markets in the first place.
If it was the consumer who directed the economy, not the producer, liberals, socialists and feminists asked: How was it that the consumer was treated as serf rather than king? Consumers needed to arise, assert their rightful place at the centre of society and put the power of their purse to civic use. What this meant in practice depended on national traditions and political cultures. We can nonetheless identify three broad goals. One was individual: be a conscientious shopper. The second was collective: consumers organize. The final one was political and directed at the state: give consumers rights and protection.
‘The nineteenth century has been the century of producers,’ Charles Gide, the leader of the French co-operative movement, told students in 1898. ‘Let us hope that the twentieth century will be that of consumers. May their kingdom come!’90 Gide’s vision of a new social order mixed republican ideas, Christian values and a French associationist vision of socialism by small groups. All social life evolved around consumption. Did not eating at the same table automatically bring people together? Consumption had a better claim to create solidarity than production, especially given the modern division of labour. Everyone was a consumer. Yet, at present, he wrote, manufacturers and department stores were in charge and planted ‘false needs’. Consumers needed to throw off the yoke of ‘commercial feudalism’, join co-operatives and buy responsibly. Once they controlled the wholesale trade, they would take over production and land as well. Consumers had it in their power to achieve social harmony and raise the condition of workers.91
Co-operative societies were run by men, but it was ultimately the ‘women with the baskets’ who did the shopping, and who were in the vanguard of ethical consumerism. Well-off women discovered their toiling sisters. In 1891, a Consumers’ League was set up in New York to fight sweatshops. By 1914, it had grown into a national federation with 15,000 activists, headed by Florence Kelley.92 The first ‘white labels’ were attached to underwear from certified manufacturers (see Plate 38). Now a respectable woman could know that her clothes were not stained by the blood of factory girls. Boycotts of sweated goods followed. There were links with the earlier campaigns against slave-grown goods which had been directed by Kelley’s aunt, Sarah Pugh, a Quaker abolitionist.
Buyers’ leagues sprang up in Paris, Antwerp, Rome, Berlin and Bern. International exhibitions publicized the harsh realities of home manufacturing and child labour. ‘The consumer,’ a German woman explained, ‘is the clock which regulates the relationship between employer and employee.’ If the clock was driven by ‘selfishness, self-interest, thoughtlessness, greed and avarice, thousands of our fellow beings have to live in misery and depression’.93 Love of fashion and control of the household budget gave women a special duty not to take advantage of shopkeepers and artisans. Buyers’ leagues provided the ethical shopper with a checklist: start your Christmas shopping early, stop buying after 8 p.m. and pay small traders immediately, in cash. The leagues campaigned for Sunday closing; those in America and Switzerland also pressed for the minimum wage and the right to collective bargaining.94
Some of this was little more than a charitable hobby for the local elite. The president of the German league, founded in 1907, was the wife of Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg, the Prussian minister of the interior and future German chancellor. Who could disagree with women exercising their duty as caring mothers and housewives? ‘To live is to buy. Buying is power. Power is duty,’ was the motto of the first international conference of buyers’ leagues in 1908.95 But ethical consumerism was also about rights. For the growing number of educated, reform-minded and ambitious women, it was a way to demonstrate their public spirit. Suffragettes on both sides of the Atlantic saw a symmetry between choice and the vote. If a housewife on a tight budget could choose wisely in the marketplace, day in, day out, and feed her family, how could she not be competent enough to make a cross on a ballot paper every few years? Consumption taught women to be ‘chancellors of the exchequer’. In Britain, fourteen women formed a separate Women’s Co-operative Guild in 1883. Twenty years later, the guild had 20,000 members and targetedpoorer working-class areas. Co-operatives were mini-democracies. Here, members learnt the skills of citizenship: deliberation, voting and representation. In the past, radicals had praised the ‘art of association’ for creating virtuous and self-reliant male breadwinners who did not make any claims on the state. The WCG turned it into a justification for women’s political and social rights, including state aid for maternity care and a minimum wage.96
The feminist and socialist case for a consumer revolt was put most forcefully by Teresa Billington-Greig, a British suffragette who had horsewhipped a steward for ejecting her from a Liberal Party meeting and seen the inside of Holloway Prison. It was idle, she said, to complain about capitalist profiteers. ‘We are all more or less profiteers.’ Consumers’ love of cheap goods implicated them in low wages and social injustice: ‘We are a shoddy people.’ Women were especially prone to poor taste and conservative inaction because they were imprisoned in their homes. Capitalism had made man the producer who controlled public life. At the time of writing, in 1912, the rise in the standard of living of the previous three decades had levelled off. Organized labour had failed, she concluded, and it had especially failed women. As one of the few women organizers in the young Independent Labour Party, Billington-Greig knew what she was talking about. Female emancipation and the consumer-led reform of capitalism were one and the same battle. Organized as consumers, women would free themselves from both degradation and the cult of cheapness. Co-operatives were no longer enough. Consumers needed to pursue direct political action, enter into partnership with trade unions and establish a consumers’ council to lead the fight for better-quality goods and improved working conditions.97
The discovery of the consumer acted as a catalyst for the idea of social citizenship. Political rights required the right to leisure, Simon Patten had stressed. A parallel economic argument made sure that this was no empty phrase. If modern nations had moved from scarcity to abundance, this meant they were producing a ‘surplus’. Where did this surplus come from, and where did it go? The progressive answer was given by J. A. Hobson, the most prolific of a new generation of British radicals. As early as 1889, he had challenged the orthodox wisdom that production always created its own demand (J.-B. Say’s famous law) together with his friend, the businessman and mountaineer A. F. Mummery. The rich, the two argued, were unable to consume all their income. The result of such ‘underconsumption’ was over-investment, gluts and depression. Six years later, Mummery was dead, lost in the Himalayas. Shunned by the establishment,
Hobson pressed on alone. In 1899, he went to South Africa as the Manchester Guardian’s special correspondent to cover the Boer War. He returned with a book, Imperialism (1902), that revolutionized the terms of political debate – quite literally, since Lenin borrowed from it freely before adding a revolutionary edge.
Hobson’s great idea was that aggression abroad was connected to ‘under-consumption’ at home. Poverty persisted, he argued, not because of natural, Malthusian pressures but because wealth was unfairly divided. Productivity was rising steadily. The profits, however, went to a small clique of investors. Finance was ‘the governor of the imperial engine’, constantly seeking new outlets for investment, by force if necessary, as in the South African war. All the time, the remedy was waiting at home. ‘If the consuming public in this country raised its standard of consumption to keep pace with every rise of productive powers, there could be no excess of goods or capital clamorous to use Imperialism in order to find markets.’98 A vast market lay at home, untapped, with Britons hungry for better food, better homes and better cities.
Enlightenment thinkers had looked to the merchant as an agent of peace. Hobson looked also to the consumer. Like Marshall, Hobson believed that people would not just consume more, but better. Gambling, racecourses and the ‘flash music-hall’ were the cultural byproducts of imperialism and inequality. The lower classes aped the manners of financiers and aristocrats; Hobson admired the American economist Thorstein Veblen, who who had attacked the luxurious lifestyles of the American rich as a form of social waste, and would meet him in Washington, DC, in 1925. Together, Hobson hoped, social welfare and free trade would purify the air. Ordinary Britons would ‘begin to demand better commodities, more delicate, highly finished and harmonious’. Enjoyment would increase ‘without . . . exhausting the store’ of nature. Greater appreciation of quality, in turn, would provoke interest in how goods were made and put an end to ‘anti-social competition’. The ‘more qualitative consumption becomes, and the more insistent each individual is upon the satisfaction of his peculiar tastes, the smaller will be the probability that two persons will collide in their desires, and struggle for the possession of the self-same commodity’. Here was a progressive counter-argument to the charge by Conservatives and Marxists that free trade created a downward spiral of cheapness, materialism and apathy. Instead, in a more equal society, consumers would show an ‘increased regard for quality of life’ and care more deeply for things, the people who made them and their community. Hobson joined two subjects that previously had been kept apart: ‘the citizen-consumer’.99
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