Empire of Things

by Frank Trentmann

  A century earlier, similar alarm bells would have been rung by European and American reformers worried about commercial leisure corrupting communal life, body and mind. There was one big difference: in Korea, they had the full support of the state. From one day to the next, foreign boutiques disappeared from department stores. Rumours circulated that people who had purchased foreign cars would be investigated on suspicion of smuggling and foreign-currency fraud. For the government, ‘excess’ was code for foreign products. Grapefruits from the United States were boycotted. Foreign goods were required to carry a price tag that listed their low import value next to the hefty price in shops. Korean consumers would thus realize that they were paying through the nose for an American video camera or an Italian handbag that, in its original state, was worth a fraction of its retail price.84 It says something about the strength of nationalist feeling that the government never seems to have worried that the price-tag system might direct consumer anger at the Korean state itself, which, after all, put the heavy duties on foreign goods in the first place.

  These campaigns notwithstanding, it is difficult not to conclude that Asian societies have found consumption less of a moral challenge than European ones. Most sermons and bestsellers decrying ‘consumerism’ hail from the United States and Europe, not Japan, India or China. Asian debates about luxury lack the emotional heat and shrill paranoia of those in the West. Wealth and possessions do not carry the same stigma of sin for Buddhists or Hindus as they do for many Christians. Nationalism and social solidarity provide a shared moral script. As long as consumers act responsibly, affluence is not a problem.

  Caring for family and community, therefore, has been an essential precondition for the Asian embrace of consumption. And this attitude extends beyond the human community to the community of things. Earlier, we criticized the view that the modern West has been an object-alien, subject-centred civilization. Western thinkers and writers, in fact, did appreciate that the self was material. Victorian literature taught children that if they cared for their toys, toys would love them back. Asian societies have a particularly strong view of things possessing a soul. In Buddhism, objects, as well as experiences, are always in flux and can advance towards liberation. In Shinto, objects have magical powers. Karl Marx argued that the West led capitalism because it cleverly took the spirits out of objects so that it could trade them for profit as abstract commodities. The thesis clearly sits awkwardly with the Asian miracle of the last few decades. Animism – the belief that animals and things have spirits – clearly did not stop consumer capitalism in its tracks in the East. That things have spirits does not mean they cannot also be bought, gifted, desired and exchanged.

  Japan is a case in point. The inter-war architect Bruno Taut, who idealized an austere East, would be shocked by the many ornaments, gifts and souvenirs that crowd Japanese homes today. In the past, the kura, a storehouse, served the changing demands of the seasons. Goods rotated. Today, small apartments are bursting with permanent storage units to accommodate the multiple sets of clothes for any given season. In a gift society like Japan, the sharp rise of disposable income, together with travel and the commercialization of old and new festivities such as Valentine’s Day, have swamped homes with objects. Yet to throw them away might cause bad luck. To this day, gifts and souvenirs cannot easily be transferred unless a new recipient promises to take good care of them. One housewife, for example, hated the three wise men statuettes her husband had brought back from China but worried she might be cursed (tatari) if she got rid of them. Appliances, similarly, should not be thrown out if they are still functioning and full of life. To cope with the material deluge, Japanese households have come up with three strategies. One is to have cabinets and alcoves so that the many figurines, flowers and gifts can be appropriately housed and displayed. The second is to favour gifts that can be used up, especially sweets and pickles, but also washing powder. Finally, there are fund-raising bazaars where people can leave their unused things with a farewell card, asking the new owner to look after them well, almost as if dropping off a child at an orphanage.85

  Consuming, in other words, can be spiritual. It is possible to have more goods and be good. Sects and ghost worship in South-east Asia since the 1980s have risen alongside the world of goods.86 In China, the Communist Party has rediscovered Confucius and makes offerings on his birthday. The larger religious revival suggests that neo-Confucianism is more than just the product of a state in search of a national ideology after Mao. Temples are being renovated and religious tourism is thriving.87 Confucianism holds out an ideal of harmony and respect for others, convenient to authoritarian rulers, but it is also a guide (li) to virtuous conduct in everyday life. It appeals to individuals worried about avarice and greed yet at the same time keen to use gifts, and getting and spending, to create guanxi (social networks) to get on in life.

  In societies which mix gift and commodity culture and where consumption is tied to ritual and reciprocity, individuals have to walk a fine line between generosity and self-interest, reciprocity and corruption. Religion offers them a moral balancing rod. The Confucian revival might be one reason for the decline in a work-hard-get-rich mentality reported by Gallup polls between 1994 and 2004. Ren, or self-cultivation in the quest of reaching full humanity, is a central concern in Confucianism. Contrary to popular wisdom, the Chinese are not obsessed with work. Their values have shifted to self-expression, personal taste, entertainment and communication. One indication is the phenomenal speed with which DVDs and mobile phones have been adopted – 7 per cent of households in 1997 to 52 per cent and 48 per cent respectively by 2004, much faster than the washing machine and the fridge in earlier decades; by 2013, the average Chinese household had two mobile phones.88 If this shift from functional to emotional goods is observable in all advanced economies, it is especially pronounced in Asia.

  DEMI-GOD, HALF-CITIZEN

  It was not exactly what it said on the label. In 1998, Chinese villagers in Shanxi province in northern China treated themselves to bottles of ‘Long Life and Double Happiness’ during the spring festival. For twenty-seven of them, it was their last celebration. The liquor had been mixed with poisonous methyl alcohol. Such tragedies would have been familiar to the Victorians and have repeated themselves time and again in developing societies. Rising demand and new products create risk as well as pleasure. This was the historical backdrop to debates about consumer rights and protection, from early laws against adulteration in late-nineteenth-century Europe to J. F. Kennedy’s Consumer Bill of Rights in 1962, which laid down the rights to be safe, to choose freely, and to be heard, informed and treated with respect. In the United States and much of Western Europe, such policies developed in tandem with democratic politics. Consumers demanded recognition as citizens. In Asia, the discovery of the consumer has been as dramatic as the growth of the economy. Japan, India and China have all rolled out their own consumer bills. By 1997, according to one survey, consumer law had come to matter more to Chinese people than employment and criminal law.89 Everywhere now, the consumer is recognized as an important being. The question is, what kind of creature is it, and who are its parents? Is it a political citizen, a self-reliant market actor or, as the Chinese have it, a ‘god’?

  In India, consumer protection had ancient roots. The Arthashastra concerned itself a good deal with the many risks facing the public, from fraudulent gamblers to washerwomen wearing their customers’ clothes. Merchants were ‘all thieves’, out to cheat their customers, it said. An over-reaching state was another danger. Two thousand years of history have barely changed the litany of complaints – profiteering, price-fixing, adulteration, the fraudulent use of weights and measures, misrepresentation and deceit – although few consumer advocates today would go as far as the Arthashastra in punishing the culprits. A merchant who misrepresented the quality of an item, it recommended, ought to pay eight times the actual value, while a goldsmith working illegally faced a fine of 200 panas or the loss of his fing
ers; the lowest government official earned 60 panas a year.90

  Independent India was slow to develop its own consumer regime, but when it did, it did so with a splash. In the 1950s, the government passed a string of laws to control drugs and ‘magic remedies’, food adulteration and trade and merchandise marks. These, however, were purely preventive and offered consumers no redress. That arrived in 1986, with the Consumer Protection Act, a remarkable measure that catapulted India into pole position in global consumer politics. In addition to protection and information, Indians gained the right to complain and seek redress. Over 3 million complaints have been handled since by the thirty-five state and six hundred-odd District Consumer Fora.91

  Rights do not automatically translate into consumer power, of course. Twenty years after the law was passed, most Indians continue to be unaware of their rights. Bringing a complaint costs time and money and often involves hiring a lawyer. Most people do not bother. India remains a shadowland of monopolies. Consumers secured the right to participate in proceedings before the Monopolies Commission but, for every monopoly struck down, a new one cropped up. In Jaipur, cable TV companies dictate their terms and schools force pupils to buy their books and uniforms at specified shops. Barber shops and paan dealers fix their prices like in days of old.92 In many ways, India remains a society where the producer and trader, not the consumer, is king. The Department of Consumer Affairs tries to make the best of a shoe-string budget to raise awareness with video-clips (Jago Grahak Jago!; Awake, Consumer, Awake!) and radio programmes in Hindi and regional languages, broadcast in homes, postal offices and railway stations. There are parallels here to the state-sponsored media and awareness campaign during the New Deal in 1930s America – with a crucial difference. In the United States, this had been a moment of greater state intervention. In India, by contrast, it was one of economic liberalization and rolling back the state.

  If market reform opened up a space for consumer politics in India, this does not mean it has remained a matter for the market. There was also a political thrust behind it. In 1994, a court in Lucknow found in favour of Mr Gupta against the Lucknow Developing Authority in a dispute over housing construction. It was a landmark ruling. The interests of a consumer, it said, concerned ‘not only day-to-day buying and selling activity undertaken by a common man, but even such activities which are otherwise not commercial in nature’ yet confer some benefit, for example construction and land development. Statutory services, such as public housing, were a ‘service to the citizens’ that needed to be protected as much as goods bought over the counter.93 Consumers since have confronted the state when electricity and telecommunications fail. Interestingly, the majority of complaints have concerned shoddy services rather than faulty products.94 Consumer protection built a bridge between people’s private grievances in the marketplace and their public interest as citizens. In 2005, the Right of Information Act handed consumers an additional weapon. Activists and courts have used consumer law to press for greater accountability. In the case of medical damages, for example, the Supreme Court has stressed that the consumer forums did not exist simply to quantify damages but also to ‘bring about a qualitative change in the attitude of the service provider’.95 Greater accountability and good governance mattered as well as product safety.

  Some of this language echoed the ‘Citizen Charters’ agenda of John Major’s Tory government in Britain in 1991, which set out to make hospitals, schools and other public services more accountable to users; in fact, some Indian administrators had picked up the idea at the UK’s civil service college at Sunningdale. These ideas, however, acquired a more radical flavour in a country like India, where most consumers were (and are) poor and excluded from politics and where corruption has remained widespread. Consumer rights, citizenship and human rights walked together. Neo-liberalism has been tempered by shades of Gandhi. On the one hand, choice and competition came to rule. In that sense, Gandhi’s ideas of self-sufficiency and asceticism are dead. On the other, consumer advocates have continued to take inspiration from the mahatma when turning to questions of social inclusion. Official posters in 2007 urged consumers to ‘Join a Revolution’ and announced ‘The Time Has Come for Us to Stand up for Our Rights Again’, with an image of Gandhi leading the poor in protest against the British Salt Tax in 1930.

  The Indian government supports over 7,000 consumer clubs in schools, where concerned pupils act out the dilemmas of being a consumer in street-plays (nukkad natak) and reflect on the ethics of shopping. ‘While buying a product,’ the students’ column of one club’s magazine read, you should ask yourself: “Do you really need this product? . . . Will it last as long as you would like it to?” ’ What was the ‘health fall-out’ and impact on the environment? A ‘consumer must exercise restraint in consumption to consume responsibly’. At the same time, it was no longer possible to hold up a universal norm of austerity. ‘Every segment has its own special consumer profile’ and needed to define its own sense of responsibility.96 In a poor country with a rich moral history, personal excess remains a sore point for middle-class students. Consumer choice is good but should include standing up for the poor. Or, as one advocate of consumer protection put it, ‘maybe we can start realizing a “good” in between “God” and “goods”,’ similar to the Middle Path of Buddha or Aristotle’s golden mean.97 Sometimes, nationalist history is bent to fit that purpose. Gandhi has been reincarnated by government agencies as the friend of the consumer who had the prophetic wisdom to recognize ‘the customer’ as the ‘most important visitor on our premises’, the ‘purpose’ of our work and the element on whom everything depends.98 Adam Smith had said something like that in the Wealth of Nations. Whether Gandhi would have liked to appear as an Indian mouthpiece of Smith is doubtful.

  As early as 1915, passengers irritated with transport services set up an association to voice their complaints. Half a century later, a more general Consumer Guidance Society of India was founded. In the 1980s and ’90s, the number of consumer groups jumped from 80 to 1,500. It is this thriving civil society that has been one of the most striking features of India’s embrace of consumption, and comes closest in Asia to the parallel growth of goods and associational life in the United States and Western Europe in earlier centuries. One of the most active bodies is CUTS, the Consumer Unity and Trust Society. Founded in a garage in Rajasthan in 1983, CUTS has grown into a global NGO which works on trade, women’s rights and rural poverty. There are not many consumer groups in the West that can match its expertise or its staff of three hundred. India no longer just imports but exports policy frameworks. CUTS, for example, has drawn up blueprints for consumer protection for Ghana, South Africa and Vietnam. In the 1990s, when there were plenty of social movements opposed to globalization, CUTS linked free trade to basic needs for all and ran an outreach programme in rural areas. Here was an echo of the British crusade for cheap food and free trade a century earlier. But the balance between private and public services has been almost fully reversed. Nationalization has come and gone. In nineteenth-century London, consumer groups were formed by propertied householders against private monopolies in gas and water. In 1980s–’90s India, the frontier of consumer politics was bad public services. One reason choice appeared so attractive as an instrument of social welfare was that most of the poor had been let down by state schools and power stations; Pradeep Mehta, CUTS’ crusading director, has proposed school vouchers, so the poor can pick their school, instead of sitting in a classroom with no teacher at all.

  In the 1990s, critics across the globe attacked neo-liberalism for shrinking public life. Privatization, it was said, reduced public-minded citizens to self-centred customers. That argument was the privilege of affluent nations that went to bed without having to worry whether there would be water and electricity in the morning. In developing societies like India, most homes did not enjoy twenty-four-hour basic services. Farmers, it is true, got their electricity free or at subsidized rates, but that was also one reason the
network was so overstretched and constantly breaking down. If privatization raised fears, it also created opportunities. It is not possible here to do justice to the complex picture across all regions and services, merely to single out two interesting developments – one affecting the rural poor, the other the urban middle classes.

  For many rural poor, being called a customer was a sign of recognition, a step up from being treated as a passive dependent or from never having had access to basic services in the first place. Poor people and poor services were connected in a vicious circle. Because they could not pay, they were in debt to the utility companies. Cut off, they started stealing their water and electric current. The companies, in turn, lacked the revenue to provide a decent service. At home, the lights went out; in the fields, the water pumps fell silent. A project in Rajasthan in 2002 set out to break the circle by turning villagers into paying customers. In Piplod, in the District of Jhalawad, where the electricity transformer burnt out sixteen times a month, the village elders got together and agreed to put an end to the pilferage of electricity and to install tamper-proof cables. In exchange, the electricity company invested in a better transformer that guaranteed the villagers electricity for more hours, without a drop in voltage. A household committee (vidyut sudhar samiti) was set up to monitor improvements. Soon, all villages in the district had such a body. In the Indian context, ‘customerization’, to use an ugly phrase, was not only about making peasants pay but about giving them a stake in their local infrastructure. Neo-liberalism had social-democratic features. Indeed, the reforms in Jhalawad were steered by Indian consumer groups with the help of the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, the German social democratic foundation.99