The Shock of the Anthropocene

by Christophe Bonneuil

58Alan Gropman (ed.), The Big ‘L’: American Logistics in World War II, Washington, DC: National Defense University Press, 1997, 150.

  59Milward, War, Economy and Society, 69.

  60Germaine Veyret-Verner, ‘Une industrie en pleine expansion: l’aluminium’, Revue de géographie alpine, 44:2, 1956: 311–42; Matthew Evenden, ‘Aluminium, Commodity Chains and the Environmental History of the Second World War’, Environmental History, 16:1, 2011: 69–93.

  61Brian Finnimore, ‘The A.I.R.O.H. House: Industrial Diversification and State Building Policy’, Construction History, 1, 1985: 60–71.

  62Winfried Wolf, Car Mania: A Critical History of Transport, London: Pluto, 1996, 87–101.

  CHAPTER 7

  Phagocene: Consuming

  the Planet

  Human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns. But we’ve discovered that owning things and consuming things does not satisfy our longing for meaning. We’ve learned that piling up material goods cannot fill the emptiness of lives which have no confidence or purpose.

  –Jimmy Carter

  On 15 July 1979, before a TV audience of 65 million, Jimmy Carter delivered a major anti-consumerist speech. If its immediate context was the second oil shock, its key idea was that the energy crisis could not be combated without a profound change in values. Americans were summoned to renounce consumerism and individualism, in a ‘rebirth of the American spirit’.

  If Carter’s defeat by Ronald Reagan in 1970, who called for a restoration of US hegemony and the deregulation of polluting activities, showed the limits of this appeal, his speech does illustrate the influence, since unequalled, that criticism of the consumer society had acquired in the public sphere. During the 1960s and ’70s, the themes of ‘commodity fetishism’ and ‘cultural alienation’ dear to the Frankfurt School invaded the periodical press. Herbert Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man (1964), Jean Baudrillard’s The System of Objects (1968), Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle (1967) and Marshall Sahlins’s Stone Age Economics (1974) were all bestsellers. Daniel Bell, the theorist of post-industrial society, explained in The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1976) how the consumer society undermined the Protestant work ethic that had been the bedrock of American capitalism. In 1979 Christopher Lasch published The Culture of Narcissism, in which he lambasted consumerist and hedonist subjectivity. This cultural critique of consumption was closely bound up with an environmental critique. In 1974, two years after the famous Club of Rome report on The Limits to Growth, the biologists Anne and Paul Ehrlich published a successful work, The End of Affluence, which predicted the coming exhaustion of mineral and agricultural resources.

  If the 1960s and ’70s saw the apogee of this criticism, it had already been substantial at the height of the Cold War, the very time when the expression ‘consumer society’ was coined. The 1950s were marked by David Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd (1950), which denounced the rise of individualism and the consumer society. This was in fact one of the most popular sociological works of all time, selling 1.4 million copies. In 1958, with The Affluent Society, John Kenneth Galbraith showed the contradictions between private consumption and national prosperity: the exuberance of private consumption (artificially stimulated by advertising) limited public investment in education, health and transport. And in The Hidden Persuaders (1957), Vance Packard denounced the cynicism of advertising and the immense material waste it produced.

  If we go further back in time, in the early years of the century, authors such as Thorstein Veblen were alarmed by the development of advertising, marketing and conspicuous consumption. And in 1925, Stuart Chase published The Tragedy of Waste, a scathing pamphlet against planned obsolescence and the proliferation of poor-quality products that forced repeated purchase.1

  While noting these age-old criticisms, we must also note their inability to sway the historical trajectory. The consumer society is a perfect example of this: criticism of it is as old as the target itself, yet consumerism remains more than ever the motor of capitalism. Worse, history seems to have set out to confirm the majority of these analyses. The fall of the Berlin Wall has even been interpreted as the triumph of democracy through consumerism, the ‘evil empire’ succumbing to the empire of the commodity.

  During the decades that followed, the rich countries stimulated their economies, despite wage stagnation, by an excess consumption made possible by the low price of oil, raw materials and Asian labour power. In the United States, household debt rose from 60 per cent of annual income in 1980 to 130 per cent in 2005. Housing expanded by 55 per cent in the same period, which was clearly not enough to cope with the tide of objects, as the ‘self-storage’ sector grew in the 2000s at the dizzying rate of 81 per cent per year. Before the crisis of 2008 a new profession appeared, that of ‘home organizer’, helping families to manage the overabundance of their possessions. And yet, during the same period, indicators of well-being deteriorated: both the ‘happiness index’ and more material measurements such as life expectancy stagnated, and healthy life expectancy actually began to decline.2 Among the rich countries, the human development index (education, health, income) diverged from GDP, the former stagnating from the late 1970s while the latter, a wretched indication of real well-being, continued to rise.3

  How can this incapacity to escape from consumerism be explained historically? How can we explain, despite certain heralds of ‘reflexive modernity’ (see chapters 4 and 8), our absolute lack of reflexivity? The issue for the historian of the Anthropocene is to understand the making of consumerism and its power.

  Is it desire that led us into the Anthropocene?

  From the 1980s on, an increasing number of historians showed that certain elements generally attributed to the ‘consumer society’ could be already observed in England and the Netherlands in the late eighteenth century. This thesis, initially controversial, aroused a rich bundle of research, which has upwardly reassessed the material density of ‘advanced organic economies’ in Western Europe.4 According to Neil McKendrick, English society of the eighteenth century displayed a powerful desire for the consumption of commodities (porcelain, textiles, watches, as well as colonial products such as sugar, tea, coffee and precious woods). A royal census of 1759 counted 141,700 shops in England and Wales, a density of 240 per 10,000 inhabitants (as against 45 per 10,000 at this time in France).5

  At the source of this phenomenon was a less rigidly defined social status, which generated social emulation between the middle classes and the landed aristocracy. If the expression ‘conspicuous consumption’ was coined by Thorstein Veblen, the actual idea is very old, formulated among others by Adam Smith. Smith’s anthropology naturalized the instinct of enrichment: individuals were moved by a powerful acquisitive passion that needed to be controlled and enlisted so that it acted in the sense of the common good.

  These historians went on to show the causal link between this ‘consumer revolution’ and the industrial revolution. According to Jan de Vries, the latter was prepared by a long ‘industrious revolution’, from the late seventeenth century to the 1800s.6 This period was marked by a rise in production, but without a technological break or a gain in productivity. Growth was therefore basically realized by an intensification of labour: the working year in England rose from 2,700 hours to 3,300, chiefly by the suppression of religious festivals. In parallel with this was a new involvement of women and children in productive activities oriented to the market.

  How should we explain this acceptance of ‘working more to earn more’ in the eighteenth century? It is here that desire and the appearance of new and attractive goods come into play. For example, the spread of watches and clocks in Western Europe in the eighteenth century was rapid and general. In the Netherlands, while clocks had been extremely rare in inventories drawn up after the death of farmers in the late seventeenth century, fifty years later they were to be found in 86 per cent of such lists. In Paris, in 1700, only 13 per cent of servants possessed a watch, but this figure r
ose to 70 per cent by the 1780s. For Jan de Vries, the desire to consume becomes the deus ex machina of European economic dynamism. It is what reoriented productive activity from subsistence agriculture to the sphere of commodities and money.

  If this thesis complements explanations in terms of production or environment (innovation, coal and the ‘ghost acres’ of the British Empire), it nonetheless has the defect of naturalizing the desire for consumption. It neglects several indications that attest, contrary to this, the difficulty of inculcating in artisans or new arrivals from the countryside a labour discipline involving whole days and weeks of work. For example, ‘Saint Monday’ (i.e., absenteeism) was considered a privilege well into the nineteenth century by well-paid artisans who opted in favour of leisure.7

  Under the law of pre-revolutionary France, artisans were subject to a contract of hire by the job. They committed themselves to the entrepreneur or commissioner to supply a product at a given date but remained responsible for the methods and rhythms of labour. This freedom legally distinguished them from servants.8 The rhythm of labour under the ancien régime, whether agricultural or handicraft, was characterized by a great irregularity: intense periods were followed by those of relative idleness. Many contemporary authors suggested that the motivation to work declined with a rise in wages. This rational behaviour attests to the hold of a culture of sufficiency.9

  The infrastructures of the consumer society

  A different historiography, whose roots go back to the critique of the consumer society in the 1970s, has shown the importance of the material and institutional arrangements that forged the first mass-consumption society, particularly in the United States at the turn of the twentieth century.10

  This period was marked by large-scale social conflicts, followed by major strike waves after the First World War. The issue was not just the level of wages but the wage relation itself, as a principle and for the subordination of the worker that it involved. At the start of the twentieth century, entrepreneurs complained of workers’ absenteeism. Even during the First World War, skilled workers in munitions factories refused to abandon the custom of ‘Saint Monday’.

  This period also saw major increases in productivity, bound up with the introduction of electricity and Taylorist methods in factories. In the United States, the power of industrial machines quadrupled between 1899 and 1927.

  Finally, this was the period in which economic globalization was completed: radio, refrigerated ships, and railways followed the telegraph to link up a unified world market for the first time. This phenomenon, closely bound up with the consumer society, had particularly deleterious consequences for the environment of tropical countries. Between 1870 and 1920, American consumption of tropical products (coffee, sugar, bananas, rubber) grew steeply: that of sugar rose from an annual 17 kilograms to 42 kilograms per person, that of coffee by a multiple of seven.11 In the countries of Central America, subsistence agriculture was pressed back onto the mountain slopes by the latifundia and big estates of the United Fruit Company, causing a disastrous erosion of the soil and accompanying social tensions.12

  As a result of globalization, commodities also became far more abstract, cut off from their connections with producer and territory. For example, in the great silos that arose in Chicago in the 1860s, wheat could no longer be related to a particular farm. This abstraction made nature far more suited for circulation in the networks of world capitalism. The grain stored in Chicago could be bought in London without concern for its quality. It could even be bought before being produced, as along with the silos came the invention of futures markets for food crops.13

  Mass consumption was a strategic adaptation of American capitalism to these various mutations. The explicit and paramount aim of politicians, industrialists and advertisers alike was to create markets able to absorb the new productive capacities of Taylorist factories. In the words of Herbert Hoover, ‘High wages are the very essence of mass production.’14 As well as spending power, various innovations also contributed to the creation of mass markets.

  First of all, trademarks became general. In the early 1900s, the majority of common consumer goods were not branded: the grocer sold wine from the barrel, sugar from the sack and so on. The choice of mass production was a risky one: it was necessary to be sure that the costly machines it required would be profitable. Entrepreneurs therefore needed commercial outlets that were stable and independent of intermediaries. Trademarks precisely made it possible to bypass the wholesaler and create a direct relationship with the consumer. And the consumer in turn now demanded a particular brand, imposing stock requirements on the retailer. For producers, the trademark, by stabilizing demand, reduced the impact of economic fluctuations. Protection of trademarks was established in 1890 when the US Supreme Court granted a property of unlimited duration. This decision aroused fierce controversy, as it went against the fourteen-year protection that was given by patent law.15

  The turn of the century was also marked in the United States by a revolution in the distribution chain. Barter and bargaining were marginalized and credit sale formalized with the transition from the traditional slate to consumer credit. Mail order was also invented, along with grocery chains, followed soon by the self-service supermarket – inaugurated by the Piggly Wiggly chain during the First World War as a response to staff shortage.16

  Finally, there was a change in the nature of advertising. From a marginal activity more like the present-day classifieds, it became an essential engine of the consumer society. In the 1920s, the advertising sector of the US economy grew from $58 million to $200 million.17 Madison Avenue in New York City became its centre. More generally, the transition was from advertising a particular product to glorifying consumption as a lifestyle and marker of social normality. Advertisers made the essential discovery that the precondition of being able to sell is to question the perception that consumers have of themselves. In the 1920s, Printers’ Ink, the advertising trade journal, explained that Americans ‘had to be made aware of such things as enlarged nose pores or bad breath’. ‘Advertising helps to keep the masses dissatisfied with their mode of life, discontented with ugly things around them. Satisfied customers are not as profitable as discontented ones.’18 Psychologists, psychoanalysts, sociologists and behaviourists invaded this rich new market.

  With the development of advertising, the classic concept of the market was turned completely on its head. From the abstract market of the economists, the meeting point between rational individuals seeking to satisfy needs that preceded their entry onto the market, there was now the concrete market of advertisers, a market that could be created from scratch, where needs were malleable and buyers irrational.19

  Disciplinary hedonism

  In 1893, the economist George Gunton explained that new products were indispensable for attaching workers to their job: ‘such a conscious need for an object that its absence will cause sufficient pain to induce the effort and sacrifice necessary to its attainment’.20 With the production of deep and stable markets, the second goal of mass consumption, completely explicit, was to discipline the workers. Henry Ford introduced a daily wage of $5, double that of his competitors, partly so that his workers could buy the cars that they made, but above all to reduce staff turnover. The repugnance of workers for Taylorist methods and assembly-line work was such that Ford had to recruit 963 men in order to add 100 workers to its labour force.21

  Consumer credit also played a key role in this disciplinary hedonism. Until the 1920s, credit remained informal (the slate) or underground (loan sharks and other ‘leeches’). Banks only financed businesses and property acquisitions. New credit techniques such as hire purchase or instalment plan universalized the slogan ‘buy now, pay later’. Companies producing consumer goods, such as Ford, General Motors and General Electric, became major suppliers of credit. During crisis periods, when investment flagged, banks were also interested in this lucrative market. The development of mass consumption in the United States took place
on credit. In 1926, for example, half of American households already owned a car, but two-thirds of these cars had been bought on credit.22 This was a characteristically American trait: neither Britain nor France, the two European countries most motorized at this time, had more than one car for twenty inhabitants at the end of the 1930s. When consumer credit was first introduced in Britain, it failed to take off.23

  The ‘consumer society’ thus refers to a new relationship with objects and the environment, and a new form of social control that makes this relationship desirable. Disciplinary hedonism played (and continues to play) a fundamental role in the acceptance of mass production and its disastrous environmental consequences. It required a transformation of values: repairing, economizing and saving were presented as outdated habits harmful to the national economy, while repeated and ostentatious consumption, fashion and obsolescence became respectable objectives. The rise in wages and above all the introduction of consumer credit were the pillars of a new form of social control, at the heart of the famous Fordist model. In exchange for consumption, individuals had to accept an increased routinization of work and the dependency arising from credit.

  From recycling to planned obsolescence

  Mass consumption eclipsed the practices of recycling that were absolutely fundamental in the nineteenth century, deeply affecting the cycles of materials.

  In France in the 1860s, chiffonage, the collection of discarded objects and material, occupied more than 100,000 people. Virtually everything was suitable for recovery: rags for paper and bone used for tablets and buttons, animal charcoal, phosphorous, sal-ammoniac and gelatin. Until the late nineteenth century, human and animal excrement was systematically collected for agriculture.24 Recycling was integrated into the distribution circuits. In the United States, commercial travellers also acted as recyclers, offering distributors new goods in exchange for worn-out ones, bits of metal, glass or rags, and thus stimulating a general collecting effort.25