"For capitalism to function, workers must only be able to access the products of their labor through the market. If they could directly make and take everything they needed, there would be no way for capitalists to profit. This separation between production and consumption is imposed in every transition to capitalism. As capitalism expands and deepens, it becomes a separation between the worker and every aspect of the world she lives in.
“Of course, the products of paid labor are not the only things that are consumed. European colonizers accused indigenous peoples of cannibalism, sometimes explicitly to justify enslaving them. Yet today, many of those peoples are only remembered in the names of cities and sports teams, while their staple crops and religious traditions are sold in gas stations. Who devoured whom?
“Once everyone has been pressed into the market, new dynamics emerge. As production increases, survival itself is subject to a kind of inflation: it takes more and more resources to participate in social life. A few centuries ago, peasant farmers only relied on the exchange economy for a few specific goods; they could grow everything else they needed at home or barter with their neighbors for it. Today’s consumer must have a cell phone, a television, a computer, a car, a bank account and credit, insurance, and a great deal more to take part in society, let alone wield any influence in it. If a peasant farmer had miraculously come to possess any of these he would have been rich, but today’s consumer can have them all and still be poor. This inflation produces a class of people who are excluded from society in the midst of a great abundance of goods.
“The same dynamic plays out on the level of nations and peoples. When one society is scrambling to out-produce and out-invent their neighbors in order to conquer or at least profit off them, everyone else has to rush to keep up; who wants to end up poor and exploited? This pressure was behind much of the destructive industrialization of ‘developing’ nations.
“Having become merchandise themselves, workers consume merchandise to exert power the only way they can. Once there is nothing to compare it against, purchasing ceases to be a necessary evil and becomes a sacred act; in the religion of capitalism, in which financial power is equated with social value and spending is thus proof of worth, it is a form of communion. The store is the temple in which the act of buying affirms the consumer’s place in society. Much of our leisure time is made up of rituals in which spending money itself is the point: it is what qualifies an activity as having a good time or going on a date.
“In the 20th century, mass production created an increasingly homogeneous consumer culture. But when market expansion reached its limits, capitalists shifted to diversifying consumer options; consequently, the rebellious subcultures that had arisen in reaction to mass society were transformed into market niches. Promoting individuality and ‘difference’ became a formula by which to extend consumerism further and further, capitalizing on the very discontent it produced.
“Today there’s a product line for every identity—for every ethnic group, sexual preference, and political position. These products have become indistinguishable from the identities they supplement: when the pop star sings about what he likes in a woman, he sings about her perfume, her makeup, her clothes. Even the most rebellious subcultural identities are founded on shared consumption patterns—on shared aesthetics.
“In a time when economic pressures are constantly breaking up and reconfiguring workforces and local communities, it isn’t surprising that people base their sense of self more in their consumer activity than their roles in production. Unruly neighborhoods are gentrified out of existence and rebellious ethnic groups are divided between prison and assimilation; any social body that assumes a radical conception of its interests is dispersed as swiftly as possible. Perhaps this explains why opposition to capitalism is spreading as an ideological identity but diminishing as a force in struggles over production and physical territory. Resistance isn’t impossible under these conditions, but it has to assume new forms. Most of the recent innovations in resistance tactics have taken place on the terrain of consumption rather than production: squatting movements, food distribution networks, anticapitalist subcultures.
“Meanwhile, every form of resistance that doesn’t address the root of the problem is reabsorbed into the functioning of the market. Outrage against specific symptoms of capitalism has generated ethical consumerism, which only serves to stimulate the capitalist economy. For products like free-range chicken and fair-trade coffee, being ‘ethical’ is an additional selling point to increase their perceived value and thus their price. In the free market, selling price is not determined by the material costs of producing the item, but by the highest price consumers will pay. Value is not an inherent characteristic—even petroleum is only valuable inside of a certain social framework. The social construction of ‘sustainable’ and ‘natural’ as desirable characteristics serves to create a new immaterial value that can sell items at higher prices even during an economic downturn—utilizing consumers’ good intentions to perpetuate the system that gave rise to the problems in the first place. So long as capitalism remains the law of the land, any actual benefit to chickens or Brazilian coffee harvesters can only last as long as it is profitable."
via CrimethInc., Work: Capitalism, Economics, Resistance (emphasis mine)
