Social democracy under consumer capitalism

Since the early 1980s, many of us have been searching for a coherent alternative to neo-liberalism, for a way of reinventing social democracy in an era of global consumer capitalism. We have failed miserably. The left has been wandering in the wilderness, mouthing the old slogans to a world that is no longer interested, distraught at its irrelevance, but not knowing where to turn.

The vacuum has been filled by the pallid apologetics of the so-called Third Way - Thatcherism with a human face. The Third Way is the way that no-one can define, a program in search of a rationale, a social analysis in which conflict is conveniently replaced by complexity, and in which any talk of power is taboo.

Around the world, we have seen the parties of the left transformed into their opposite, with the spin doctor elbowing out the policy advisor. They have increasingly become parties for politicians who are not sure what they stand for but which employ advertising agencies to convince us that they stand for something. The Third Way is essential to the new dispensation of political convergence in which the historic battle of ideologies has been superseded by product differentiation.

The left itself is responsible for this state of affairs. It remains wedded to a view of the social order defined by class, exploitation and inequality. Difficult as it may be to admit, social democrats and democratic socialists have a psychological predisposition to believe that the mass of people are suffering from material deprivation. We thrive on the imagined wretchedness of others. When the economy goes bad we feel secretly vindicated, for our reason to condemn the system is renewed.

But we must face up to the facts – the left’s "deprivation model" is today the opposite of the truth. The dominant characteristic of contemporary Australia is not deprivation but abundance.

By any standard Australia is an enormously wealthy country. The great majority of its citizens want for nothing. In 1950, average real incomes were around $9,000; today they are more than $30,000. Average households today are filled with big-screen TVs and DVDs. When we overfly the suburban expanses of Sydney, we see backyards dotted with swimming pools. It is nothing for an average parent to spend $1,000 on a present for a child or to buy them a personal mobile phone. Ordinary families happily shell out $40,000 for a four-wheel drive play-thing and gamble away a few thousand dollars each year merely for entertainment. They avail themselves of sophisticated healthcare when it’s needed. Almost everyone has access to good quality primary and secondary education.

In real terms, Australians today are at least three times better off than their parents were after the war, and the fact is that the distribution of income is about the same. Of course, there is a residual at the bottom who are struggling. We still have poverty (and, let’s face it, we probably always will). As a society we have an obligation to attempt ceaselessly to eradicate it. But why does the left continue to base its entire social philosophy and political strategy on the circumstances of the bottom 10 or 20 per cent? Concern for the underprivileged should not provide the driving force for a politics of social change in a society where the daily experience of the great majority is occupied not with how to pay the bills but with how to enjoy their unprecedented wealth.

The model of society where the dominant social evil is want has been rendered irrelevant by five decades of sustained economic growth. It might be argued that the left is concerned not with material wealth but with exploitation. But it is impossible today to argue that the mass of people in industrialised countries is exploited, at least not in the way the left has traditionally understood the term. Both the structure and nature of classes are fundamentally different. Liberation itself has not been denied but co-opted by consumer capitalism.

Modern consumer capitalism is wracked by a great contradiction – that between the promise of consumer capitalism and the modern social condition. Despite the fantastic promises of material progress, and the extraordinary success of capitalism in delivering undreamt of wealth for ordinary people, the people are still not happy.

In the USA, where consistent surveys have been conducted since 1946, real incomes have increased by 400 per cent, yet there has been no increase in reported levels of well-being. Indeed, the proportion of Americans reporting themselves to be ‘very happy’ has declined from 35 per cent in 1957 to 30 per cent in 1988, while the percentage who said they agreed with the statement that they are ‘pretty well satisfied with your financial situation’ fell from 42 to 30 per cent. The story is the same in Australia.

The growth project has failed; but it is too threatening for people to admit it. In the USA, there is virtually no difference in reported levels of life satisfaction between people with incomes of $20,000 and $80,000. Overall, over half of the population of the richest country in the world say they cannot afford everything that they really need. And it’s not just the poorer half.

The pursuit of wealth is not making us any happier. It is not simply that other trends in society, occurring in parallel with rising incomes, have offset the benefits of wealth; the process of economic growth itself has produced a seriously sick society. In a mass of evidence from the USA, mirrored by studies in Australia and other rich countries, the richest people in the world are saying that they are miserable, that it’s not worth it, and, most disturbingly of all, that the process of getting rich is the cause of the problems.

So the issues for the left today are not those of exploitation, poverty and discrimination. At the dawn of the 21st century, the sicknesses we face are overwhelmingly the sicknesses of affluence. We see epidemics of the diseases of boredom and alienation, especially gambling, television catatonia and recreational shopping.

We see an epidemic of drug use, both legal and illegal. Our response to unruly children is to drug them into submission with Ritalin.

For all of the hype, the information superhighway is principally a conduit for pornography, and there is an insatiable demand for soft-core titillation on television and video.

Moreover, at a time of unprecedented levels of personal wealth, citizens of rich countries are afflicted with an epidemic of psychological disorders. According to one study, depression has increased ten-fold among Americans born since World War II.

Young people, the principal beneficiaries of super-affluence, are most prone to clinical depression, manifested in record rates of teenage suicide and other social pathologies such as self-destructive drug taking.

Today, our greatest afflictions are associated not with deprivation but with over-consumption. We are gorging ourselves and growing fat. The volume of waste we generate is enormous. We discard and destroy vast quantities of useful goods. Driven to consume more and more, we are willing to pour our wastes into the atmosphere, oceans and landfills, causing severe damage to the natural world that sustains us.

In the age of global consumer capitalism then, the defining predicament is not a lack of money, but a lack of meaning. From a mass of psychological studies, confirmed by folk wisdom, there is one factor that stands out as differentiating more happy from less happy people- a sense of meaning and purpose in life.

Yet a lack of purpose is the hollow centre of life in modern consumer capitalism. It is the hole we try to fill with consumption. As long as we cleave to the deprivation model we validate the belief in the general populace that the foremost means to social and personal betterment is continuously to raise incomes. The left reinforces the belief by those in government, of whatever party, that everything must be sacrificed on the altar of economic growth. In the interests of more growth we must have privatisation, free trade, small government, lower taxes, corporate welfare, competition policy and reduced welfare payments. We cannot adopt policies of sustainability because they might affect growth.

The left is as much the slave of growth fetishism as the right. The deprivation model draws the power from progressive people, not only because it means they share the fundamental goal of neo-liberalism but, crucially, because it prevents the left from joining with the most serious political and intellectual challenge to consumer capitalism: environmentalism. It explains the uneasy dissonance between the left’s preoccupation with deprivation and environmentalists’ emphasis on the perils of abundance. Put crudely, one wants more growth and one wants less.

The political implications of all of this are profound. The left must discard its old understanding of the world. We must accept that capitalism has moved to a phase of abundance broadly spread. We must focus on the things that really do affect the well-being of ordinary people and the processes that condition society. For despite its extraordinary successes, and at a time of complete political hegemony, capitalism is more fragile than it has ever been. Why? With more wealth at their disposal than ever before, most people could simply choose not to participate, to no longer notice the advertisements, to step off the materialist treadmill, to discard the DVD player, the second house, the luxury car, the holidays abroad, the meaningless acquisitions. To do so would not mean taking to the barricades, or putting themselves on the breadline.

All it takes is a recognition that personal contentment is more important than money, and that it is possible to find a purpose in life that is fulfilling and self-expressive. If ordinary people today are exploited, then it is by common consent. They choose the gilded cage. We need a politics that will point out that the door of the gilded cage is open, so that ordinary people can achieve liberation and authentic lives in which community and relationships are valued above wealth and status. We need a politics for a society in which the citizens are committed to a rich life rather than a life of riches.

A post-growth politics would deprive capital of much of its political power, because people would everywhere reject the assumption that everything – including our communities, the natural world and our dignity – should be sacrificed on the altar of growth.