In Eastern Europe and former Soviet Union, capitalism appears attractive because it promises to deliver consumer goods, which people wanted.

In the West, the features of the consumer culture include:

• identification with freedom with private choice and private life
• consumption becomes a privilege site for constructing identity and status

The image of the consumer, associated with freedom, autonomy and choice, is a powerful and influential image. This image is used to attack many forms of collectivism (socialism, communalism etc).

Modernity is a key focus in this course. The issues and concepts central to thinking about consumer culture are the same ones that have been central to modern intellectual life since Enlightenment. There is nothing new about consumer culture. Rather it re-brands, re-designs, itself every few decades.

The study of consumer culture is not simply the study of individual choice and wants, but rather the study of such things in the context of social relations, structures, institutions. The study of needs and wants explores the social relation between private life and public institutions. Mistakenly, needs is either conceived as:

• natural and self-evident – basic needs for food, clothing and shelter
• arbitrary and subjective – ‘wants’, ‘preferences’, ‘whims’ and ‘desires’

‘I need something (e.g. apartment, car, radio)’ is a social statement in two ways.

• I need this in order to live a certain kind of life, have a certain relations with others, achieve certain aims, to be a certain kind of person.
• I need this or that is to make a claim on social resources, to claim a right.

There are three fields of social struggles or contestations.

• Consumption depends on specific social arrangements of productive organisation, technological abilities, relations of labour, property and distribution. The specific arrangements are central to questions about what kind of society we are.
• How is access to goods and services regulated?
• What is the logic that determines the nature of goods provided in society?
• How are our needs, identity and ways of life defined or mediated?
• In consuming we do not simply reproduce our physical existence but also reproduce (sustain, contest, evolve etc) culturally specific meaningful ways of life. As consumption becomes ever more important, struggles over the power to use material, financial and symbolic resources become more central to the cultural reproduction of everyday life.
• Questions of identity and ethics are bound up with our consumption practices and our status as consumers. We see ourselves as people who choose, are free and self-managing, make decisions about who we are and want to be and use and purchase goods and services and experiences to carry out these identity projects.

Note that none of these fields of struggles are new. Consumption always depends on social arrangements, the economic, for managing material resources; is always culturally meaningful to reproduce social identities; and is always considered an important site for social, moral and religious regulation of the self. Indeed, consumption is profoundly social.

Consumption is always and everywhere a cultural process, but ‘consumer culture’ (a culture of consumption) is unique and specific. It is the dominant mode of cultural reproduction developed in the advanced industrial societies.

It is bound up with central values, practices and institutions that define western modernity such as choice, individualism and market relations.

A single defining feature of consumer culture is how social arrangement is mediated through markets. It is carried out through the exercise of free personal choice in the private sphere of everyday life.

Other modes of cultural reproduction:

• gift-giving (e.g. friendship, love, blood)
• household practices (e.g. knitted scarves, home-made tables, forest mushrooms)
• welfare state (e.g. education and medicine)

Consumer culture arose in the west from the C18th onwards, as part of the west’s assertion of its own difference from the rest of the world as modern, progressive, free, rational. But the idea of consumer culture has a universal character. Consumer culture has been a key factor for the advance of western business, western markets and a western way of life. As an aspect of the universalising project of western modernity, consumer culture has both global pretensions and global extension.

Consumer culture is not a late consequence of industrial modernisation and industrial modernity. Consumer culture is bound up with modernity (in particular the modern west) in two ways.

• Core institutions, infrastructures and practices of consumer culture originated in the early modern period.
• The consumer is no longer governed by tradition but rather by individuality and rationality; its world is produced through rational organisation and scientific know-how.