Bill Moyers recently interviewed Benjamin Barber, [1] a renowned political theorist and a distinguished senior fellow at Demos — a public policy think tank here in New York City. Barber’s most recent book is Consumed: How Markets Corrupt Children, Infantilize Adults, and Swallow Citizens Whole [2] (2007). What’s the focus of this book?
[T]he global economy produces too many goods we don’t need, too few of those we do need, and, to keep the racket going, targets children as consumers in a market where shopping is a twenty-four hour business. Capitalism, he says, “seems quite literally to be consuming itself, leaving democracy in peril and the fate of citizens uncertain.”
Barber argues that we now have “push capitalism”:
They’ve got to sell all this stuff, and they have to figure out how to get us to want it. So they take adults and they infantilize them. They dumb them down. They get us to want things. And then they start targeting children. Because it’s not enough just to sell to the adults.
One prominent example is bottled water, which is often actually bottled tap water. Was there ever really a demand for expensive bottled tap water? Yet so many of us demand it and claim to need it. Barber argues that American adults are, indeed, infantilized.
What I mean is that grownups, part of being grown up is getting a hold of yourself and saying, “I don’t need this. I’ve got to be a gatekeeper for my kid. I want to live in a pluralistic world where, yes, I shop, but I also pray and play and do art and make love and make artwork and do lots of different things. And shopping’s one part of that.” As an adult, we know that. But if you live in a capitalist– society that needs to sell us all the time, they’ve got to turn that prudent, thoughtful adult back into a child who says, “Gimme, gimme, gimme. I want, I want, I want.” Just like the kid in the candy store. And is grasping and reaching.
Barber argues that push capitalism is threatening democracy. It seduces us into thinking that being a consumer is being a citizen.
That a citizen is nothing more than a consumer. That voting means spending your dollars spreading around your private prejudices, your private preferences. Not reaching public judgments. Not finding common ground. Not making decisions about the social consequences of private judgments, but just making the private judgments. And letting it fall where it will.
How do we combat this threat of the hyper-consumption of un-needed goods and services that is driving us deeply into debt? Barber makes three suggestions.
First of all we, as consumers, have to be tougher. We are the gatekeepers for our kids and our families. We have to be tougher. I mean, I ask anyone out there who needs to go out at 2:00 AM to go shopping? For God sakes, wait ’til Monday afternoon.
Second thing is capitalism has to begin to earn the profits to which it has a right, when it takes real risks. Inventing something that is needed. Folks working in alternative energy, some of them are going to make real money.
Barber’s third approach is a slap at those who disparage government and naively tell us that we should look to the “free market” to solve our problems. [3]
We’ve got to retrieve our citizenship. We can’t buy the line that government is our enemy and the market is our friend. We used to say government can do everything, the market can do nothing. That was a mistake. But now we seem to say the market can do everything and government can do any– nothing. [But] Government is us. Government is our institutions. Government is how we make social and public choices working together. We’ve got to retrieve our citizenship.
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