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The consumer society: a consensus from Soral to Lordon 1:59 There are theses, notably from your friend Michel Clouscard, which claim that we are not yet finally in a consumer society, and that perhaps we have never been in a consumer society, and perhaps also that we never will be. So again, can you shed light for us on this concept of consumption? I think I can, I don't know if I should, I'm afraid, I'm frankly afraid to answer this kind of question, because there's such a consensus against me that I'm afraid to breach it. I'm going to venture into it anyway. After all, not far from Rousseau's tomb, whose motto was to suspend his life on truth. I'm going to try to make my life depend on the truth.
2:38 No, no, but I may sound like I'm being sarcastic, but the stakes are enormous, because the consensus you're talking about spans a spectrum that runs from Soral, for example, on a certain extreme right, to Lordon. Lordon is the opposite, in spirit, the opposite of the right, and even more so of the extreme right, of course, who takes courageous positions in foreign policy which I salute, when he refuses to recognize the European treaty or when he condemns it, when he wants to impose, well, on capital.
3:14 But that same Lordon, precisely, balked when he read Clouscard, that passage on consumption, as it happens, which is indeed the weak point. And he says, come on, admit it, Clouscard, however much you twist and turn, that ultimately the working class caved in during the sixties, and for more than a mess of pottage, with the rise in the standard of living. That's where Clouscard comes in, and it's a real revelation. Because in The Capitalism of Seduction, the one of his books that had the greatest success, well, in terms of print runs, editorially, and which he was kind enough to dedicate to me, when he dedicates it saying 'To Dominique Pagani, to whom this book owes much,' I should say he's not doing himself justice.
Consumer goods and equipment goods according to Clouscard 3:52 I enlightened him a little, he brought me an enormous amount on popular cultures, I enlightened him a little on points of musical culture, that shows in his chapter on the sound system, that's a strictly limited point on which he owes me, if you can even say that, a lot from our exchanges. What I owe him is so much more, namely, the distinction that he was the only one to introduce at the time, and which answers your question, which is the key, in my opinion, to answering it—the distinction he makes, which he is the only one to make even today, no one before him and no one since has explored it, between consumer goods and capital goods. And can we put on the same level the consumption of the champagne bought by Berlusconi to pour over the body of the girl at a ceremony, what's it called?
4:34 Bunga Bunga, I think. I'm trying to keep track. Is the consumption of that champagne of the same order as that of the miner from Pas-de-Calais, who, a year from retirement—great victory, I didn't die of silicosis, I'm a year from retirement—buys his first color TV, and who is branded by Cohn-Bendit and his 68 cronies as a filthy sellout, gone bourgeois, a consumer, lost to the revolutionary cause, oh sure. It's to rise up against this social betrayal, against this anti-consumerist discourse coming from those who consume the most.
5:10 I'm sure, for example, when it comes to the water problem, which matters more to me than the carbon layer issue, maybe because I lived for a long time south of the Sahara, I don't know, but the water problem, which really is a capital environmental and human issue, I mean, I'm sure Nicolas Hulot, in the hotels he stays at, and in the jacuzzis—where he indulges, which I never do—consumes incomparably more water than I do. So I mean, coming from those who consume the most, this condemnation of the timid access of the most exploited class to the first elements of mass consumption which it is entitled to, going so far as to make a very fine analysis, showing that there is first—I'm answering your question precisely, thanks to him now, here's the sequence—collective equipment goods, the sewers, the gas systems, when you walk down a street in Paris, you should see what makes a big city function in terms of equipment, I'm talking about the invisible part, which we never see, millions of people who work for us, in silence, road maintenance, etc.; it only takes a garbage collectors' strike for a few days for us to suddenly see, when it all stops, how important it is.
From collective equipment to libidinal consumption 6:20 And so, collective equipment goods, roads, canals, land development. Then, household consumer goods, second stage—well, that's indeed the washing machine, the refrigerator, but as Clouscard admirably puts it, when you consume a refrigerator, you're not consuming the fridge itself but what's inside it; if there hadn't been the washing machine, the woman couldn't have gone to work, because women's drudgery for years wasn't the dishes—that's a joke by comparison, doing the dishes is nothing—it was the laundry, that was awful, in winter, going to do the wash, the wash-house, hands reddened by the cold, luckily she didn't do it too often, in some regions even just once a year, and afterward—not far from where you live, I believe, in Haute-Marne—they used to dry it in the Vosges, laundry dried on the grass, as they say, and there you have it, it's dreadful; the washing machine, the end of that slavery, which is a piece of equipment, which moreover liberates, which is even in capitalism's own interest, which frees the woman, who was bound, a hostage to housework, so she could go to the factory—how can you put on the same footing, with the same word 'consumption,' things so different, it's a bit much, and that's what Clouscard says.
7:30 that not only is it not true that we consume too much today—first of all, that there even is a 'we,' there are some who would very much like to consume a bit more—he goes so far as to say that the majority of the population is well below what it should, and could, consume, what it could and therefore should consume, if we measure it not against some hypothetical reference to the past—sure, compared to my Corsican grandmother who was ecstatic, flicking the electricity switch on and off, not getting over the fact that the light would come back every time, and go off, at her command—we're not going to say that having electricity today is a luxury—but rather, so we measure an excessive level of consumption, when does the excess begin, well, to answer your question exactly, we measure it against what the productive forces allow, to speak in Marxist terms, of the era one lives in; the car was a fabulous luxury, in the days of the first automobiles, agreed, it's something now that we find with considerable popular reach, and there too, by the way, because it's become a piece of equipment, most of the time, most of the hours Parisian-region commuters spend in the car are to go to work, or come back from it, or to run errands on the weekend—there's also that space of freedom, to go for a drive with the family, through the landscapes of sweet France, there you go, but, so...
Planning against generalized degrowth 8:42 from collective equipment goods, to household equipment goods, to consumption that he calls playful, marginal, libidinal, which is reserved for—no, not for a privileged class—that one, the working class, never had access to it, there you go, so that's why what I'm saying is a bit scandalous: not only do we not consume too much, but I maintain that we don't consume enough. Of course, all these terms are foolish; now let me go back to being a philosopher in the strict sense, that is, what do we call 'consumption' here—it's obvious that we consume too much nowadays, of certain things, across all social strata included, and not enough of other things. So there's a taboo word, that of planning, if we really want to put an end to this, and decide that this particular production is the one to be encouraged, at the expense of that one, which should even rather decrease—why not be degrowth-oriented in certain parasitic domains, that doesn't bother me—but generalized degrowth, we can clearly see where the scam lies. I notice that the so-called ecologists, the most radical ones as they say, who are flatly in favor of degrowth, and the employers, share this objective complicity: it's the investment strike, because that's the main cause of the crisis we're experiencing in financial terms, the fact that for 40 years employers have stopped investing.
9:52 they'll have no desire to invest, in a country where, through hard-won struggle, rights have been won, where wages aren't those of Bangladesh, so, since that's how it is, I've lost the game at the national level, I'll build my factories in Slovakia, for cars, and my textiles, of course, over there where a thousand people burned to death, right, in Bangladesh—so it's strange to see that a certain ecological-economic discourse, that of degrowth, and that of the employers, go in the same direction, that is, tough luck, for those who would like to consume more, who are nonetheless the majority.
