The Revolution of Everyday Life, Chapter 7

 

Summary of Chapter 7: The Age of Happiness

Chapter 7 begins a new subsection of part 1, titled, “The impossibility of Communication: Power as Universal Mediation,” under which heading V states:

In the realm of Power, mediation is the false necessity wherein people learn to lose themselves rationally. Mediation’s power to alienate is now being reinforced, and also brought into question, by the dictatorship of consumption (seven), by the predominance of exchange over gift (eight), by cybernetisation (nine), and by the reign of the quantitative (ten). (65)

This chapter, then, will be about the “dictatorship of consumption. Vaneigem’s summary:

The contemporary welfare state belatedly provides the guarantees of survival which were demanded by the disinherited members of the production-based society of former days (1). Affluent survival entails the pauper­isation of life (2). Purchasing power is a licence to purchase power, to become an object in the order of things. The tendency is for both oppressor and oppressed to fall, albeit at different speeds, under one and the same dictatorship: the dictatorship of consumer goods (3). (65)

V begins the chapter with condemnations of both the welfare state and consumerism, noting with great sarcasm the obfuscation of the working class, who can now be imagined to be “rich” because they have various objects, and how consumption is meant to stand in for or replace the goals of revolution. Nevertheless, the younger generation are not taken in, and V celebrates various examples of uprising/insurrection.

The dictatorship of consumer goods has finally destroyed the barriers of blood, lineage and race; this would be good cause for celebration were it not that consumption, with its logic of things, forbids all qualitative differences and recognises only differences of quantity between values and between people. (69)

Vaneigem notes that consumer goods are losing their use value, with their value for consumption being all that matters. Noting Stalin’s revealing phrase that humans are “the most precious kind of capital,” V asserts that even this is no longer true: humans are only good for moving consumption along, gaining our entire identity from what we buy. “Work to survive, survive by consuming, survive to consume: the hellish cycle is complete” (70). V observes with some irony that

a historical period based on such an anti-human truth can only be a period of transition, an intermediate stage between the life that was lived, if obscurely, by the feudal masters and the life that will be constructed rationally and passionately by masters without slaves. Only thirty years are left if we want to end the transitional period of slaves without masters before it has lasted two centuries. (70-1)

The great Bourgeois revolutions of the west have turned out to be no better than counter-revolutions, producing a society, not of “masters without slaves,” but of “slaves without masters.” At the same time, as the Stalin quote revealed, state “socialism” is also not truly revolutionary, but just another variation on the capitalist/consumerist order. [and has not China since demonstrated this even more clearly?]

The old proletarian sold his labour power in order to subsist; what little leisure time he had was passed pleasantly enough in conversation, arguments, drinking, making love, wandering, celebrating and rioting. The new proletarian sells his labour power in order to consume. When he’s not flogging himself to death to get promoted in the labour hierarchy, he’s being persuaded to buy himself objects to distinguish himself in the social hierarchy. The ideology of consumption becomes the consumption of ideology.... On the one hand, homo consumator buys a bottle of whiskey and gets as a free gift the lie that accompanies it. On the other hand, communist man buys ideology and gets a bottle of vodka for free. Paradoxically, Soviet and capitalist regimes are taking a common path, the first thanks to an economy of production, the second thanks to an economy of consumption. (72-3)

In the Soviet Union, the “surplus value of power” is the support of the bureaucrat. “He earns it not on the basis of money-capital, but on the basis of a primitive accumulation of confidence-capital obtained through the docile absorption of ideological matter.” (73)

In capitalist countries, the material profit reaped by the employer from both production and consumption remains distinct from the ideological profit which the employer is not alone in deriving from the organisation of consumption. This is all that prevents us from reducing the difference between a manager and worker to the difference between a new Rolls Royce every year and a VW lovingly maintained for five.

But State planning reduces everyone to no more than agents for consumption. Although many of V’s Cold War observations can sound a bit dated, the following presciently evokes the fantasies of some current Silicon Valley technocrats:

The culmination of the process would be a cybernetic society composed of specialists ranked hierarchically according to their aptitude for consuming, and making others consume, the doses of power necessary for the functioning of a gigantic social computer of which they themselves would be at once program and print-out. (73-4)

He ends by expressing hope that the disaffected proletarian youth of the first world, and the peasantry of the third world, will have none of this, and will join forces in revolt, putting an end to the bourgeois half-revolution:

The revolt against the welfare state will set the minimum demands for world revolution. You can choose to forget this, but you forget it at your peril. As Saint-Just said, those who make a revolution by halves are only digging their own graves. (74)