Crippled with Consumerism

ANIMAL WITH A LIST

There are many definitions to human beings, thinking animal, laughing animal, tool making animal... and so on. I think, a much more apt definition will be : “animal with a never ending list”. Why? You don’t agree? Just reflect a little. Think a little. The list of things which we want. How large it is? Yes. It is much larger than what we can imagine. Let us do a mental experiment. It is going to be interesting. Let us make an exhaustive list of goods and services we require in a day. Yes, we require besides material goods, a variety of services too. These goods have been produced by very many different people at places near and far, transported and sold by still more different people.

As soon as you wake up in the morning you may like to have a bed coffee. That will require coffee powder, milk, sugar, fuel and vessels, cup, saucer.... etc. And then your toiletries.... tooth paste (powder), brush, blade soap, oil tower, pipe water... Then comes the newspaper, the radio, the chair you are sitting on... all are goods purchased by you. Your break fast alone will require the services of very many people. The rice, the urud, the salt and oil for your dosa are the products of the labour of very many different people, now purchased by you. the mustard , the chilly and the coconut in your chutney come from still different quarters. Then there is your travel, the postal service, your enjoyment, radio and television, education of your children, health care, recreation... every minute are human being is linked with several others in a consumer producer relationship. In a way human beings can be defined as a “Universal consumers”. Every thing he needs, whether goods or services he payments for and purchases.

We can think of yet another experiment. We organise a small little project work for the 11th class students of a medium town school We divide them into batches of three or four. there will be say 10-12 batches. To each batch give one 200 page note book and a task. They have to go to all the shops in the town and collect the list of all individual items sold by them and the source of their purchase / production. One batch would cover stationery items, another would cover electronic durable consumer goods, yet another textiles, some will cover drugs and pharmaceuticals, some provision stores, some jewelry... Some schools, some hospitals, some post offices some other offices.... and so on. Soon, you will find each one of them coming back and asking for another note book and yet another.

I conducted a small experiment of a different sort. I knew a nearby stationery shop. He was my friend. Each year end he makes a stock list of all the items in the shop. he gave me a copy of that one. There were over three thousand separate items listed in it.

It will be an extremely rewarding experiment for a family- father mother and children- all together prepare a list of all the things which they have purchased during the past few months and they want to purchase in the future. Quantities and prices are not important. Just the names of things- that will do. It will take some days to complete such a .list. But once completed, you will be astounded. the number of items will run into hundreds, if not thousands. Without certain of these items you cannot live.

DEPENDENT HUMANS

Your comforts and your very life depend on so many hundreds and thousands of persons. It would never have occurred to you that through a very simple act of striking a match sick, to light your stove, you are getting indebted to several hundred people either directly or indirectly. Chart I gives a simplified version of a box of matches and the activities which lead to it. One can make this net.work even more elaborate by bringing in tertiary and further connections. And for each and every one of the items you consume there is a similar network of interconnections. It is an irony that still human beings think about themselves and for themselves only. We just cannot live a day without enjoying the fruits of labour of hundreds of others.

What are the implications ? We always like this? Its implications are many. And the complications are even more . But, no, it had not been like this all the time, Human beings used to live differently. Why, even at the beginning of this century, that is less than a century ago, we used to buy much less things from the market. There were not even one hundred of the present things in the market in those days. Even twenty thirty years ago things were different. There has been a sort of an explositve increase in the number of goods that are sold in the market. And this increase is continuing unabated.

EVOLUTION OF THE CONSUMING HUMAN

Ten thousand years ago, there were no market. No commodities. Primitive human being was a gatherer. He was not a producer. Agriculture was partly the first productive activity of human beings. But it was, in those early days, for own consumption and not for sale. When production increased, when division of labour became signified, markets began to apper. Still they were small ones. only a very small fraction of things that were produced was ‘sold’. It was only with the advent of capitalism, the scene changed so drastically. the sole objective of production became exchange and profit. More profit means more production and more exchange, more commodities, more markets. Like living systems social systems too cannot remain static. Either they grow or they decay and die and the natural tendency is to resist death. Capitalism can survive only through expansion. it has to, by its very nature, continuously increase production of goods and services. As we observed earlier it is not only things, material goods that we want. We require a multitude of services education, health, transportation, communication, recreation, administration, maintenance of law and order etc. etc. so many of them. Here also we are dependent on too many other people. This too was not the case long ago. First of all we never required so many services at that time. Most of them we could ourselves do. But today we are dependent for anything and every thing on others. Every thing is a commodity today- goods services- for which you have to pay a price. Why, even parents and children are gradually becoming commodities. Even former socialist countries, which argued that production is for consumption and not for exchange, were fetish about consumption. they wanted to surpass the capitalist nations in consumption. It is a mad rush, the world over. Even in a poor country like India there is sizable section of the society which can and are rushing after goods.

The implication of this is grave. It is threatening the very existence of life, notably human life, but all forms of life on this planet. These implications can be broadly listed as below. 1) Excessive inter-connectedness and consequent breakdown, leading to extensive and intensive problems. 2) Increasing production of commodities which have exchange values and perhaps use value but doubtful welfare values. 3) Enrichment of a few and immiserisation of of many. 4) excessive and wasteful consumption of limited natural resources. 5) Excessive environmental destruction leading to global catastrophes.

INTERCONNECTEDNESS

As we have seen the life of an average family in any part of India, and in most parts of the developing countries, is so intimately interconnected with the life and activities of tens of thousands of other people, some within the country and some outside the country. And all of us are cogs in the giant wheel of economy. In a ten million steel plant neither the workers nor the public has any control. Not even the managers? In a power systems of tens of thousands of megawatts most of the consumers are at the mercy of a few decision makers. The whole world has become one interconnect4ed market controlled not by the idealistic market forces of free competition, but the sophisticated and aggressive practices of a few transnational giants and supported by the military strength of the “developed” countries, especially the USA. This is what over commoditization and run away production has done to the humanity. Since our lives are so dependent on the activities of many other people who themselves are not their own masters, the whole system is becoming unstable. there is the danger of human society completely losing its equilibrium.

USE WITHOUT WELFARE

As we have seen earlier our markets are flooded with commodities of all description. There are essential things like food, water, clothing shelter etc. These things which make life less , less tiresome, more comfortable- it is more comfortable to ride a bus than walk twenty Kilometers. But whether you require a car, and that too for each member of a house one car, is another point. A soap may be more convenient than soap powder or green gram powder. But how many varieties of soap you want. It would have been not that bad if you did not have to spend more resources to make a variety. But that is not the case. They spend enormous resources to coax you, through advertisements of all sorts, to purchase one brand of soap in preference to another. This could be even more than the resources used in actually making the soap. This is true not only of soaps but of every thing else also. Newspapers use more than sixty percent of the pages for advertisements- which are in the ultimate analysis basis, heinous tactics to convince you that you want very badly something, which is not of much use to you. Doordarshan , all other TV broadcasting companies, as everybody knows, run by the finances obtained through advertising- most of them unethical.

Goods have an exchange value provided they have a use value too. But deoes everything which has got a use value, a welfare value too? Most of the goods articles we are induced to buy have very little or zero welfare value. However, under a system which can thrive only on the profits obtained through production and exchange of goods and services and that too tat a continuously increasing rate we cannot escape from wasteful production.

INCREASING RICH-POOR DIVIDE

The results of such a production and exchange process is a continuous increase in the gap between the rich and the poor. this is true not only within one country and but also between countries. On a global scale, the gap between the industrialised, developed, nations and the developing or poor nations has been increasing continuously and that too with an accelerated pace. For example, the average per capita income of “developed” countries in 1960 was 9 times that of the average per capita income of less developed countries. In 1990 it was 12 times. Within India we have seen people getting richer and richer and a lot many get poorer and poorer. There is a sizable upper middle class which may not extraordinarily rich, but are rich any way. They are a crazy lot, as crazy as an average American or a Japanese. there is no limit to their greed. They are ready to sell their own motherland so that they can “enjoy” all that the world can offer, so that they can live a most decadent life. If we have a profit based development policy and not a welfare based one, this invariably, is the outcome. The two, profit and welfare are generally, mutually contradictory.

WASTAGE OF NATURAL RESOURCES

An average American home of three members, father, mother and child has 2-3 Television Sets, 2-3 telephones, 6-7 radios, 1-2 cars and so on. the per capita energy consumption of some developed nations, and some developing nations are given in Table

Table gives a comparison of number of years by which the known reserves of some of our resources will be exhausted at the present average rate of world consumption and at a world average rate equal to that of an average American. The very high rate of consumption of resources is necessitated by two factors: a) production of increasing quantities of consumption goods with doubtful welfare value, mainly for the purpose of profit. This can go to unimaginably ludicrous extends of first separating the constituents of a natural product into different components, for example polished rice and barn, and joining them to imitate the natural product thus completing a wasteful cycle, somebody making profit at each stage, but the earth losing its natural resources, b) production of weapons and other military equipments. Today, human specie is safe from all other animal species. It requires very little weapons for protection against animals. The entire weaponry is to protect from and attack other human beings all because a few want more and more and more of everything than others and for this they have to use force. What an inhuman thing! It is strange that most of us fail to see the absurdity of war, all the more today when we can produce enough of everything necessary for a comfortable living for all – every human being.

Table

Table ... gives the most important development or welfare parameters of a nation, its average life expectation and the per capita consumption of certain resources and commodities for a few selected countries. The inference is self evident.

ENVIRONMENTAL DAMAGE

There was a time in human history when human beings were puny little things in comparison to natural forces. Whatever little scratches and scars they made on the surface of earth used to get automatically healed. But the situation has changed, changed drastically. Today humanity can inflict irreversible damages to the earth and make it unconducive for life. the excessive release of green house gases, especially CO2 from power stations and vehicles, the release of ozone killing gases, the accumulation of non-degradable solid wastes and radio active wastes, the pollution of air and water... This world is becoming increasingly non-livable and may, at not a far distant future, become totally so. Sustainability has suddenly become the key world. The Rio Earth Summit was a response to this situation. However the major cause of the eco-catastrophe and the main perpetrators were not clinched at that conference. Instead, the victims of the eco-catastrophe were painted as the sinners. The “developed” nations blamed the population and population growth in the developing countries as the cause- not even as one of the causes, but as the cause- for the eco-degradation that is taking place in the world. What a factual misrepresentation and what a theoretical bankruptcy!

The fundamental characteristic of life – any life form- is to resist death and to procreate and increase population. True, in a given areas there are limits to increase in population, above which scarcity of food and psychological stresses can cause a total breakdown in the normal behavioral pattern of the species, which were developed in its struggle for survival. This may lead to the extinction of the species. This has happened to many a species earlier. It can happen to human species too. But the question is this: is the present human population anywhere near this critical size. The answer is ‘no’ . If we organize our societies more scientifically and in a humane way, we can support two to three times the present world population easily, with a high quality of life. the human life expectation is in the range of 75-80 years. It is the inhuman organization of the society, the unscientific and absurd concept of equating development to consumption and an economic formation demanding exponential increase in production, exchange and consumption of commodities of doubtful welfare value and the consequent shortages of resources leading to wars which in turn accelerate the depletion of resources- it is this that is the real culprit. the industrialized nations are the culprits.