Individualism in Consumer’s Society

Individual, unique and the exploitment of the new middle class.

Introduction

This is the first part (and chapter) of “Individualism in Consumer’s Society” and its point is to legitimate the whole book and theories expressed in it. Therefore this chapter is a little more weak philosophically and might feel “old” and full of already expressed theories.

Let me start by asking a question: is the individual an individual? This question may seem peregrine to those who read it, for if an object is such, then it cannot be otherwise. However, I would like to ask whether an individual can really call itself an individual. The individual is an entity, it is, by its very nature, only such if there are other individuals around it. The individual is fundamentally the individual in a pluralist world. The individual is such only if there is a society to make him so. The individual needs society, for without it he is a Stirnerian ‘unique’. Ergo if we define the individual as unique living in society, making him, as unique, emancipated from it, we are committing a fallacy. The unique is only unique if it can be self-managing and the individual in a society must have inter-social exchanges, thus making him a ‘non-unique’ by nature. So it can be said that an individual, as liberalism defines it, is not an individual. The individual does not exist; or at least this conception of the individual trapped in society does not exist, because the anti-social individual does not exist by nature; much less does it exist in capitalist society. Capitalist society requires the individual to be part of a ‘society’, the basis of capitalism itself says this is logically true. In fact, Smith, who certainly was not a communist, says that the individual doing his own good indirectly does that of others as well, so others are inseparable in the equation. Now we are faced with a doubt, the linguistic referent ‘individual’, with me as the sender, is deemed non-existent by its very nature, now it is up to the receiver to accept or reject the hypothesis (Lyotard, “The Postmodern Condition”). Now then, if one follows this line there are two possible responses, one of assent and one contrary. If the answer is assent, then one is already admitting the elimination of individualism as it is represented today; if it is contrary then I will actually have to bring arguments in my favour. The individual is such only because we are told so. We are told that the individual is ‘himself’ extracted from others, that he is alone and only if he remains so can he call himself an individual. To the assertions made by those who are against my thesis, I would like to pose an opposite, namely, is the individual an individual when he is alone? My answer would be no. The individual, individualistically, needs the help of someone else in order to find himself. For example: a person suffering from depression needs support. Now you will tell me that this case is one in isolation, but I would like to put the statistics on the increase in depression among young people as a counterpoint. As we can see, they tell us that young people become more and more depressed as society goes on. Ergo capitalist society brings us, or at least those who have yet to imagine a future, into a depressive state, ergo a state of necessary help. Therefore, as we move forward, those who need someone else increase, ergo making the necessary help no longer a special case, but a common one. This is given by the necessity of the system to place the poor in an average state, from which they are unlikely to emerge positively, and the rich in an ever higher state, and to do this the average must become the newly exploited. Now both ‘vetero-communists’ and ‘neo-conservatives’ and ‘neo-liberals’ will tell me that I am simply complaining as a dissatisfied middle-class. These will not change their minds any more than they have changed it before, however, in the face of accusations I would like to pose some answers, for those who actually espouse such questions out of sheer curiosity. To this I would respond by saying that exploitation today is no longer only based on the labour that is produced, but also on the labour that is bought. In the consumerist society, the ‘mental’ exploitation of the consumer is posited as the increase of capital. From here we understand that the proletarian is not society’s preferred exploited, which is why wages are raised by the large multinationals. It suits them to have ‘well’ paid workers, who then spend their money on the products of the multinationals themselves. Taking Pepsi as an example, it offers a wide variety of products, many of which are so far removed from the brand that we hardly know, or remember, that it is they who produce them. So if we put it as a possibility that a Pepsi worker would prefer to buy Coca-Cola, well then we would say that the pay rise is unnecessary; this would be correct if and only if Pepsi only produced beverages, while it also produces food, including Doritos.

Therefore, assuming that the worker from before has to buy the essentials for a Saturday where his favourite team is playing, and assuming that he invites friends over, in addition to drinking, which could very well vary besides soft drinks, he will have to buy pre-packaged food, such as chips and various snacks; ergo, given the great popularity, we could safely assume that he buys Doritos. From here we see how, due to the inherent property of multinationals to produce various products, he eventually buys their products. So in this situation the worker and the consumer coincide, thus making the increase in salary a mere excuse to increase the capital of the multinationals and through various types of advertising the consumer is exploited. If in Marx’s time consumption was the exploitative bourgeois, since the beginning of the modern era, then with expansion in the postmodern era, it has become more and more affordable. Therefore, we should define the increase in wages not as the companies that, for various reasons, decide to pay their employees more, but rather the companies that want to squeeze and squeeze the most out of every human being, now forced to spend on their products due to the oligopoly that is increasingly imposing itself on modern society.