Compensatory Consumerism

Capital Vol. 1 - Rules for Radicals - Marx, Capital and the Madness of Economic Reason

Author

Clara Lim
March 03, 2025 • Reading Time: 7 minutes

Despite the preponderance of corn and linen equations, I enjoyed Karl Marx’s Capital vol. 1. The man does indeed have a “certain peculiar charm”, as one of Capital’s contemporary reviewers wrote. Here, let me pen the book at random and provide an example of the man’s prose:

You and I know on the market only one law, that of the exchange of commodities. And the consumption of the commodity belongs not to the seller who parts with it, but to the buyer, who acquires it. To you, therefore, belongs the use of my daily labour-power. But by means of the price that you pay for it each day, I must be able to reproduce it daily, and to sell it again. Apart from natural exhaustion through age, &c., I must be able on the morrow to work with the same normal amount of force, health and freshness as to-day. You preach to me constantly the gospel of “saving” and “abstinence.” Good! I will, like a sensible saving owner, husband my sole wealth, labour-power, and abstain from all foolish waste of it.

I feel so vindicated. Who knew that my “laziness” at work (habitual corner-cutting, low QC standards, gleeful misuse of company time) was, in fact, me preserving my labour-power? Awesome!

Also, while freelancing and doing hourly-wage/gig work in the past 4 years, I paid close attention to my time, income and expenses, trying to bring them in line and optimise things. I was obsessed with finding the minimum amount of work I had to do to secure my continued existence (somewhere between 15 and 20 hours a week, I found).

Reading the (many) pages about the length of the working day, I realised that my preoccupation was accidentally Marxist. For him, time spent working was important, because any labour time above the minimum for self-maintenance = pure profit for the capitalist employer. Marx opposes long hours not just because it’s better for worker welfare, but also to deny the capitalists’ their sought-after profits.

Capital further developed into a coercive relation, which compels the working class to do more work than the narrow round of its own life-wants prescribes.

I meant to finish Capital before starting my new job, hoping to bisect my life neatly in two: the Jobless Hobo Before Times and the Corporate Wageslave Era. Alas, without severance technology, this kind of neat sundering isn’t possible. I’m sure the feeling will pass eventually, but right now, I feel so uncomfortable in this comfortable carpeted middle-class setting, constantly aware that I “sold out” for a fat paycheck and health insurance.

Marx famously characterises it as alienation:

First, the fact that labor is external to the worker, i.e., it does not belong to his intrinsic nature; that in his work, therefore, he does not affirm himself but denies himself, does not feel content but unhappy, does not develop freely his physical and mental energy but mortifies his body and ruins his mind. The worker therefore only feels himself outside his work, and in his work feels outside himself. He feels at home when he is not working, and when he is working he does not feel at home. His labor is therefore not voluntary, but coerced; it is forced labor. It is therefore not the satisfaction of a need; it is merely a means to satisfy needs external to it. […] As a result, therefore, man (the worker) only feels himself freely active in his animal functions – eating, drinking, procreating, or at most in his dwelling and in dressing-up, etc.; and in his human functions he no longer feels himself to be anything but an animal.

Well, is it any wonder white-collar Singaporeans are always at Chagee, on Shopee, and going to Japan? (I’m not judging, by the way. I bought 16 books, a whole bunch of bourgeois groceries, and a Projector membership, all before my first paycheck has even come in.)

Consumption seems the most accessible form of freedom. Along with non-work activities, consuming is a natural way to feel human and to replenish the depleted self, as Marx facetiously argues in an early essay:

Thus political economy – despite its worldly and voluptuous appearance – is a true moral science, the most moral of all the sciences. Self-renunciation, the renunciation of life and of all human needs, is its principal thesis. The less you eat, drink and buy books; the less you go to the theatre, the dance hall, the public house; the less you think, love, theorise, sing, paint, fence, etc., the more you save – the greater becomes your treasure which neither moths nor rust will devour – your capital. The less you are, the less you express your own life, the more you have, i.e., the greater is your alienated life, the greater is the store of your estranged being.

On the other hand, “compensatory consumerism”, as David Harvey calls it in Marx, Capital and the Madness of Economic Reason, has obvious limits:

The rise of ‘compensatory consumerism’ for the working classes is supplemented by conspicuous consumption of ‘hedonistic goods’ within all classes that add up to nothing more than conspicuous waste. The endless pursuit of satisfactions of wants, needs and desires that can never be fulfilled, necessarily parallels endless compounding growth in production.

I don’t know about you, but no matter how much bubble tea I drink, I still can’t forget the fact that I’m doing work I don’t personally care about and creating surplus value for capitalists I don’t even know.

For my sanity, I need to work on something else outside of my scope of employment - something I care about.

So I broke my no-self-help rule to read Saul D. Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals (thanks Gerard for the book!). It’s a Machiavellian guide to community organising and effecting social change. Forget your moral high horse, forget splitting hairs about your “political position”, forget theorising at the expense of action. An effective organiser works in reality, not fantasy - within the existing system, using tools that are actually available.

On that note, I finally got round to visiting Casual Poet Library. It met my expectations: an embarrassing, bourgeois, middle-class self-love temple with way more copies of that sellout Korean Buddhist monk‘s book than necessary. I did have a lot of fun judging those bookshelves. Sorry! It’s funny when moneyed regular jackoffs try to be ~tastemakers~.

Bookshelf content aside, the library is a really good example of realist-pragmatist community organising. The place is crowdfunded, and its ~180 shelves are rented out to individual subscribers, who collectively pay the rent for the shophouse space. Whenever subscribers stop paying, the organisers work methodically down the waitlist. There is zero elitism here, i.e. curation and taste and personal relationships don’t come into the decision-making.

Now, would it have been a better library if it were run by a group of, say, cool-but-broke bookstore employees with killer taste in books? Absolutely! But the deliberate “inclusivity” dramatically increases the chances of the library’s survival. I can respect that.