Consumption and Violence

It is difficult to say something new about 1968, Joachim Scharloth wrote in 2011. Alexander Sedlmaier seeks to do so by investigating the relation between consumption and violence, though he expands his time-frame to include protests in West Germany from the late 1950s to the unification in 1990. Questions of consumption were, he argues, ‘historically interlinked with discourse on the state’s monopoly on violence, terrorism, war, revolution and genocide’ (p. 1). Consumption was, in other words, central to leftist critiques of modern society. Indeed, it will come hardly as a surprise that left-wing critics were deeply sceptical about modern consumer society that only concealed, they argued, the real dearth of life under capitalism. To distance himself from leftist critiques, Sedlmaier develops the concept of ‘regimes of provision’, which he defines as a ‘network of activities that attaches consumption to the power relations that make it possible and at the same time hinders other forms of consumption and production’ (p. 11). Leftists, he suggests, did not criticise consumption per se, but a historically specific regime of provision. They longed, that is, for a different organisation of consumption, which brought them into conflict with the forces of order that sought to defend and maintain the existing regime of provision. ‘Even in an age of affluence’, he writes, ‘militant protest and political violence can essentially be traced back to competing concepts of moral economy’ (p. 21)

Capitalism · Consumption (sociology · Genocide · Left-wing politics · Militant · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Social science · Sociology · Communism, Protests, Social Movements · European history and politics · Italian Fascism and Post-war Society · Law