The long-feared capitulation of American consumers has arrived. According to Thursday’s G.D.P. report, real consumer spending fell at an annual rate of 3.1 percent in the third quarter; real spending on durable goods (stuff like cars and TVs) fell at an annual rate of 14 percent.
To appreciate the significance of these numbers, you need to know that American consumers almost never cut spending. Consumer demand kept rising right through the 2001 recession; the last time it fell even for a single quarter was in 1991, and there hasn’t been a decline this steep since 1980, when the economy was suffering from a severe recession combined with double-digit inflation.
Also, these numbers are from the third quarter — the months of July, August, and September. So these data are basically telling us what happened before confidence collapsed after the fall of Lehman Brothers in mid-September, not to mention before the Dow plunged below 10,000. Nor do the data show the full effects of the sharp cutback in the availability of consumer credit, which is still under way.
People have enough and have had enough. Oil prices were sky high this summer. And we knew that the oil companies were making out like bandits. It may also be that we knew that they had us by the short and curlies. As long as we needed their crack, we were their bitches, selling ourselves into debt slavery.
The consumer as producer? Please. The truth behind that Web 2.0 cliche is that the consumer is a producer of debt, massive amounts of circulating, productive debt, debt that is split and bundled, bought and sold, insured and serviced. Entire industries have been based on feeding the debt-machine (I imagine here the patients at the obesity clinic featured somewhere on cable; their families buying them junk food, their friends helping them sneak food in behind their nurses backs; everyone knows its killing them; but they are all caught in the circuits of feeding and feeling).
We can resist their ads and commercials, their fads and fashions. We don't need one in every color. We aren't consumers, not any more. That's not who we are. That's not a name for the people. It's a name for the industries that rely on us, consuming our incomes, desires, and futures, the best of our imaginations and energies. They displace this name from themselves and project it onto us (like so many clumsy moves in the McCain campaign: accuse your opponent of the crimes you've committed).
And maybe for the first time in too long a time we are in the midst of the political process that is uttering another name for the people, the only proper name.
The workers.
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