Excess

Over–consumption is one of the key issues of our time; especially in the Western world. Over the past decade, in the face of historically unprecedented levels of consumer spending in the West – and the more recent threat of economic recession – a vigorous politics of anti–consumerism has emerged in a range of wealthy nations.This timely and original new book provides a comprehensive overview and analysis of what has come to be called the ‘new politics of consumption’; a politics embodied in movements such as culture jamming, simple living, slow food and fair trade. The book offers an examination of anti–consumerism at a time when the idea of ‘consumer excess’ is being re–framed by global recession, and crucially explores what this means for the future of the debates. Drawing on interviews with activists across three continents, and offering a refreshingly accessible discussion of contemporary commentary and theory, Kim Humphery sympathetically explores anti–consumerism as cultural interpretation, lifestyle change, and collective action. While analysing the positive advances of the anti–consumerist movement, Excess: Anti–consumerism in the West also challenges contemporary critical thinking on consumerism. Humphery takes issue with the return to theories of mass culture in the contemporary anti–consumerist polemic and with the tendency for critics to indulge in a high moralism, a pop psychologism, and a self–helpism, all directed more so at the individual as consumer than at the institutions of commercial and political power that drive the systems of consumption. Alternatively, Humphery begins to forge a politics of anti–consumerism that addresses the complexity of material acquisition, which avoids treating consumers as mere dupes in the logic of capitalism, viewing them instead as active participants in a culture which is capable of transformation.