{"resolved":true,"match_type":"uuid","source_type":"original_book","book_id":"e38ef66b-e3ac-494b-b5ea-9cc05b2975d8","title":"Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies Communicative Capitalism and Left Politics","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":null,"requested_by":"printed_page","book":{"source_type":"original_book","book_id":"e38ef66b-e3ac-494b-b5ea-9cc05b2975d8","id":"e38ef66b-e3ac-494b-b5ea-9cc05b2975d8","uuid":"e38ef66b-e3ac-494b-b5ea-9cc05b2975d8","title":"Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies Communicative Capitalism and Left Politics","normalized_title":"democracyandotherneoliberalfantasiescommunicativecapitalismandleftpolitics","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":null,"isbns":[],"parsed":true,"ai_readable":true,"document_type":"book","page_count":229,"navigation_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/e38ef66b-e3ac-494b-b5ea-9cc05b2975d8","title_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/title/Democracy%20and%20Other%20Neoliberal%20Fantasies%20Communicative%20Capitalism%20and%20Left%20Politics","fixed_page_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/e38ef66b-e3ac-494b-b5ea-9cc05b2975d8/page/{printed_page}","path_api_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/book/e38ef66b-e3ac-494b-b5ea-9cc05b2975d8/page/{printed_page}","read_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/e38ef66b-e3ac-494b-b5ea-9cc05b2975d8","page_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/e38ef66b-e3ac-494b-b5ea-9cc05b2975d8/page","search_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/e38ef66b-e3ac-494b-b5ea-9cc05b2975d8/search"},"page":{"printed_page":69,"pdf_page":79,"physical_index":79,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"ed3afd032444e5d9f404f33742c5ebedbb3a3cbeb2e579797e7ffa7306fc37b0"},"chapter":"Comunicative Capitalism & Left Politics","content":"Not al accounts of consumption begin from excess or luxury-Daniel Miller in particular has done important work on consumption as provisioning.57 Nonetheless, images of excessive consumers abound and in fact determined debate in the U.S. Congress over the (typicaly misnamed) Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2005. In an argument characteristic of those ofered in support of the legislation, Tim Kane, a research fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation, rejected \"the liberal line that some fity percent of modern bankruptcies are driven by healthcare emergencies\" and lauded the bill for \"making it harder for people to abuse the system and feign povertY:' 58 For him, as well as for the majority of senators and representatives who approved the hill, overhauling bankruptcy law was \"essential\" to helping \"bankrupt Americans break the bad habits of over consumption:' These voices, along with those of economists and sociologists considering consumerism strictly in terms of excess and luxury] have little to say about provisioning, or about the rising costs of healthcare, housing, education, and transportation, on the one hand, and the collapse of pension funds and increases in layofs and unemployment, on the other. How they conceptualize consumption, in other words, has less to do with actual practices than it does with the image of the insatiable consumer, the strange attractor orienting or structuring their analyses. Moreover, even as they criticize the consumption of \"experiences;' that is, of travel, leisure, culture, and spirituality, they too . often neglect the fact of the broader commodification and marketization of ever more aspects of daily life such tpat people have little opportunity to do anything other than consume.\n\nThe image of the excessive consumer saturates popular media. Magazines, newspapers, and television shows employ a vocabulary of abundance. Women are said to pickup \"armloads\" of sweaters ar t-shirts-one in every color! Consumers scoop up or snatch up \"must haves:' In the United States, the market for min storage facilties as well as for closet organizing systems is rapidly expanding as consumers run out of places to store their extra stuf. Mainstream media coverage of \"Black Friday\" -the Friday after Thanksgiving when shoppers eager to cash in on Christmas bargains send retailers into the black as they post their first profits of the year-features images of mobs and mayhem. A television news report from an AB c - afiliated station in the San Francisco area describes a common scene: \"Stores created a shopping frenzy on the day after Thanksgiving that turned ugly and even violent. Here and across the country] shoppers fought over merchandise, and in one case, trampled others. The rush to get into a Michigan Wal-Mart store when the doors opened turned into a stampede. Shoppers fel and tripped over each other. A lady lost her wig and quickly put it back on as the melee continued. At the Best Buy store in San Carlos, early morning shoppers created a mob scene just to get bargain-priced laptops and other electronics.\"59 The British novelist Sophie Kinsella has written a popular series featuring an excessive conumer-Confessions of a Shopaholic, Shopaholic Takes Manhattan, Shopaholic Ties the Knot, Shopaholic and Sister, and Shopaholic Has a Baby. The novels' protagonist is Rebecca Bloomwood, a compulsive shopper who spends in order to save and who, in the initial book of the series, works as a financial journalist, dispensing the advice she doesn't follow. Her purchases always make a kind of immediate sense, thereby reformatting the ostensibly responsible chqices presupposed in descriptions of neoliberal markets as a kind of nonsense. Enjoined by the superego to shop, buy, and enjoy, she fails when she does and she fails when she doesn't. She fails when she does by overspendi:p.g, overconsuming, running up debt, and risking bankruptcy. She fails when she doesn't because by not shopping she will lose her already fragile identity; she will have no way to signify w.ho and that she is, where and how she belongs. The first book, Confessions of a Shopaholic, ends with Bloomwood-her credit cards maxed out-successfully a<sup>v</sup>oiding bankruptcy in two quite predictable ways: she sels her belongings, thus confirming the importance of free trade, and marries a wealthy businessman.\n\nFREE TRADE\n\n69","previous_page":68,"next_page":70}