Collective Consumption

Manuel Castells and Collective Consumption

This link between collective consumption and government was a central feature of the neo-Marxist approach of urban sociologist Manuel Castells. His work, which came to prominence in the mid to late 1970s, set out to explain the precise location of the boundary between private and public (or collective) consumption in Western capitalist societies. He tried to understand the reasons for the limits of state or government intervention. Basically he argued that the state was forced to intervene in order to provide those goods and services “whose organisation and management cannot be other than collective” (Castells 1976, p. 45) because of the size and complexity of the problems they address. Since those services are typically located in urban areas, Castells also used the term collective consumption to help define the nature of the city in advanced capitalist societies, asserting that urban areas were basically organized around collective rather than individual consumption. Consequently, he defined city as a “unit of collective consumption corresponding more or less to the daily organisation of a section of labour power” (Castells 1976, p. 148); in other words, all of the arrangements, such as transportation, necessary for those people who work in the public sector to do their jobs. It is urbanites' shared consumption processes that create for them a common set of experiences [Page 204]that then lead to the development of political action. Political action follows because, although the goods and services collectively consumed are ones that the state must provide (given that capitalism cannot or will not do so), the reality is that typically the state is unable to meet their cost. Hence there is a tendency toward crisis in their provision, a crisis that precipitates urban social movements.

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