Collective Consumption

Collective consumption draws a distinction between those goods and services provisioned and consumed primarily by individuals and those that require mass provision, most usually through the state, such as public transport and mass education services. The term was developed by Manuel Castells in his 1977 book, The Urban Question, as a critical concept for explaining urban change in the postwar era. Being an essential concept in Marxist urban sociology, the social organization and process of collective consumption is important for understanding urban politics in advanced capitalist societies, contributing to accounts of consumer culture through its recognition that much consumption is collectively provisioned: consumer culture from this perspective is not only a matter of individuals and households purchasing goods and services from markets (e.g., through retail provision).

For Castells, to reproduce a labor force adequate for capitalist productive activity, it became necessary to provide collective means of consumption, what he terms the collective means for reproducing labor power. Castells distinguished conditions for simple and extended reproduction of labor power. The former refers to housing and minimal material amenities, such as lighting, sewers, and roads. The later relates to three systems: (1) the economic system (biological reproduction), such as green space; (2) the institutional system (development of the capacities for socialization), such as school amenities; and (3) the ideological system, such as cultural amenities. The public facilities and service in education, health care, transport, cultural amenities (e.g., art galleries, museums, libraries), and so on, are therefore necessary to ensure healthy, skilled, and socialized workers and the long-term interest of the capitalist economy as a whole.

[Page 199]In the postwar period, and accompanied by the development of monopoly capitalism, the state played a vital role in the provision of collective consumption. This took two forms: direct aid (often through subsidy or tax incentives) to capitalist monopolies, and the taking over of sectors crucial for the reproduction of labor power, such as health, education, collective amenities, and housing. As it massively and systematically intervened in the socialization of consumption, the state, according to Castells, became the veritable arranger of the processes of consumption for a whole range of goods and services. However, the contradictory nature between collective consumption and state provision became the root of urban struggles in which the dominated classes came to expect and demand increasingly more public services. As noted by J. David Greenstone and Paul E. Peterson, this was exemplified by the urban crisis of the 1970s, when the deterioration of public services ultimately resulted in conflicts and urban social movements.

Indeed, Castells's examination of the “urban question” was largely focused on the political significance of collective consumption in relation to the social relations between different groups. It was in this sense that individual consumption became less important than collective consumption. He suggested, “as the degree of objective socialization of the process is advanced, as the concentration of the means of consumption and their interdependence is greater, as the administrative unity of the process is more developed” (Castells 1977, 445), collective consumption will come to dominate and structure individual consumption. In other words, urban conflicts and relations between social groups have become increasingly related to the provision of collective consumption. On one hand, there are struggles of the dominated class who are concerned with organization and distribution of collective consumption; on the other, the state intervention makes the units of consumption the real source of order in everyday life and comes to form the political apparatus of the dominant classes.

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