When I lived in London two years ago, I wrote many articles criticizing how consumerist Western society had become. According to the western anti-consumerist NGO, Adbusters, the average urban Westerner is exposed to around 5,000 advertizing messages in a single day. To walk through London today is to be hit by a barrage of adverts, all inciting one to spend.

I was, and remain, both amused and disgusted by the ridiculous depths to which mass advertising often sank. For example, I saw an advert on the London tube showing a soulful-looking young man in khaki trousers, meditating on a beach. The inscription said –‘Achieve inner peace’, then below, in smaller writing ‘Trousers, £19.99’.

When I go back to London, it strikes me as a society that has lost its way, lost any idea of a higher meaning to life than leisure, entertainment, fame and consumption.

And yet, living here in Moscow, I find myself writing articles celebrating the consumer boom in Russia, writing homilies to IKEA, and eulogies to Eldorado. Is this a contradiction, or have I just sold out?

I think my position is consistent, because the UK and Russia face very different problems. Western society is now at the point where, more or less, an individual’s political freedoms are protected. What is lacking now is moral freedom– freedom from the compulsion to buy, freedom from the insecure need for the approval of others that is the human motive behind much consumption, freedom from needs that are artificially stimulated by advertisers – freedom from one’s own harmful and inflated desires, in other words.

In Russia, by contrast, the challenge is different. What is lacking is political freedom– freedom from the abuse of state bureaucrats; from harassment by OMON, MVD, the FSB or private-sector mafia; freedom of the press; even freedom of religion.

The consumer boom may help in the process of achieving these political freedoms. How? First of all, a consumer boom stimulates the rise of merchants. I don’t mean oligarchs, but entrepreneurs who have developed new companies to take advantage of the consumer boom. Two examples would be Wimm-Bill-Dann dairy goods company, or Tinkoff beer company. This bourgeois class of entrepreneur merchants is the true revolutionary class in Russia – the class that will gradually demand less interference by the state, stronger civil rights, a more genuine media, and more open, predictable and professional government.

Consumerism, as vain and wasteful as it is, has often gone hand in hand with the rise of liberal ideas in the past – in eighteenth century England, for example, the age of Adam Smith was also the age of booming consumerism, as increasingly affluent merchants started to use their greater leisure both to spend more on luxury items, and to read more and discuss political events in cafes. It is not an exaggeration to say that both the Enlightenment and the French Revolution were products of a middle class consumer culture.

Secondly, the consumer boom means the economy becomes less dependent on oil and gas. This in turn means power is less concentrated in the hands of the few individuals who control the oil and gas sector. Economic power is more diversified, which means it is less open to abuse.

Finally, it is to be hoped that the rise in a consumer culture in Russia will lead to a rise in a consumer mentality, i.e that if you are paying for something, you have the right to expect good service. That’s not just an attitude for the private sector, it should translate to the public sector too.

Americans may be the most uptight consumers in the world, noisily complaining in a restaurant at the slightest thing, but this also means they are the people most likely to hold their government to task if they fail to provide a proper service to them. Russia needs more of that American intolerance of mediocre or incompetent service.

Thus, I applaud the rise of consumerism in Russia, even while I condemn the triumph of consumerism in Britain. The challenge in Russia is to secure freedom of the individual from the state. The challenge in Britain is, having secured freedom of the individual from the state, to secure freedom of the individual from his own desires.

This last goal, securing the freedom of the individual from his desires, cannot be done by the state, only by a free-acting individual for himself, which is why I believe the best conditions for it to take place are a liberal society.

Anti-liberal and anti-consumerist societies, in Russia, Belarus and elsewhere, have tried to justify themselves by claiming they free men from consumerism and capitalism, from the tyranny of unnecessary desires.

This claim has its own philosophical tradition, going all the way back to Plato. The great enemy of liberalism claimed that democracy had made Athenians slaves of consumption, slaves of luxury, slaves of the economy, and with all their so-called freedoms they had forgotten the divine in them. Therefore, the enlightened philosopher should seize society and force citizens to follow his theological programme: “the desires of the less respectable majority are controlled by the desires and wisdom of the superior majority”.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau took much from Plato in his critique of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. The liberal West, he asserted, was actually alienated from its true nature, because westerners were addicted to luxuries, and obsessed with their image in other people’s eyes. Government needed to ‘force people to be free’, by legislating so that they only cared for the public interest, rather than their own selfish and superficial desires.

In Russia, Dostoevsky likewise criticized the liberal reform movements of his time. He writes in The Brothers Karamazov: “the world says: ‘You have needs, therefore satisfy them…even increase them’…But what comes of this right to increase one’s needs? For the rich, isolation and spiritual suicide; for the poor, envy and murder…Taking freedom to mean the increase and prompt satisfaction of needs, they distort their own nature, for they generate many meaningless and foolish desires, habits and the most absurd fancies in themselves. They live only for mutual envy, for pleasure-seeking, and for self-display.”

Such writers do an excellent job at painting the moral corruption that often accompanies individual freedom. What is freedom, they say? The freedom to destroy oneself in luxury, debt, anxiety and decadence.

But what is the alternative? The alternative is the state dictating what people should or should not desire, and enforcing its version of the truth onto its people, often violently. And what this amounts to, in Plato, Rousseau and Marx, is a totalitarian society.

There are many obvious flaws with a totalitarian model, but perhaps chief among them is that its main justification – making its citizens more moral – is doomed to failure. You can’t force someone to be moral. A moral act done under state compulsion is not a moral act. The only way people can morally grow is by having the freedom to sin or not to sin.

The challenge, one that I’m very conscious of, is whether the people of a liberal, free market society totally geared towards consumption could suddenly awaken, as it were, and choose a different path, or whether their habits and patterns of consumption are too ingrained. There is also the question of whether being subjected to 5,000 adverts a day is actually a Pavlovian encroachment on one’s freedom.

My tentative answer to these questions is that only experience teaches you something is healthy or harmful. Only the experience of having all the consumer products we want will teach us that there is more to life than consumer products. And if we destroy ourselves? Well, at least it was our choice.

Julian Evans is a British freelance journalist based in Moscow. The article is written specially for "Eurasian Home".

June 28, 2005