Bourgeois pianists
CONSUMING INTEREST LESLIE ADRIAN
Have you read the what's-wrong-with-con- sumerism exposé? You may have met it on the middle spread of your daily paper, or in one of the socio-political magazines, or even as a separate monograph. Whatever its origin and outlet, it goes something like this: We live in a consumer society. There are various consumer organisations. All of them, when weighed in the balance, must be found wanting. The Which? people are too middle-class, too obsessed with testing washing machines, too stand-offish from manufacturers. The Consumer Council is too middle-class, too hamstrung by its terms of re- ference to test anything, too pally with manu- facturers. Local consumer groups are too middle-class, too amateur, too exiguous, too lacking in resources. And so on, ad nauseam. Therefore, what we really need is . . .
At this point the paths diverge. Writers tak- ing the low road think consumers can to a greater extent be left to make their own beds and lie on them: exerting their influence in the classic way by withdrawing custom and going elsewhere when uncomfortable. Consumer organisations, in short, could well do less. The other and larger groups of authors, taking the high road, think they ought to do much more. What is required, they argue, is either (a) a con- sumers' political party, or (b) a grand umbrella organisation to tackle all the problems of all consumers in a coordinated way. John Martin and George W. Smith in The Consumer Interest (Pall Mall Press 45s) are the latest to flirt with (a), while Lucy Syson and Rosalind Brooke in an essay in More Potter to the People (Long- mans 21s) make a stirring call for (b).
Though I'm not out just to knock the what's- wrong merchants, I cannot go along with all they say or all they advocate. I certainly don't find it surprising let alone sinister that modern consumer organisations should be predomin- antly middle-class in make-up. Marx notwith- standing, the bourgeoisie is traditionally the group best endowed with the influence, money, education, leisure and energy to initiate social change. But it is not the sole beneficiary of such change. When products are made safer as a re- sult of comparative testing, countless thousands who have never seen the test reports still have cause for thanks. When victorious war is waged on the wrong sort of salesmen, it is not only middle-class doorsteps that are cleansed. When local groups achieve improvements in local ser- vices, the locality as a whole benefits and not one privileged section of it. And when consumer organisations successfully exert pressure for legislative reforms, the laws are of universal application. So please don't shoot the bourgeois pianists; they're doing their best for all of us.
To imply that they might play more softly, leaving the competing jingles of advertising to determine choice, is irrelevant nonsense. The late Senator Estes Kefauver once observed with sweeping simplicity that where there was a multitude of independent producers each vying for business, there need be to cause for Con- sumer concern. But the remark came in the con- text of an historical attack on us trusts and monopolistic practices. Last week, in a speech in Washington to the biennial congress of the International Organisation of Consumers Unions, Senator Philip Hart inveighed against the still continuing American trend to oligopoly and the establishment of price rings made easy by a high level of consumer demand. The same demand is marked (and in some degree actively assisted) in Britain, and elsewhere in Europe. Of the famous consumer rights enunciated by President Kennedy it is precisely the right to choose that is the most generally threatened.
In these circumstances it may indeed be tempting for consumer pianists to aspire to the conductor's baton. The temptation should be resisted. So far from increasing consumer influ- ence, it might actually jeopardise it. As Martin and Smith point out in The Consumer Interest though they seem unconvinced by their own
argument), the creation of a consumers' party could antagonise just those activists in other parties whose support is most needed for furthering consumer—including anti-monopoly —programmes now. There is a lot more to be said for eventually pulling together into one system the at present fragmented work of con- sumer protection. 'We want it to be possible,' announce the Fabian young ladies in their con- tribution to More Power to the People, 'for someone to be able to go to a shop in the High Street and say that his father is not being re- housed with his family, that his children have been sent to a school he does not like, that he has been waiting two years for a hospital bed, that the clothes his wife bought fell to pieces the first time they were washed, or that he is made to take up a credit sale he does not want.' How inexpressibly relieved I was to find this poor fellow's problems linked by 'or,' not 'and.' But how relieved he might be if this dream ser- vice were one day to come true.
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