The cultural contradictions of commercialised asceticism
There is no shortage of proposed ways to break the “cycle of consumerism”. Self-help guides, Forbes articles, and YouTube channels encourage “No-Buy Years” to cut out all extraneous purchases. Such abstinence from buying is often, though not necessarily, coupled with “de-cluttering” one’s living space by getting rid of superfluous items. This has produced a noticeable rise in donations to charity shops, especially after the popular 2019 Netflix series Tidying Up With Marie Kondo.
These practices are a kind of moderate asceticism. They involve depriving oneself of certain desires regarded as indulgences, but not to the levels seen in various monastic traditions around the world. Popular reasons given for such moderate-ascetic practices include environmental sustainability, anti-consumerism (often, though not always, understood as resisting capitalist values), and the hope that possessing fewer material objects will help produce a “truer” happiness. This moderate asceticism is highly commercialised. As seen from the abundance of self-help books and online series, there is a thriving market for disciplined abstinence from buying and the wellness industry is keen to cater to it.
Most can appreciate the irony that “asceticism sells”. Nevertheless, this is not simply a case of capitalism co-opting a non- or anti-capitalist practice by commodifying it. Rather, as the sociologist Daniel Bell acutely observes, capitalism has always contained contradictory drives towards asceticism and hedonism. Commercialised asceticism manifests this internal tension.
Asceticism, hedonism, and capitalism
In his 1976 book The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, Bell proposes that contemporary society is an uneasy amalgam of three distinct “realms”, each with its own normative drives, which legitimate different, even contrasting, kinds of behaviour. The techno-economic realm is hierarchical and bureaucratic; the political realm is at least formally committed to participation and equality; the cultural realm is concerned with self-enhancement and fulfilment. To Bell, this disjuncture produces the sorts of inner conflict the individual experiences and ideologically expresses as “alienation”, “depersonalisation”, and so forth. Additionally and importantly, Bell identifies a tension within the economic realm:
“In the world of capitalist enterprise, the nominal ethos in the spheres of production and organization is still one of work, delayed gratification, career orientation, devotion to the enterprise. Yet, on the marketing side, the sale of goods, packaged in the glossy images of glamour and sex, promotes a hedonistic way of life whose promise is the voluptuous gratification of the lineaments of desire. The consequence of this contradiction…is that a corporation finds its people being straight by day and swingers by night.” (The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, p. xxv)
In short, capitalism fosters both an ascetic ethos and a hedonistic ethos: it drives people towards both disciplined restraint and immediate gratification. Applying this insight to present-day commercialised asceticism, such moderate-ascetic practices are not contrary to capitalist values, even if some of their participants believe otherwise. Rather, phenomena like No-Buy Years represent the partial absorption of an ethos ordinarily associated with capitalist enterprise into the sphere of capitalist consumption, which appeals to people as a possible solution to the feelings of alienation or depersonalisation that Bell attributes to such structural and contradictory drives.
In left-wing circles, this is obscured in part by the common, but erroneous, tendency to read Karl Marx’s writings on how capitalism creates “artificial” needs and desires as anti-consumerist. This reading ignores Marx’s belief that, whilst this proliferation of needs and desires can manifest in irrational ways, it is a “great civilizing influence of capital” precisely because it expands human wants beyond basic food and shelter to art, literature, travel, decoration, and so forth. Bell can therefore provide a useful corrective to people’s propensity to conflate anti-consumerism with anti-capitalism and thereby cast asceticism as anti-capitalist.
This misidentification is perhaps most noticeable when we look back to one of Bell’s most significant influences, namely Max Weber. Weber’s classic essay The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904–05) is frequently misread as an argument for the causal primacy of religious beliefs in the genesis of capitalism. In my view, it is best understood as an examination of the encounter between and fusion of, on the one hand, certain Protestant groups’ asceticism and, on the other hand, the ethic of the calling. This produced the “spirit” of capitalism, which in turn encountered and fused with the “form” of capitalism. Whether or not Weber was correct about these “elective affinities”, it is striking that so many current practitioners of commercialised, moderate asceticism believe that they are resisting capitalist values by acting more like the thrifty, austere, Calvinist businessmen that Weber famously analyzed in his study of nascent capitalism.
Reconsidering commercialised asceticism
To be clear, there are perfectly rational grounds for wanting to buy less. Needing to pack fewer items is practically convenient for someone who moves frequently. Whilst nobody should be under the illusion that personal thrift can overcome a systematic lack of life-chances, having little income forces one to be careful with expenditure and one can hardly be blamed for wanting to save for a rainy day or a special occasion.
The problem begins when one attributes greater political or ethical radicality to such practices than they actually possess. In terms of environmental impact, individual or even mass consumption habits are nothing next to wide-scale industrial practices and believing that changes in the former will lead to changes in the latter rests on an oversimplified “supply and demand” understanding of their interrelationship rather than any strategic consideration of leverage. As for advancing left-wing politics, asceticism is entirely compatible with capitalist logic and encouraging it casts as virtuous the kind of frugal lifestyle into which low-waged workers are forced by material necessity. In this respect, commercialised asceticism often comes across as precisely the kind of secular repackaging of Christian values that Friedrich Nietzsche excoriated: in this case, the exaltation of meekness and simple living.
By placing the ironic phenomenon of commercialised asceticism in the context of the cultural contradictions of capitalism, we can see moderate-ascetic consumption practices in a more sober light.
