Shelf conscious

With her new book, Reluctant Capitalists: Bookselling and the Culture of Consumption (University of Chicago Press, $35), Laura J. Miller enters the struggle between chains and independents that has dominated the book business over the last 40 years. Miller favors the independents, and it’s ironic, then, that her major achievement is one of marketing rather than content. She’s proved decisively that, no matter how boring it is, a book about bookstores is going to get some buzz. The copy we picked up was prominently displayed on the front table of one of Chicago’s most venerable independents, 57th Street Books.

In fact, the volume’s monochromatic gloom is flecked throughout with glimmers of interesting books that might have been. Miller could have, for example, put together a bubbly, gossipy history of contemporary bookselling. Or she could have written a fuck-the-chains polemic in the style of someone like Tom Frank. Miller does manage to get off a couple of zingers at the expense of the chains, as when she notes sardonically that their customers “savor the victory of a book discount equivalent to the price of the mocha latte they purchase in the store café.”

But, as an academic, Miller mainly mouths bland circumlocutions and picks on capitalism, more or less in that order. Thus, her final call to arms claims “…as consumers, we try to reconcile the act of acquiring commodities for the self with a need to make meaning, which sometimes includes a commitment to bettering the human condition. The ironies are endless, but they do not need to stop us.”

Mealy-mouthed quotes aside, Miller does have a couple of points to make. Her central one is simply that consumption is a political act. What and where you shop affects others. Because people have a special reverence for books, Miller argues, the plight of the independent bookstore has raised the average person’s consciousness of his or her role as “citizen consumers.” Those who own or shop at independents place community, diversity and love of reading above bargain hunting. Such individual changes of heart and emphasis may well have some effect—with due caveats and qualifications, of course—on capitalism as we know it. Hallelujah.

Miller seems to be under the confused impression that the consumer-as-citizen is an outré idea—one that many find peculiar or even offensive. Yet shopping-as-morality is almost a liberal shibboleth at this point. From vegetarians to Wal-Mart haters, sometimes it seems like being a radical is as much about lifestyle accoutrements as it is about voting record. And leftists aren’t alone, as the religious right’s oft-launched boycotts of Hollywood indicate.

What Miller ignores is that under capitalist ideology, consumption has always had a moral and political dimension. In his own day, Adam Smith was as well-known for his book The Theory of Moral Sentiments as he was for The Wealth of Nations. Moreover, for Smith’s contemporaries, the two topics were linked. Freedom of economic action was a moral right; restricting it resulted in unhappiness, poverty and unfairness. Before capitalism, morality was spiritual—it was about a relationship with God, and was discussed in terms of sin and death. But under capitalism, morality is material; it’s about one’s relationship to stuff, and is discussed in terms of who has what, and whether that’s fair or just.

Not that resistance is futile. Miller discusses some of the steps you can take: Forming a union, as some chain-bookstore workers have done, is a good possibility; lobbying to keep a chain out of your neighborhood is another. But the suggestion that you can transform the world just by altering where you make discretionary purchases is about as ridiculous as arguing that the leadership of the country is hanging on how you vote come November. If you want change, organize. If you want to shop, please, just shop.