Page 47 - Purchasing Power Black Kids and American Consumer Culture

32 . The Shadow of Whiteness

to be scaled. Marx aptly describes the promise of the market: that money
is the ultimate democratizing force, and that as a consumer class status is
(potentially, at least) unimportant: "[As] worker .. as consumer and
.
possessor of exchange values, and that in the form of the possessor of
money, in the form of money he becomes a simple entry of circulation—
one of its infinitely many entries, in which his specificity as a worker is
extinguished" (1969,420-21).
This ability to become "a simple entry of circulation" is a sort of free-
dom, and it is this idea to which a snubbed customer refers when declar-
ing, "Isn't my money just as good as hers?" Ben Fine, in a review of politi-
cal economy and consumption (1995), explores the implication of Marx's
comment:
[Marx's] analysis of a generalized commodity-producing society re-
veals that it does not allow consumption to be read off from other de-
termining economic relations, since quantitative differences in the
ability to consume, derived from the distribution of incomes associat-
ed with different class positions, have no immediate implications for
differentiation in consumption itself. (135)

That is, class standing does not determine what exactly is consumed,
though class certainly has implications for income, raising practical bar-
riers to consumption even though formal barriers might not exist. To put
it another way, consumption under capitalism is largely mediated by cul-
ture, a notion that Pierre Bourdieu has captured in his study, Distinction
(1984), in which he develops the notion of cultural capital.
Bourdieu examines consumption not as a relatively consensual
process, but as one from which some people are actively barred. Accord-
ing to Bourdieu, consumption is partly based in special forms of knowl-
edge and experience that are often acquired through inarticulate, quo-
tidian happenings he terms habitus. In discussing his notion of habitus,
Bourdieu pays special attention to children: in the habitus the child is so-
cialized to the small gestures and bits of knowledge that allow a person
to operate as a member of one's culture or class: how to eat, where to
sit, inflection of the voice, what to wear. This knowledge and experience
accrues as what Bourdieu calls "cultural capital," a term chosen ex-
pressly to communicate the fact that class is not just clothes or educa-
tion or accent but the result of a tremendous, lifelong acquisition
process. As Thorstein Veblen (1912) had noted, class mobility is restrict-
ed not only because climbing the ladder is plain hard work, but because
people at the top are actively trying to prevent those below them from
following too closely.