Malls Raise Consumer Debt for the ‘Sheeple’

A large sign hangs above an entrance to the Mall of America July 16, 2002, in Bloomington, Minn. Today the Mall of America receives over 40 million visitors annually. (Mark Erickson/Getty Images)

DURBAN, South Africa—Back in 2002, South Africa hosted a U.N. environmental summit on sustainability. It drew a rag tag army of green activists from all over the world, many excited to visit the now free South Africa that they fought for through the apartheid years, and hoping to meet members of the liberation movement led by Nelson Mandela.

The closest to Nelson Mandela they got was to gather in front of a giant statue, created by a Swedish artist, in a commercial square named after the South African icon. When they pictured the new South Africa, they probably saw the townships where tens of thousands of people marched for justice.

Whole societies are organized around venues for routinized and regimented shopping that is masqueraded through advertising as fun.

Instead, they found themselves in Sandton, a “township” that only capitalists could imagine, an upscale enclave within the city of Johannesburg devoted to corporations, banks, and giant malls even more opulent than similar temples of consumption in other countries. Many wandered around in front of the luxury shops safeguarded by a security army, wondering what that had to do with saving the planet.

South Africa has become a mall country. There’s even one now in Soweto.

A Mall Economy

In the old days, empires colonized countries; now their economic combines colonize consumers into market segments who depend on modern malls to organize the shopping that drives economic life.

The mall is for the modern economy what the factory was for the old one, until consumption trumped production as the engine of economic activity.

We no longer make many goods; we just generate demand and sell goods others produce in a transaction-based culture where whole societies are organized around venues for routinized and regimented shopping that is masqueraded through advertising as “fun.”

In Durban, South Africa, the giant Gateway Mall, with its food stores, restaurants, game parlors, and movie theaters, calls itself a “theater of shopping.” It claims to be the largest in the Southern Hemisphere.

The academic Christopher McElligot sees the mall as a “consumer dreamworld for the constantly moving happiness machine.”

Another professor, Dr. Arzu Seri, goes further and locates malls in the structure of how our modern economies operate, noting, “In shopping malls, the material culture of capitalism creates an appearance of variety, a colorful surface, which hide the uniformity of capitalist relations and the resulting inequality and poverty.”

These institutions are now referred to as pillars of a consumer democracy by analysts writing in the Globalist who say there is a showdown coming between China’s economy and our own.

Write Nicolas Berggruen and Nathan Gardels, “The United States has turned into a borrower and consumer-driven economy dominated by the financial sector and services industry and a country where inequality has grown dramatically. In contrast, China is an investor and export-driven economy that is still industrializing, still largely impoverished and sharply unequal.

“This contrasting dynamic between two clashing systems has generated an imbalance in the global economy that, if not corrected, threatens the peace and prosperity that has so far been achieved through globalization.”

‘Unifying Faith’

Julian Delasantellis speaks in the Asia Times about malls as key to American survival but they are now also a global phenomenon as you can experience every day in South Africa:

“In what is, according to some media reports, the bleakest time in finance history since the moneychangers were driven from the Temple, Americans keep spending. How can they not? … No matter what the politicians bleat on in the Iowa cornfields about the centrality of Jesus in American life, the country’s real unifying faith, affirmed no matter what race, color, creed, gender, or sexual orientation, is mindless consumerism.