Materialism/Conspicuous Consumption In The 1980s - A Working Class Perspective

'80s moments - what do you remember?

Much is said and written about the "Greed Is Good" 1980s.

But what were they really like for your average working class geezer? And who was and is trilling "conspicuous consumption" and "materialism" regarding that decade?

Firstly, there is no doubt that the 1980s boomed - yuppies arrived and flaunted dosh hideously, Dynasty transformed the American night time soaps - including Dallas - with glitzy, OTT hugely expensive clothing, and many real, everyday people consumed more. There were more things first available or affordable for a start - think mobile phones, compact discs, personal computers, microwave ovens and VCRs.

My family started the decade as they had lived through the previous decade - with a wonky black and white TV and no phone, in a council house which had no central heating, wooden sash windows (which iced over on the inside in the winter and rattled and let in the draughts something awful!) and a kitchen and toilet prefab attached to the back of the house. The prefab had actually been condemned since 1971, and there was a slight gap between it and the house which had developed over the years, where the wind blew through.

And we certainly couldn't take three square meals a day for granted.

I left home in 1983, but my family ended the decade with a VCR, a phone, colour TV with remote control, and microwave oven. Their council house had been extensively modernised in 1987, the prefab removed and a new brick kitchen added, together with new windows and central heating. They now had an upstairs as well as a downstairs loo. The family was eating better food - at least three times a day - and viewing with great interest the blossoming mobile phone and personal computer markets and satellite television.

These things became part of their lives in the 1990s.

By the late 1980s, the cry had gone up from the great and the good: what a greedy decade it had been; we'd been too obsessed with money, possessions and style - how awful we'd been.

What truly hacked me off at the time was that the people making these pronouncements were well heeled journalists and BBC types. And, compared to us, their lives had always been highly materialistic.

And when had these big greedy years that suddenly were the entire 1980s actually happened? 1980? Don't make me laugh! 1981? Pah! 1982? Give me my deelyboppers!

The boom times had been from around 1984 to 1987 in my estimation, when the stock market crash put the frighteners on the yuppie types and things got a little wobbly.

In the years following the 1980s, it has been a great comfort to many to scapegoat the decade as the start of materialism writ large. But when you consider that, in the 1970s and early 1980s, many of us working class folk lived in housing and with facilities that would cause your average 21st century geezer to have a fit of the vapours, it's hardly surprising that we wanted new stuff and wanted to be part of the modern technological world.

And much of the stuff in my family was brought through mail order catalogues on easily repayable terms, just as they'd always shopped for larger items during my childhood.

The people making "greedy '80s" statements now are many and varied. It really is a comforting thing to scapegoat one decade. But the voices are still loudest from the comfortably heeled Guardian and BBC types - and that gets right up my nose!

Round my way, we certainly weren't saying, "Chortle! Chortle! Consume, consume!" in the mid-to-late 1980s. We were just emerging from the long, grey, poor-as-can be 1970s and early '80s, and we went: "Crickey! A VCR! And we can rent one! Isn't that brilliant?!!" or, "A microwave oven? Well, if you're sure they don't give people radiation poisoning, it would be out of this world to be able to cook like that!"

Wikipedia tends to try and glamorise the 1970s and write the 1980s as very ugly indeed, and a lot of that is simply claptrap.

That's not to say that everybody was happy in the 1980s, far from it - unemployment more than doubled in the early 1980s, from one and a half million at the end of the 1970s. Genuine stories of '80s traumas make for heart rending reading or listening.

But the fact remains that for millions of us life improved a great deal, we became better fed, had more material comforts and better lifestyles.

The fact is also obvious, to anybody with a few brain cells, that the view of the decade so familiar to us all, touted by the likes of the BBC, is simply a ridiculous comic book caricature, based on trying to make everything in the 1980s look horrible compared to the mythically beautiful 1970s.

And that view of the 1970s? Ridiculous! Hippies truly were a cutting edge thing of the mid-to-late 1960s, and the only hippie types I encountered in the 1970s (and, indeed, 1980s) were well-heeled, middle class people. That was always the case.You couldn't be dirt poor and drop out!

Punk was the real, fresh and happening thing of the 1970s.

Oh, and to all those reading this who think I was a rabid Tory in the 1980s and that this post is leading up to a great dollop of praise for Maggie Thatcher, think again: I gave up my nice office job and went to work as a care worker in a Social Services home for the elderly in the mid-'80s. I also took the greatest of pleasure in voting Labour (Old Labour, that was, not New).

But to wear tacky, cheap Miami Vice style clothing and be able to have some home comforts and experience modern technology gave me great pleasure.

These days, I'm probably the least "materialistic" person I know - I don't have a TV service subscription, no mobile phone, no microwave oven, no washing machine even.

But that's my choice. I like to rough it, it doesn't give me any right to preach or feel superior.

I wouldn't call your average working class person of today, with a houseful of nice furniture and modern technology (far more than we had in the 1980s), greedy.

But there are many amongst the great and the good who see it as a regrettable trend started in the so-bad-they're-unreal 1980s.

And, coming from their moneyed backgrounds, everything on tap and taken for granted, that makes me seethe!