Buying into Change: Mass Consumption, Dictatorship, and Democratization in Franco's Spain, 1939–1982 by Alejandro J. Gómez del Moral

Abstract

Reviewed by: Buying into Change: Mass Consumption, Dictatorship, and Democratization in Franco's Spain, 1939–1982 by Alejandro J. Gómez del Moral Annabel Martín Keywords Spain, Europe, United States, Consumerism, Mass Culture, Advertising, Department Store Culture, Galería Preciados, Corte Inglés, Sears, Supermarkets, Francoism, Dictatorship, Spanish Miracle, Internationalization, Democracy, Gender, Alejandro J. Gómez del Moral, Annabel Martín gómez del moral, alejandro j. Buying into Change: Mass Consumption, Dictatorship, and Democratization in Franco's Spain, 1939–1982. U of Nebraska P, 2021, 366 pp. Buying into Change: Mass Consumption, Dictatorship, and Democratization in Franco's Spain, 1939–1982 is a sharp and intelligent study of the development of a consumer society and its effects on Spanish cultural and social mores during the Franco regime. Segments of Spanish society of the 1960s were invited to join Europe's consumer society and did so with a vengeance. The accumulation of goods, the habitus of the new bourgeoisie, and the depoliticization of the working classes through consumption (goods and tourism) was not "Spanish" in intent, but rather the necessary outcome of a model of early neoliberal modernization grounded on the widespread decoupling of the economic sphere from all others in developed western societies. The Franco regime might have been anachronistic in the limitations it secured in most political, social, and cultural manifestations, but it was, on the other hand, a model student in its placing of capitalist market structures, a new service sector centered on tourism and consumption, at its core. In this new socioeconomic scenario, Spain proved itself a worthy European neighbor, given how the lack of political freedom or the repressive state discourses on cultural and gender mores were overshadowed by rapid, market-driven, and speculative [End Page 319] economic development. Buying into Change sets out to document just how important the new capitalist model of development was in accomplishing this by focusing on several of the pillars of capitalist consumption: the prolific offer of consumer goods in retail stores, the reordering of the country's food supply thanks to the success of the supermarket, and the role of modern advertising and of consumer magazines in this process. If the market, and not politics, is what articulates this new society, then modernity is secured for the dictatorship, provided it follow the laws of profit and gain. In The Consumer Society (1970), Baudrillard reminds us that consumer goods present themselves not as the products of labor but rather as the harnessing of power (33). Within a dictatorship, goods can appear to magically remedy the shortcomings of the political system, a magic that turns abundance into "an effect of nature," into an "inalienable right" (33) thanks to advertising and its invention of "truth." Individuals who bore this process in Spain and did so with a blunt political imagination did not automatically link a change in the political regime with the improvement of the conditions of life, for "progress" was, for the most part, exclusively branded in economic terms, measured in degrees of consumption, just like for fellow citizens in neighboring western democracies. This fresh age of affiuence immersed Spaniards within a burgeoning material abundance, regardless of its actual accessibility. One begs to ask, then, if capitalist economic and social structures are not actually custom-made for dictatorships. It would not be extravagant to think so given how consumer logic does away with the messiness of societies, thanks to its logic of efficiency (control and uniformity) despite parading as varied and plural in options and choices. If this is the case, the effects on democracy are also quite straightforward shortening, therefore, the road Spain needed to travel to become more like its democratic neighbors. However, one must not forget that consumerism also withholds a promise of change, of hope, a momentary arrest of the difficulties of life brought about by the political and economic impossibilities that the working poor faced in Spain. No one pointed to these contradictions within consumer society like Spanish filmmaker Luis García Berlanga in El verdugo (1962), quite possibly the most provocative critique of the Franco regime ever screened. In the film, the violence of the dictatorship can comfortably coexist within consumer society, constricting...