Much critique of consumer culture resolves around a brutal paradox: a system that has the material power to liberate humans from want and provide the basis for human development instead subjugates them to the logic of exchange that produces alienation and unhappiness. Dissatisfaction arises from the conflict between complexity of needs and alienation.
Consumption is a question of
how humans relate to things in the world that might satisfy them. Having split
subject from the object, how do humans assimilate the world of objects into
their subjective experience?
As Hegel argues, the
relation between subject and object is in reality dialectical and interrelated.
On the one hand, individuals and societies create and transform the world in
relation to their needs through their intellectual and practical efforts. On
the other hand, their needs (their subjectivity) are objectified, the objective
world is human subjectivity made manifest by remaking the world in its light.
Thus, the world humans have made is objective, and becomes the new environment
in which they live, by which their subjective experiences are formed and
constrained, and in which they refine their needs and desires. In transforming
the world, we transform ourselves.
From this dialectic approach arises two themes.
·
Human nature (needs, ways of knowing and doing,
consciousness) is not fixed but develops in line with the material world it has
created. As human-made ‘nature’ gets more complex, so does human subjectivity.
·
The problem of not recognising that we make the
world. We lose the connection between the transformation of objects and the
transformation of ourselves,
It seems that the world of consumer culture demands complexity and
richness of needs and subjectivity but in the form of merely choosing among given objects,
individuals are unable to recognise the objects as the products of their own
labour and therefore are seen as alien. They can choose between pleasurable things but cannot assimilate them into a process of self-development.
Alienated labour:
Marx outlines how the consumer culture has led to dissatisfaction and alienation as the processes of production and consumption become separate under capitalism. Instead of being transparently linked, the relation between production and consumption is indirect and mediated through markets, money prices, competition and profit. I relate to myself and my labour, to the products of my labour, and to other people abstractly and as entirely ‘other’ (alien) to me.
Instead of people directly producing the use-values they need, capitalists enter production and buy labour power in order to make profits and accumulate the capital necessary to produce on an ever expanding scale. For Marx, capitalists are economic amoralists: they are utterly indifferent to the specific use-values they produce so long as they can be sold on the market. The capitalist economy is radically formal and disembedded.
Alienated needs
Marx argues that capitalism lays the potential for future happiness. The capitalist economy produces an astonishing expansion of objective culture (discovery of new things as well as new qualities of old things). Capitalism begins the development of human energy that is an end in itself, the true realm of freedom. The logic is that capitalist must drive society out of the realm of nature and natural necessity and into the possibility and realisation of culture (enrichment of needs and use-values, the creation of people ‘rich in needs’).
However, capitalism will fail to deliver this realm of freedom. The inherent capitalist exploitative relations distort the needs and the objective culture. The capitalists’ needs are not ends in themselves, but merely a means by which they realise exchange value. The proletariats can only afford a style of life at or below the level of basic needs. For Marx, the exploitation of needs and the exploitation of labour simultaneously produce desires that are over-stimulated (as in the case of the ‘leisure class’) and injustices as desires cannot be satisfied (as in the case of the propertyless).
Commodity fetishism
At the centre of the critique of alienation is the problem of recognition and distance. Can we recognise as our own the world we have made? How are social relations and commodities represented?
Marx criticised the political economists who represented the market as commodities having relationship with each other (or money). The true source of their value – human labour – is not visible. Therefore, economists perceive value in ‘the fantastic form’ of a relation between things rather than as arising from relations between people (relations of production: labour, wage-relations, structural class divisions).
This critique of the commodity culture develops into three lines of thought.
· The commodity fetishism can be extended beyond economic exchange value to include a whole range of social and cultural values. For instance, the representation of the commodity’s promise (or product’s appearance) is manufactured, calculated and manipulated by advertising, selling techniques, display and promotion.
· People mistake the appearances of society for its reality. People falsely identify their real material interests with the market and commodities, with consumption.
· Commodity fetishism presents capitalist modernity as fragmentary, as individual experiences, actions, items. All of modern social experience is in some respect reduced to the consumption of chance, isolated events that are experienced through a aesthetic mode as surface or appearance without depth or historicity.
Alienation and romanticism
For Marx, consumers’ capacity to transform the world has become a mere means to the end of choosing and buying goods; whereas their own needs and desires have become a mere condition for the making of profit. Marx seeks a new and even better state of grace that reconciles subject and object; a direct and transparent relation between production and consumption.
There is a
powerful romanticism at work. Post-capitalist societies as worlds governed by
use-values and concrete labour, as worlds not governed by cash nexus. For Marx, the
entire romance of reconciliation is founded on the notion of ‘labour’ –
neglects ‘reproduction’!