Much of the development of western Marxism has extended and generalised ‘the model of commodity fetishism’ in two ways:

• as commodity form spread to all aspect of social life, the model of commodity fetishism can be generalised into an account of capitalist culture and consciousness
• modern world is increasingly dominated by rationalisation and instrumental rationality and this reduces both people and things into calculable object.

Lukacs used the term reification to synthesise the two themes to depict the world constituted as objective, natural and independent of human action, and which comes to regulate human life as an all-encompassing power.

According to Marxists and critical theorists, the one fundamental and non-negotiable need is for non-alienated human practice. It is by its failure to satisfy that need that consumer culture is judged as false and wrong. How can we be sure that these theorists possess a properly independent standard rather than a self-justifying ideological standard?

Weber characterised modernity as increasingly governed by formal and objectifying systems of administration, control and calculation, by quantification, rules. In Adorno and Marcuse’s analyses, Weber’s account of the world becomes an account of modern social life as an ‘administered world’: mass and consumer cultures have an instrumental relation (e.g. through advertising and marketing) to individuals. The objectivity of the modern world compromises treating its contents as objects: impersonal, calculable and law-like in their social circulation.

Lukacs treats ‘rationalisation’ as a product of the dominance of commodity relations. He argues that estrangement and objectivity of labour are intensified by the systems of rational planning and administration (e.g. Taylorism and other forms of scientific management of labour process) that gather pace under advanced capitalism. Not only is production subject to exact calculation, but also law, bureaucracy, and other aspects of society.

Consequently, everyday life, work and leisure in reified capitalist world are all characterised by passive, contemplative, rather than active or creative, attitude to the world. The sense of inevitability arises from the objectification of human practice in a law-like social world. People can only contemplate this objective nature: observe given laws, functionally conform to them or calculate within their framework in order to further their own self-interest. To sum up, consumer culture creates a contemplative attitude, based on having rather than doing or making or being.

Marxists believe that human development depends on the recognition of the objective world as a human reality, made by humans. How can a critical theory promote critical practices that relate to the world as a human product rather than as a natural structure? How can people break out of their ‘contemplative’ attitude?

The School argued that critical consciousness depends on an ‘oppositional’ culture, one that has sufficient autonomy from the commodifying and rationalising forces of modernity to exist in a state of critical tension with it, to act as its negation. However, culture as a whole has become consumer culture. It has lost its oppositional content and its critical distance. Consumption has become compensatory, integrative and functional.

Yet on what basis should we be critical of consumer culture? The School argues that the system denies the most basic form of freedom: ‘non-alienated’ labour and a creative relation between subjects and objects, people and their world. Consumer culture is alienated - needs become false when they are experienced as needs for more commodities rather than less alienation, unfreedom, injustice.

However, the School’s argument requires a distinction between what people think they want and what the analysts think they really need. Yet, the School (and other variants of Marxism) fails to provide an adequate account of human needs. Why prioritise the need of non-alienated practices over others?

Another weakness is that the School takes a ‘manipulationist’ view of modern consumers: their needs are functional requirements of the system. This ignores the creativity, irony, consciousness and rebelliousness with which people deal with goods.

Pessimistic visions emerge from the critique of alienation. In all these visions, human consciousness is dominated by a totalised system of objectivity – dominance of commodity relations and estrangement of labour. Moreover, people can imagine no other world because their consciousness is limited to the reality of the contemporary commodity culture, and they have lost the capacity for critique.

The source of this deep pessimism can be understood in terms of the problem of needs. The concept of needs states these substantive values should govern society and judge it. According to Marxists and critical theorists, the one fundamental and non-negotiable need is for non-alienated human practice, the need to engage in the creative transformation of the world in relation to humanity’s unfolding needs. It is by its failure to satisfy that need that consumer culture is judged as false and wrong.

However, while the substantive and critical concepts of need are necessary, they are also untenable or dangerous. When defining a ‘real need’, Marxists and critical theorists are making claims of statements about the ‘real’ and ‘essential’ nature of the human. But producing definitions of humans can become ahistorical, essential and ideal. The danger is that Marxists and critical theorists proclaim themselves to be authorities on people’s needs. In other words, they can constitute themselves as a form of totalitarian social power. How can we be sure that these theorists possess a properly independent standard rather than a self-justifying ideological standard?

Marxists and critical theorists’ conception of the need sits uneasily with their understanding of the dialectic process of needs, of subject and object.

Whether their standard of judgement – non-alienated practices – works, must itself remain a matter for argument and reasoning.