Consumerism creates a new society
Modern consumption is mediated by market relations and takes the form of the consumption of commodities. The consumer’s access to consumption is largely structured by the distribution of material and cultural resources (money and taste), which itself is determined in crucial ways by market relations above all the wage relation and social class.
From a Marxist perspective, it is the wage-relation (not industrial mass production), it is capitalist relations of production (not its technical forces) that produce the consumer. Consumer culture is incompatible with the political regulation of consumption that suppresses the market. It does not arise in non-capitalist societies. This is why a society-wide solution to the problem of consumerism is not going to occur through personal or cultural politics. At this stage of late consumerism, our best bet is legislative action.
At this time compact disc players, digital media, personal computers, and cellular phones, all began to integrate into everyday lifestyle in all over the world. A large change in World’s culture has subsequently occurred “a shift away from values of community, spirituality, and integrity, and toward competition, materialism and disconnection.” Companies and corporations have realized that rich consumers are the most attractive targets for marketing their products. The upper class’ tastes, lifestyles, and preferences, trickle down to become the standard, which all consumers seek to emulate. The not so well off consumers can “purchase something new that will speak of their place in the tradition of affluence”.
A consumer can have the instant gratification of purchasing a high-ticket item that will help improve their social status. In the industrial workplace, employees faced long hours often twelve or more per day in sweaty, dangerous conditions. Pay was low, and employees had little recourse against employers, who protected their own pocketbooks rather than their workers. Industry owners felt no obligation to recompense employers injured on the job or the families of workers killed in workplace accidents. To be a consumer is to make choices, this exercise of choice is in principle unconstrained.
The freedom of consumer culture is defined in a modern and liberal way; consumer choice is a private act. Two senses of meaning of this: in the positive sense, it occurs within a domain of the private, which is ideologically declared out of bounds to public intervention, social and political authority in the negative sense; it is restricted to the household, mundane domesticity, the world of private relationships A critical remark is that in becoming ‘free’ as consumer we barter away power and freedom in the workplace or in the political arena in exchange for more private contentment.
Consumer culture is often identified with the idea of mass consumption. Market relations are anonymous and in principle universal. The idea that consumer culture serves a general public also promotes a more positive idea that it embraces ‘everyone’. We are all formally free and equal, unconstrained in our choices by legally fixed status or cultural prohibitions.
Yet, it is also felt to be universal because everyone must be a consumer, this particular freedom is compulsory. If there is no principle restricting who can consume what, there is no principled constraint on what can be consumed: all social relations, activities and objects can in principle be exchanged as commodities.
Basically consumerism is that, whatever is supplied, being consumed this issue we the people of consumer society can not omit. Everyone have their own choices they can select their own choice but they convince by those people whom actually set the agenda for the consumer. Because of advertisement and because of mimic the products. So, all the consumer societies are driven by the manufacturer or the suppliers.
Source: "The Rebel Sell"– by Joseph Heath & Andrew Potter, Department of Philosophy at the University of Toronto.
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