Consumerism

Choice of a society founded exclusively on the quantitative dimension of its members’ material consumption — to the detriment of all other considerations.

Consumerism is the lowest degree of materialism and economism, since it’s uninterested in long-term economic power, neglects the economy’s ecological effects, and focuses exclusively on the mere volume of immediate consumption. Consumerism is a form of slavery, to which the mass men of our civilisation have succumbed, these mass men who are neither citizens, nor actors, nor responsible individuals, but rather passive, domesticated beings. Questions of an ecological, ethnic, or political nature hold no interest for the consumer. Even his personal security takes second place to his standard of living. A goose in the barnyard of a foie gras producer.

Consumerism stems from a certain mental pathology — as Thorstein Veblen, Guy Debord, and Jean Baudrillard have shown. It’s a matter of accumulating objects, things, but it lacks a sense of ends, even in matters of pleasure or well-being.

Veblen (1857-1929) was a prominent American economist and sociologist. He is best known for his 1899 book The Theory of the Leisure Class, in which he postulated that the emerging upper class of modern society was unique in that it consumed a great deal, but contributed little toward the maintenance or advancement of civilisation.

Guy Debord (1931-1994) was a French Marxist philosopher and the founder of the Situationist International, and whose ideas have become influential on both the radical Left and Right. The spectacle, as described in his principal work, The Society of the Spectacle, is one of the means by which the capitalist establishment maintains its authority in the modern world — namely, by reducing all genuine human experiences to representational images in the mass media, thus allowing the powers-that-be to determine how individuals experience reality.

Jean Baudrillard (1929-2007) was a French philosopher and cultural theorist who is regarded as one of the most important postmodernist thinkers. In his early works, he analysed consumerism and concluded that capitalist societies instill false needs in the minds of consumers by linking the consumer’s identity to a fetishised object which will give him social prestige if he acquires it.

(see economism)