Critical Theory, Commodities and the Consumer Society

Many twentieth century Marxists have paid close attention to the way in which culture reproduces and legitimates advanced capitalism. Marx’s concepts of the commodity, reification, fetishism, and alienation have been used to analyse a wide range of cultural phenomena by thinkers such as Luk2~cs, Gramsci, Sartre, Lefebvre, and the Frankfurt School. At the same time, these and other theorists have attempted to describe the changes in the social processes, mode of production, and forms of social reproduction in advanced capitalism. With the stabilisation of monopoly capitalism after World War II, various European and American Marxists saw the emergence of the consumer society as the distinct form of contemporary capitalism. In this social formation, culture, as Fredric Jameson (1981, p139) has argued far from being an occasional matter of the reading of a monthly good book or a trip to the drive in is the very element of consumer society itself; no society has ever been saturated with signs and messages like this one. This phenomenon of the increased role of image and spectacle in reproducing and legitimating advanced capitalism derives from the fact that they are part of the social processes of production and distribution (Debord 1970), as well as creating consumer demand that will reproduce the consumer society (Fromm 1955; Marcuse 1964). More and more contemporary