Critical Study On The Ideology Of Luxury Consumption

From the perspective of classical Marxism,capitalist society is mainly a whole or a logical structure dominated generally by production where consumption is viewed as a secondary factor.In particular,luxury consumption,a very special part in the field of consumption,has been marginalized for a long time and received little attention in Marxist study.However today,it is the consumption that promotes capitalism to obtain the capacity of reproduction again and again,and then broaden space for the development of capitalism.As a result,luxury consumption has been become rich reality landscape in the contemporary capitalism.Luxury itself not only contains thing's value in use,but also has additional values such as that in product design,packaging,advertisement and cultural implication.These features endow it with a power to extract maximum surplus value at the time when the capitalist society produces more than it needs and to earn more profits.In addition,capitalism has successfully achieved its ideological ruling status in this process.Critique of the ideology of the contemporary luxury consumption is an important task left for us by Marx,which requires to place consumption,political-subjective aesthetics and culture into an overall framework of the research on capital.If Marx's critique of ideology dodges the reality of today's luxury spending,we would not be able to show the ever-growing vitality of his theory.In turn,it is not possible for us to carry on any scientific research without applying Marxist political economy and its methodology.To this point,we can have some deep insight from the theory of Baudrillard,a famous contemporary postmodernist.By using semiotics analytical method,Baudrillard regards consumption as the symbol of personal status to distinguish theoretical levels that different people belong to.People show off who they are through consumption.This analytical method is apparently more applicable to explain the luxury consumption.More specifically,three aspects are involved in his interpretation of the issue.1.He reveals that the production and consumption of contemporary luxury goods have become a novel form of capital accumulation.The producers and merchants create symbol-values on the luxury through cultural and capital operation to speed up the buying cycle and tempt the working class lived on salary to join the luxury consumption.2.The luxury is considered as a symbol that contains two parts,the signifier and the signified,that endowed with an important function of social division.People can find their different roles through luxury consumption,thus a complete set of capital operation logic is build up.3.Capital plays a powerful ideological rule in the logical operation process of luxury consumption,and educates a vast number of viewers via internet and multi-media.As a result,people have become too indulgent with luxury to void their addiction.Baudrillard's critical theory of political economy of the sign not only discovers the profit-earning mechanism of luxury consumption in contemporary capitalism,but also successfully dismasks its ideology,which takes on an important theoretical value and practical significance.Unfortunately,he is helpless,even desperate in the face of single money-oriented logic of symbolic exchange in the commodity-market relationship.And thus,he failed to separate from himself,but has got himself in utopian imagination of primitive exchange of symbols.Baudrillard's theory isolated from the total mechanism of capitalist mode of production by talking only about the special phenomena of luxury consumption or prattling about symbolic value.Based on discussions above,we assume Baudrillard's interpretation of the contemporary capitalism doomed to be abstract,illegal and unsuccessful.To learn a lesson from him,we notice that we can find some coping strategies in Marx's general logical analysis of commodity consumption.First of all,according to Marx's basic analysis of the relation between production and consumption,consumption can't replace the dominant status of production,so luxury consumption is nothing but a last-ditch effort to ease capital surplus crisis in contemporary capitalism for the sake of obtaining surplus value and domination by ideology to avoid from dying.Secondly,Marx's historical materialism methodology still shows its effectiveness and scientific nature for understanding luxury consumption.Although Marx does not view the luxury consumption as a fragmentary part that is an independent factor separated from the economic operation of capitalism,he treats it as inherently linked to inalienable totality around the capitalist mode of production.In this sense,luxury production is only an inevitable stage of capitalist development.Accordingly,the solution to this problem will also depend on the degree of change of capitalist mode of production.This study is divided into six parts:the first part is preface,which introduces the background of the selected topic and its academic significance,research status at home and abroad,as well as research methods and the key and difficult points;The second chapter,as the foundation of this paper,begins to define the two aspects of broad and narrow senses of luxury goods,explains the differences between luxury and general consumer goods,and then identifies the distinctiveness of contemporary luxury consumption,as well as generalizes the development history of luxury goods and its change of status along with the history of philosophy;The third chapter constructs the bottom part of the entire building,which identifies how luxury consumption has become the reality in contemporary capitalist ideology,involving the logic of the evolution process for the understanding of ideology from the superstructure level of classical Marxism to criticism of the consume society represented by Lefebvre,Debord and Barthes as the luxury consumption being as a dominant ideology since then;The fourth and fifth chapters further build the mansion on the basis of previous chapters,that is to analyze concretely how Baudrillard's theory of symbol political economy deduces logical criticism of the ideology of contemporary luxury consumption.Baudrillard's theory includes three steps:the first is to downgrade use value of luxury goods;the second is to sublimate its symbolic value.It is recognized that the symbol value of luxury goods promotes to form newly distinguished class structure in the contemporary capitalist society.Luxury consumption has become in consistent with the ruling structure of capital,beside of being in accord with the equivalent principle of exchanging commodities;the third step is to dispel the symbol value of luxury goods using non-utilitarian symbolic value.The fifth chapter is a critique of Baudrillard's theory of luxury consumption by using Marx's scientific methodology,in particular,through digging deeply Marx's thoughts on luxury consumption.Additionally,Marx's understanding of use value,the essence of class analysis of Marxism and the choice of Marx's revolutionary route are also taken into consideration in order to gain a comprehensive understanding of luxury from the perspective of Marxism.Consequently,the methodology significance of Marx's critique of political economy is highlighted.The final conclusion,the cap of this grandly theoretical building,further deepens the understanding of Marx's dialectics and applies theory into analyzing the reality of Chinese luxury consumption in the light of a critical and developmental standpoint.