A Critique To Consumer Society From The Perspective Of Historical Materialism

The contemporary Western consumer society is one that focuses more on consumption than production,that does not settle for the surplus of commodities while seeking its historical end,and that encounters various crises but fails to present solutions.A consumer society is featured by the prevalence of consumerism and hedonism,coexistence of abundance and lack of commodities,and outstanding ecological crisis.Western Marxism has profoundly criticized those phenomena while generally taking a pessimistic view.To understand the consumer society,it is imperative to start from Marxism’s practical philosophy,analyze human behavior in the process of concrete actions including creating demands,carrying out purposeful activities,proceeding with social production,and creating the social living environment with the idea of “changing the world” base on Historical materialism.Only in this way can repeated interpretation and false appearance of the consumer society be eliminated.The subject of consumption is real humans.Production is identical to consumption in the eyes of real humans who derive the demands that one-sidedly correspond to rich and concrete objective phenomena from abstract concepts during conducting dynamic activities and change its state with the outside world to establish various relationships.This process is not mysterious.The object of consumption as a realistic nature.Through purposeful activities,namely the labor,man externalizes his conceptual needs and replaces the old external nature,natural body,and the relationships with new material states and relationships.Taking labor in the production sense as the axis,Marx combined the critiques of German classical philosophy and the critiques of political economy and looked for clues of labor in the consumption sense.The consumption of humanized nature by labor is essentially a material exchange between man and nature,which transcends the common social morphology.It is inevitably manifested as a material exchange crack that appears in the capitalist society.Through the consumption of nature by others,labor builds a social relation among people and contributes to the formation of different types of communities.The fundamental formation of the consumer society to the pursuit of value growth in a capitalist society.Socialized production in a capitalist society leads to the separation of production and consumption.After analyzing social production,Marx created the theory of the dual nature of commodities and the theory of duality of labor,distinguished use-value,exchange value,and value,and pointed out that the source of value growth was surplus value.The fundamental purpose of socialized production in a capitalist society is simply to pursue value growth rather than promote productivity or allow people to better enjoy the fruits of production.Through commodity fetishism,currency fetishism,and capital fetishism,value growth is molded as a social need of the capitalist society.The essence of a consumer society is the social reality created by the dominant capitalism in the contemporary era in order to pursue value growth,digest overproduction,and repair and conceal social contradictions.Capitalistic production is a structural,repetitive,and large-scale production of commodities,during which both value and usevalue are created simultaneously while the value growth and the consumption of use-value limit each other and form a tearing situation.Capitalism incorporates consumption into the production system via reproduction,which extends the historical space for brewing an economic crisis and transfers all kinds of contradictions.Meanwhile,from the perspective of Western Marxist criticism,civil society has become accustomed to the governance of capitalism,and a positive-to-negative change has happened to the revolutionary will in the process of daily reproduction.People have submitted to the consumption phenomenon created by the false ideology of capitalism and become the “digestive organ” that different interest groups use in a concealed manner to digest their surplus commodities.The camouflage of the consumer society is not deemed as invulnerable.The formation of such camouflage is mainly caused by the short circuit of technological development at two critical points: the short circuit in the process from symbolic representation to symbolic feedback between people and the short circuit in the automation of material exchange between man and nature.These two short circuits squeeze the space for people to act positively.According to historical materialism,there are three methods for demasking the consumer society: 1)to discard the concept of pure value growth through practice and restore the allaround development of the society;2)to destroy or update the gradually solidified discourse system through practice and provide guidance to more active actions;3)to constantly explore and create a symbiosis between man and nature through practice.