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Consumerism is just another tumor of capitalism. If people aren’t buying the shit you produce, then you have no profits.
Consumerism itself is no more a threat than it is a symptom really. Especially since consumerist culture is kind of dying because spending power in the imperial core has been declining consistently for almost 50 years now.
What we call today consumerism is just programmed obsolescence by capitalism, which requires us to change stuff every year, either by making repair difficult, or by releasing small improvements, or by marketing. We could very well have cars that last 10-20 years, computers and devices that last 5-10 years, modular designs that help us to replace parts without replacing the whole thing, software updates that don't make our old devices unusable, better quality clothes etc.
It's impossible to do sustainable consumption when the whole society is driven by profit maximization.
Well said. It's kind of mind-boggling to take a step back and think about just how many things do not need to be so wasteful/cyclical. The science is often there to make things last, but this is fundamentally incompatible with a societal arrangement where the continued profitability of a particular company is more important than society itself. Under a socialist arrangement, it doesn't matter if a particular merchant fails, so long as the productive forces are overall strong and able to meet the basic needs of the people. But under capitalism, the needs of the people are subordinate to those of the merchants and, as you say, subordinate to profit maximization. The merchants become like religious idols and the market like a deity.
The article I shared also comes to similar conclusions looking at Marx's takes on consumption/over-consumption - basically that capitalist consumption can be done better, fairer and still provide an outlet for people's needs and wants. This is one of those ways - a lot of the shit we buy is purposefully enshittified to make us buy more of it than we would otherwise purchase if things were built to last.
The notion of consumerism is capitalist ideology that divides the world into a consumer class and a supplier class, obfuscating material-interest-based class relations. Members of the supplier class include the owners, managers, and employees of businesses. It's false consciousness, in other words.
As far as the consumerist era of capitalism, it evolved in reaction to crises of overproduction that are inherent to capitalism's anarchy of production. Thus I don't think you can really isolate consumerism from capitalism in identifying harms; they're all harms of capitalism.
The notion of consumerism is capitalist ideology that divides the world into a consumer class and a supplier class, obfuscating material-interest-based class relations. Members of the supplier class include the owners, managers, and employees of businesses. It’s false consciousness, in other words.
Yeah, I've never heard the term "consumer" outside of capitalist swill and it appears to have something to do with validating "consuming" as a part of one's identity, as if there's some kind of intrinsic value in it. They then frame consumers as an amalgamated entity that demands certain things of the world; demands that the suppliers/producers have no choice but to listen to. By doing this, they shift blame from the conscious choices of the capitalist class to the inscrutable demands of a "consumer class". So then they can say, for example, "Climate change isn't because BP is polluting the ocean, it's because consumers demand so much oil".
But in reality, there are people at the top setting policies which heavily define what demand looks like. For example, if the people in charge of the US did a major buildup of high speed trains, demand for oil for individual cars would drop. And as long as the oil companies block policies that improve public transportation and cars are therefore the only viable way for many people to get around, demand will stay high. So it is a highly manufactured thing and how people choose to "consume" on an individual level has little to do with it.
But when people believe in the narrative of the consumers-as-defining-demand, it's easier for them to believe in a false power in boycott that isn't there. Certainly the way people purchase does something, but it is a minor influence compared to the policies set from the top down.
No.
Commodity fetishism is the observation that through many small separate acts of market exchange we command each other to behave in very specific ways, while disclaiming this same power and attributing its commands to blind necessity. It’s a key concept in Marx’s critique of capitalism (he devotes a whole section to it in Capital), and Marxists should understand that Marx used the term “fetish” to argue “commodities behave like little gods in that they seem to command men” and not “consumerism is immoral and vulgar." [...] We should endeavor to correct this misunderstanding, since the alternative interpretation transfigures Marxism into a monastic doctrine of pious asceticism that — putting aside any of its moral merits — is very unappealing. Marx was very confident that such a project would never grip the masses and lead them to struggle and triumph over capitalism.
I believe that consumerism is a social ill in so far as it is an outlet for genuine human desires for creativity and self-expression, that under capitalism becomes incredibly damaging ecologically and potentially socially. Under a fairer and saner economic system, the manifestation of those same desires is much less likely to be so destructive as rampant capitalist consumerism.
For further reading: https://redsails.org/the-negation-of-abnegation/
consumerism paired with capitalism for sure. in a communist system it wouldnt be as bad but i think it would slowly phase out of being part of the human condition.
No because ultimately consumer products get their value from the human value that is perceived as being behind it. People like designer brands because they believe it signals their value to other people. People will watch mid tv shows just to have a shared experience with other people.
Depends, laissez-faire consumerism for sure destroys the planet but a planned consumerism could be sustainable. I could imagine a world where every type of product counts with a recycling process and industry attached to it, most stuff can be technically recycled it's just that the processes are more costly than just extracting raw materials.
I still think it inevitably will happen anyway as raw materials become more scarce and costly to extract we will see the rise of recycling industries as a profitable industry, if the world is not beyond fucked at that point.