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Abstract
This essay revisits Karl Marx’s understanding of consumption, in an effort to rescue it from the overshadowing legacy of critical theory which has construed Marx as inveighing against false needs. It is argued that Marx regarded the expansion of needs entailed by capitalism in a generally favourable way, but saw capitalism as a system yoking use-value to the imperatives of profit accumulation, hence limiting and subjugating the consumption of the masses. While Marx’s position was radically different from conventional anti-consumerism it is equally incompatible with complacent affirmations of ‘the consumer society’ in that Marx at all times aimed at a revolutionary change which will transform consumption both quantitatively and qualitatively. Marx’s views are first discussed as expressed in the perennially-cited text, the 1844 Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts. The second part moves on to examine the further evolution of Marx’s ideas as found in later texts, particularly the Grundrisse.
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Appleby, Joyce 1994, ‘Consumption in Early Modern Social Thought’, in Consumption and the World of Goods, edited by John Brewer and Roy Porter, London: Routledge.
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Barber, Benjamin R. 2007, Consumed: How Markets Corrupt Children, Infantilize Adults, and Swallow Citizens Whole, London: W.W. Norton & Company.
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Baronian, Laurent 2013, Marx and Living Labour, London: Routledge.
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Bell, Daniel 1976, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, New York: Basic Books.
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Braudel, Fernand 1992, Civilization and Capitalism, 15th–18th Century, Volume I: The Structures of Everyday Life, translated by Siân Reynolds, Berkeley: University of California Press.
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Conan Doyle, Arthur 2005, The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes, Volume 1, edited by Leslie S. Klinger, London: W.W. Norton & Company.
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Corrigan, Peter 2011, The Sociology of Consumption: An Introduction, London: Sage.
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Fine, Ben 2002, The World of Consumption: The Material and Cultural Revisited, Second Edition, London: Routledge.
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Fromm, Erich 1970 [1961], Marx’s Concept of Man, New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co.
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Fromm, Erich 1976, To Have or to Be?, New York: Harper & Row.
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Graaf, John de, David Wann, and Thomas H. Naylor 2005, Affluenza: The All-Consuming Epidemic, Second Edition, San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler.
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Hanway, Jonas 1757, A Journal of Eight Days Journey from Portsmouth to Kingston upon Thames, with Miscellaneous Thoughts, Moral and Religious, in a Series of Letters: to which is added, an Essay on Tea, Volume 2, London: Printed for H. Woodfall and C. Henderson.
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Heine, Heinrich 1993, Selected Prose, edited and translated by Ritchie Robertson, Harmondsworth: Penguin.
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Heinrich, Michael 2012, An Introduction to the Three Volumes of Karl Marx’s ‘Capital’, translated by Alexander Locasio, New York: Monthly Review Press.
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Henning, Christoph 2005, Philosophie nach Marx. 100 Jahre Marxrezeption und die normative Sozialphilosophie der Gegenwart in der Kritik, Bielefeld: transcript Verlag.
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Humphery, Kim 2010, Excess: Anti-Consumerism in the West, Cambridge: Polity Press.
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Huxley, Aldous 1994 [1932], Brave New World, London: Flamingo.
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Illouz, Eva 1997, Consuming the Romantic Utopia: Love and the Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, Berkeley: University of California Press.
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Karatani, Kojin 2005, Transcritique: On Kant and Marx, translated by Sabu Kohso, Cambridge, MA.: The MIT Press.
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Lee, Martyn J. 2000, ‘Introduction’, in The Consumer Society Reader, edited by Martyn J. Lee, Oxford: Blackwell.
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Lodziak, Conrad 2002, The Myth of Consumerism, London: Pluto Press.
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Lubbock, Jules 1994, The Tyranny of Taste: The Politics of Architecture and Design in Britain, 1550–1960, The Paul Mellon Centre, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
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Mandel, Ernest 1999, Late Capitalism, translated by Joris de Bres, London: Verso.
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Marx, Karl 1990, Marx–Engels–Werke, Volume 13, Berlin: Dietz Verlag.
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Marx, Karl 1991, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Volume 3, translated by David Fernbach, Harmondsworth: Penguin.
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Marx, Karl 1992b, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Volume 2, translated by David Fernbach, Harmondsworth: Penguin.
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Marx, Karl 1993, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, translated by Martin Nicolaus, Harmondsworth: Penguin.
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Marx, Karl 2000, Theories of Surplus Value, Books I, II, and III, Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books.
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Marx, Karl 2010, The Poverty of Philosophy, New Delhi: People’s Publishing House.
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Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels 1975, The Holy Family, or Critique of Critical Criticism, Moscow: Progress Publishers.
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Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels 1976, Marx–Engels Collected Works, Volume 5, April 1845–April 1847, New York: International Publishers.
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Miklitsch, Robert 1998, From Hegel to Madonna: Towards A General Economy of ‘Commodity Fetishism’, Albany: State University of New York Press.
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Miller, Daniel 1995, ‘Consumption as the Vanguard of History: A Polemic by Way of an Introduction’, in Acknowledging Consumption: A Review of New Studies, edited by Daniel Miller, London: Routledge.
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Miller, Daniel 2012, Consumption and its Consequences, Cambridge: Polity Press.
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Ollman, Bertell 1976, Alienation: Marx’s Conception of Man in Capitalist Society, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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Sassatelli, Roberta 2007, Consumer Culture: History, Theory and Politics, London: Sage Publications.
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Sayers, Sean 1998, Marxism and Human Nature, Abingdon: Routledge.
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Schor, Juliet B. 1998, The Overspent American: Why We Want What We Don’t Need, New York: Basic Books.
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Schor Juliet B. and Douglas B. Holt (eds.) 2000, The Consumer Society Reader, New York: The New Press.
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Slater, Don 1997, Consumer Culture and Modernity, Cambridge: Polity Press.
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Smith, Adam 1999, The Wealth of Nations. Books I–III, edited by Andrew Skinner, Harmondsworth: Penguin.
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Stovall, Tyler 2015, Paris and the Spirit of 1919: Consumer Struggles, Transnationalism and Revolution, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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Vaneigem, Raoul 2006 [1967], The Revolution of Everyday Life, translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith, London: Rebel Press.
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Warde, Alan 2015, ‘The Sociology of Consumption: Its Recent Development’, Annual Review of Sociology, 41: 117–134.
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Search for other papers by Ishay Landa in
Current site
Google Scholar
PubMed
Abstract
This essay revisits Karl Marx’s understanding of consumption, in an effort to rescue it from the overshadowing legacy of critical theory which has construed Marx as inveighing against false needs. It is argued that Marx regarded the expansion of needs entailed by capitalism in a generally favourable way, but saw capitalism as a system yoking use-value to the imperatives of profit accumulation, hence limiting and subjugating the consumption of the masses. While Marx’s position was radically different from conventional anti-consumerism it is equally incompatible with complacent affirmations of ‘the consumer society’ in that Marx at all times aimed at a revolutionary change which will transform consumption both quantitatively and qualitatively. Marx’s views are first discussed as expressed in the perennially-cited text, the 1844 Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts. The second part moves on to examine the further evolution of Marx’s ideas as found in later texts, particularly the Grundrisse.
| All Time | Past Year | Past 30 Days | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Abstract Views | 1495 | 277 | 14 |
| Full Text Views | 463 | 26 | 2 |
| PDF Views & Downloads | 415 | 71 | 5 |