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| The Objective Structure and Ideology of Consumption |
| Bao Dawei |
| School of Marxism, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou 310058, China |
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Abstract This paper contends that consumerism is an expressly ideological symptom of modern civil society. The associated historical phenomenon is that the material foundation of the society is the production and exchange of goods as the carriers of symbolic value, in which the commodity of the consuming object is accumulated and possessed by the consuming subject. The abstractness lies in that the public good preset by its symbolic value is not from the living state of the subject, but is constantly shaped and reproduced by external forces. The criticism of false consumer demands and aesthetic preferences has always been an important theme of political philosophy, used not only to criticize the injustice of the privilege of the old aristocracy under the hierarchical system, but also to criticize the social fashions of materialism shaped by the bourgeoisie. Under the analyzed framework of historical materialism, the general objective structure of consumption behavior and the subject-object relationship can be completely revealed through the perspective of the characteristics of capitalist society and its survival experience, thus reducing the understanding of consumerism from consuming behavior to material production.In general consumption behavior, the subject is not the possessor of goods and currency, but the subject of labor involved in the production of material goods. Differing material possession relations produce a relation between use value and subject that is finally represented as the relation of will between different subjects of labor. Of course, in real consumptive behavior, this general and direct commodity exchange relationship has multi-level intermediary experiences, while currency is a universal intermediary used to measure the use value of commodities, and has become the actual object for labor subjects to produce and meet demands.Historical materialism and political economy reveal the objective relationship between subject and object in consumption behavior and the social relationship between subjects. Sensibility is the intuitive ability of the subject to understand and connect with the object of labor as well as the object of consumption. Capitalist consumption behavior creates an equal relation between the possessor of currency and the possessor of goods leading to an apparent equivalent relation between different labor products, simultaneously embedding the general objective relation of consumption behavior into the subject’s free consciousness. The natural constituents of labour products become the objects of externalization of subjectivity and are remolded and consumed continuously, creating and accumulation of individualism and liberalism through the circulation process. These are ideological phenomena, where the subject reconstructs the relationship between self and object through consumption, and finally points to the relationship between the society and the state as an external structure of subjectivity.On the premise of different class categories among consumers, the objective relationship between subjects becomes materialized as a “simple interest relationship”. However, under the historical conditions of capitalist surplus production, excessive consumption and extravagance have evolved into “reasonable behaviors” driving the production and distribution of personal and public goods. Excessive consumption therefore becomes a behavioral presentation of the alienation between subject and object (commodity). This is a state in which rationality and natural attributes are out of control of the subject’s demand, obscuring the subject’s objectivity in judging usefulness and use value. The coexistence of excess with scarcity of goods is the basic character in the critique of consumption in capitalist society. This in turn, is the extension of dominance/subordinance relations in the field of production. Consumption demand and its value hypothesis are constantly reproduced under the logic of capital, and the criticism of this crisis process which ultimately leads to the consumption of nature and man is an important theme of contemporary political philosophy.
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Received: 01 November 2021
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2022, Vol. 52 
