technically, labour is denied ownership of the
means of production; under conditions of exploita-
tion(the extraction of surplus value) labour as a
whole receives only a portion of the value it
produces and is therefore quantitativelyunable
to purchase as means of consumption all that it
in fact produced. It is significant that for Marx
(as for Keynes) this has meant not only the rela-
tive poverty of workers but (more importantly
for all of them) technical crisis tendencies within
capitalism, which suffers periodic catastrophes
as a result of endemic underconsumption or
overproduction.
The split between production and consumption
occasioned by market mediation is a temporal
and spatial displacement that Marx identified
through the term ‘commodity fetishism’. This
is Marx’s key statement of the structural separa-
tion of production and consumption, a dis-
connectedness that is mediated and at the same
time obscured by the market. As is the case
throughout Marx’s work there is a fusion of the
ethical and the technical: market mediation not
only mystifies the social order and constitutes
the condition for alienation, but it is also
economically unstable and crisis prone. Capital-
ists – who are driven by competitive forces to
increase the scale of their production – cannot
know in advance what expenditures of labour
will later be deemed ‘socially necessary’ by
effective consumer demand in the market; they
therefore constantly court individual bankruptcy
and collective catastrophe in the form of the
trade cycle.
At the same time, market mediation allows for
a relatively autonomous space of commodity
representations, the elaboration of packaging,
branding, advertising and so on, carried out by
functionally differentiated firms or departments
(Haug, 1986; Richards, 1991). Much work on
consumption has been either a critique or a
phenomenology of commodity fetishism. This is
obvious in the case of the theme of reification in
western Marxism (Lukacs, Adorno, Habermas).
This considers not only the cultural conse-
quences of production for the market, but also
the political consequences of a social order
which appears as the product not of human
labour but rather of the (quantitative) relation
between atomized ‘things’. For Lukacs and
Adorno, the entire social landscape appears to
individuals as a consumable spectacle – a literally
natural landscape, dominated by natural forces –
rather than as a historical product of human
action and the historical site of active social
intervention. Less obviously related to commod-
ity fetishism are more recent postmodernapproaches such as that of Baudrillard, discussed
below, in which consumption appears as a spec-
tacle of signs completely detached from other
social relations and processes. The link runs
backwards through the Situationists’ ‘society of
the spectacle’ (Debord, 1991; Plant, 1992) and
Lefebvre’s critique of everyday life as alienation
(1947; 1971), both of which are firmly rooted in
the framework of early Marx. Society is experi-
enced entirely through the detached signs that it
produces through market mediation.
It is important to note that critical perspectives
on consumption have been largely characterized
by a ‘productivist bias’ in which consumption is
derived from characterizations of modes of
production or the industrial order. This is fre-
quently based on equating the production/con-
sumption dichotomy with the economy/culture
dichotomy and giving analytical priority to the
first term in each case. Hence the focus is on how
forms of consumption are structurally deter-
mined by processes and institutions such as
advertising and marketing or the changing forms
of mass production. The problem is not simply
that this produces an image of the consumer as
‘cultural dope’ or ‘dupe’, as passive victim, but
also that the effectivity of production systems in
securing cultural ends is too often assumed with-
out proper (and probably ethnographic) investi-
gation of the actual consumption practices that
consumers engage in: they are simply ‘read off’
of industrial processes. As has been well under-
stood in studies of media consumption, for
example, the issue of power over consumption
cannot be resolved into either structures (how-
ever mighty they may be) or self-determining
agents (for example, Morley, 1992). Moreover,
in investigating actual consumer and producer
practices we find a complexity of interconnec-
tions that cut across both the production/
consumption and economy/culture divides.
This issue comes to the fore again in the most
important recent productivist framework for
understanding contemporary transformations
within consumption cultures. Historically, modern
consumer culture is often associated with the rise
of mass production and corresponding mass
consumption at the turn of the twentieth century,
developing into what is often characterized as a
Fordist system during the post-war period. As
most thoroughly analysed by the French regula-
tionist school (Aglietta, 1979; Lee, 1993; Lipietz,
1992; see also Lee, 2000), the general course of
industrialization and marketization had little
effect on the broad mass of the population –
which continued to cater for most of its needs
through non-commodities – until the rise of massCULTURES OF CONSUMPTION 1513029-ch07.qxd 03-10-02 10:46 AM Page 151