In this perspective, socialism is to build on the individualistic hedonism of consumer culture, making it available in the same measure for all. ‘“consumer” period the capitalist becomes like other men: he regards himself as a free agent, able to step back from his role as producer and accumulator, even to give it up entirely for the sake of pleasure or happiness, for the first time he sees his life as an open book, as something to be shaped according to his choice.’ Referring to a vague prediction on the last pages of Capital, Berman (1999: 51) notes that after the initial period of capitalism that follows a rigid rationality of accumulation, in a ![]() Yet with Berman (and, maybe surprisingly, also with Adorno) I will argue that from a dialectical point of view, consumer culture may hold the key to unlocking the potential for human development at the same time built up and held under the lid by capitalism. As Marshall Berman noted – when, of all people, under the supervision of Isaiah Berlin he developed his 1963 interpretation of Marx as admirer of the freedom achieved under and by bourgeois liberal capitalism – one major obstacle of such a view is that, by the workings of commodity fetishism, ‘the freedom Marx has given with one hand he seems to be taking back with the other: everywhere he looks, everyone seems to be in chains.’ (Berman 1999: 44). Following Haug’s (1986) Critique of Commodity Aesthetics one could say that, from the point of view of capital, there emerged a very real need for false needs. Consumerism is widely seen as the cultural expression of developed capitalism and Marxist analyses from the 1970s onwards have tried to show how the development of an absorbent market for consumer goods was driven by the needs of accumulation and valorisation in late capitalism (e.g. ![]() To suggest a ‘consumerist critique of capitalism’ sounds quite oxymoronic – and even more so a ‘socialist defence of consumer culture’. ![]() Slightly improved version now published in ephemera
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