"When the going gets tough, the tough go shopping."
Consumerism is an acceptance of consumption as a way to self-development, self-realization, and self-fulfillment. It makes a clear separation between producers and consumers. In a consumer society an individual's identity is tied to what s/he consumes. People living in consumer cultures have a tendency to satisfy social, emotional, and spiritual needs with material things, particularly through the high-energy, materials-intensive American lifestyle, embodied in the automobile, household appliances, the freestanding house in the suburbs, and everyday consumer products. In this analysis, the market is not simply a sphere of opportunity, freedom and choice, but is also a compulsion, a necessity, a social discipline, capable of subjecting all human activities and relationships to its requirements.
See: McNeill, J. R.. The Great Acceleration, Harvard University Press.
For critics of consumerism, such as Zygmunt Bauman (Consuming Life), happiness does not consist so much in the gratifiication of needs as with an ever rising volume and intensity of desires, and the urge fo look to commodities for their satisfaction. “the consumerist society has to rely on excess and waste” (p.38) The advent of consumerism augurs the era of ‘inbuilt obsolescence” and the insatiability of needs. New needs need new commodities; new commodities need new needs and desires, and this dynamic makes individuals wish to do what is needed for the to enable the system to reproduce itself. Thus consumption is a “hedonic treadmill” (p.45) (also known as hedonic adaptation). Its promises of satisfaction remain seductive only as long as the desire stays ungratified.
Historically, Marxist critiques have focused on the means of production, especially the appropriation of surplus labor for the benefit of property owners, and socialist countries have been defined in terms of production, not been through consumption.
Scholarly interest in the history of consumption first emerged during the Cold War, when the issue of consumption became a major vehicle in the political and ideological clash of capitalism and communism. At that time, consumer goods were described as weapons in the Cold War. With desire for cars, washing machines, and less expensive goods regularly satisfied in the capitalist West but not in the state-socialist East, empty shelves became a sign of the failure of state socialism.
To what extent is the critique of consumerism a critique of capitalism?
See” Getting and Spending