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Consumerism, Postmodernism And Market Liberalism

Decent Essays

Products of our consumption have the ability to adapt our values and we all become a product of such to consumerism. Our values are centred around the consumption of goods and services, everything we value and how we are defined revolves around our consumption of the substance. In this essay, I will be exploring Marxism, Postcolonialism, Feminism/Queer theory, Postmodernism and Market Liberalism perspectives. By unravelling these various perspectives I will also, in turn, unravel both the importance consumption holds for our social identity, as well as the problems it entails.

Consumerism exists to benefit our economy which forms the base of the base superstructure model. This model was used to help explain what Marx ideology termed economic determinism (Sherman, 1981), in which the means of production controls everything else that goes on in society and anything that surfaces from the superstructure has the capacity to change people's ideas or their behaviour (with the exception of relative autonomy). Consumerism is a mass production that presents us with cultural products and supplies. The means of production are owned by the bourgeoisie, providing them with wealth and power whereas the proletariat only has its labour power, so consumerism also controls our sense of class. Bourdieu described this through what he labelled the habitus (Grenfell, 2014) where we are divided into different class fractions and products become a direct reflection of our class status. This

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