Culture-Ideology of Consumerism

The culture-ideology of consumerism is a central concept in the theory of capitalist globalization proposed by Leslie Sklair. It refers to the transformation of above-subsistence consumption from a sectional preference of the rich to a globalizing phenomenon. Its emergence can be explained in terms of two central factors, factors that are historically unprecedented. [Page 408]First, capitalism entered a qualitatively new globalizing phase in the 1950s. As the electronic revolution got under way, significant changes began to occur in the productivity of capitalist factories, systems of extraction and processing of raw materials, product design, marketing, and distribution of goods and services. This golden age of capitalism, driven largely by new types of globally integrated transnational corporations and organized politically by an embryonic transnational capitalist class, took root in the United States, but soon spread to Japan and Western Europe and other parts of the first world, to the newly industrializing countries, and to some cities and enclaves in the third world. Second, the technical and social relations that structured the mass media all over the world made it very easy for new consumerist lifestyles to become the dominant motif for these media, which became in time extraordinarily efficient vehicles for the broadcasting of the culture-ideology of consumerism globally.

In the second half of the twentieth century, and for the first time in human history, the dominant economic system, an increasingly globalizing capitalism, was sufficiently productive to provide a basic package of material possessions and services to almost everyone in the first world and to privileged groups elsewhere. Capitalism, particularly in its neoliberal phase from the 1980s, promised that eventually everyone else in the world would get rich as long as they followed the precepts of the so-called free market. The rapidly globalizing system of mass media was also geared up to tell everyone what was available and, crucially, to persuade people that this culture-ideology of consumerism was what a happy and satisfying life was all about. In a powerful empirical study of the increasing hours and more intensive nature of work in the United States since the 1950s, Juliet Schor demonstrated how capitalist consumerism led North Americans (and other groups elsewhere) into a Faustian bargain whereby those who can find relatively well-paying employment work longer and longer hours so that they can afford to buy more and more consumer goods and services or, at least, qualify for loans to do so.

The culture-ideology of consumerism would not have been possible without two great twentieth-century inventions, namely the shopping mall and the credit card. Malls in the first world have attracted substantial research attention, less so elsewhere. Third-world malls until quite recently catered mainly to the needs and wants of the expatriate well-to-do, but now the success of the culture-ideology of consumerism can be observed all over the world in these malls, where increasing numbers of those in relatively well-paid work and their families flock to buy, usually with credit cards, thus locking themselves into the financial system of capitalist globalization.

The ideas of Americanization and cultural and media imperialism are important elements in any discussion of the culture-ideology of consumerism. Through Hollywood and the globalization of the movies, via Madison Avenue, from where captains of consciousness created the modern advertising and marketing industry (see Ewen 1976), to the more geographically diffuse but ideologically monolithic television networks, and the mainstream of the Internet, the consumerist elites of the corporate world have assumed leadership of the culture-ideology of consumerism in the interests of capitalist globalization. The universal availability of the mass media has been rapidly achieved through relatively cheap hardware (first radios, then TVs, and now computers with online facilities) that now totally penetrates the first world, almost totally penetrate cities elsewhere, and is beginning to penetrate deeply into the countryside, even in the poorest places. Thus, the potential of global exposure to global communication, the dream of every merchant in history, has arrived. The socialization process by which people learn what to want, which used to occur mainly in the home and the school, is increasingly taking place through what the theorists of the Frankfurt school had so acutely termed the culture industry.

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