Marxist Theories

Western Marxist theories of consumer culture represent a rupture from the classical and orthodox eastern Marxist theories of Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Vladimir Lenin, Leon Trotsky, Nikolai Bukharin, and Rosa Luxemburg. However, the rupture was not immediate but took place over a number of years. Gyorg Lukacs's work and personal political history represent, in some respects, an overlap between the traditions. Major differences between the two traditions are that Western Marxists reject Marx's claim of the historical inevitability of the proletarian revolution and subsequent liberation. This is in large part due to the brutality and oppression that occurred following the Russian Revolution, especially under Stalin's Soviet version of socialism. Although both traditions see consumption as an “extension of production” (Adorno 1967/1983, 26), Western Marxists who lived in the United States had analyzed and explained the role consumer culture has played in negating revolutionary ideas through the integration of the working class into the capitalist system. For Marx, the working class was the historic class that was to bring about revolutionary transformation, the decisive agent, as it were. For Western Marxists, such as Herbert Marcuse, the working class had been politically neutralized through the ideological manipulation of consumer culture in Western capitalist societies (particularly the United States): “In the capitalist world (bourgeoisie and proletariat) are still the basic classes. However, the capitalist development has altered the structure and function of these two classes in such a way that they no longer appear to be the agents of historical transformation” (Marcuse 1964, 11). This is an especially sharp point of departure between the two traditions when analyzing Western capitalist societies. Therefore, consumer culture is foregrounded in the Western Marxist analysis of modern capitalist society.