Consumption, Geography and

Theoretical Perspectives on Consumption

The historically dominant view of consumption came from neoclassical economics, which analytically privileges demand. In this perspective, individual consumers, personified by the desolate, self-centered, asocial character Homo economicus, maximize their utility or happiness by allocating incomes among different goods. This topic has been examined in exhaustive detail, including topics such as the impacts of changing incomes and prices, consumer surplus, elasticities of supply and demand, and imperfect information. Inevitably, the conclusion of such views is that markets are optimally efficient (and hence morally optimal as well). Although the neoclassical view is internally consistent within its own terms of reference, it is ultimately sterile and ahistorical, failing to do justice to the rich semiotics and social dimensions of consumption. In part, this failure arises because neoclassical economics does not represent consumers, or consumption, as a social act, that is, embedded within broader relations of class, gender, ethnicity, and power. For example, it offers no account of the origins of utility curves or why they assume their particular form. Social categories, if they arise at all, are defined largely by their relations to consumption; for example, class in conventional Weberian social analysis refers to income and socioeconomic status.

A second interpretation of consumption comes from Marxism, which argues that social science must penetrate the veneer of outer appearances to reveal the social relations that lie beneath them. In this vein, Marx argued that commodities are not only things but also embodiments of social relations. To view commodities separately from their social origins is to commit the error of commodity fetishism; the opaqueness by which market relations obscure relations among producers is functional for capitalism. Rather, Marxism draws on classical economics to differentiate the use value of commodities—the qualitative subjective dimensions—from their exchange value, that is, the quantitative price they command on the market. For example, the use value of an apple is its taste and the relief from hunger it offers, whereas its exchange value is the price at which it sells. Critically, for Marxists, labor also is a commodity whose use value to employers is less than its exchange value in wages. Thus, class is defined by relations to production and not to consumption. Marxism suggests that the extraction of surplus value by employers inevitably leads to underconsumption by the working class and the tendency toward crisis.

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