Means of Consumption

When studying the capitalist economy from a conflict perspective, attention has historically been focused on issues relating to the means of production. According to Karl Marx, classes are defined by their relationship to the means of production. Control of the means of production is a key to power, and private ownership of the means of production underpins class oppression and exploitation. Clearly, production is an important part of the capitalist [Page 492]economy and an important part of a sociological analysis of capitalism.

Marx's work, while focused on production, does not neglect consumption. Basic consumption, from the Marxist perspective, is utilization of use-values either in productive consumption or individual consumption. Instruments of labor, tools, and raw materials (the means of production) are used up in productive consumption—the product of which is the final good itself. Individual consumption is the process in which products are used to satisfy human needs or wants directly.

Marx understood the term means of consumption as “commodities that possess a form in which they enter individual consumption of the capitalist and working class” ([1884]1981:471). Marx's definition of the term focuses on the end products of the production process, though he makes a distinction between the consumption of different classes, suggesting that subsistence consumption (“necessary means of consumption”) is characteristic of the working class, whereas consumption of luxury goods is the privilege of the exploiting capitalist class, which exchanges the surplus-value denied to the laborers for its consumption excesses.

From Marx's perspective, capitalism is poisonous to human creativity. Under capitalism, humans strive to make money in order to survive and to consume, but mass consumption of mass-produced commodities is not a creative process. It is, however, a critical function for the capitalist system. A condition of production in capitalism is “[t]he discovery, creation and satisfaction of new needs arising from society itself…. [Capitalism involves] the developing of a constantly expanding and more comprehensive system of different kinds of labor, different kinds of production, to which a constantly enriched system of needs corresponds” (Marx [1857–1858]1973:409)

Consequently, Marx's own definition of the means of consumption as commodities that possess a form in which they enter individual consumption falls short. That is, it focuses on the end product that flows into the marketplace. It does not attend to the way that “new needs,” which ensure that the end products of consumption realize their use value and enrich the capitalist class, are ever more efficiently made accessible and desirable to individual consumers.

Sociologist George Ritzer has expanded Marx's concept of the means of consumption. Ritzer argues that a focus on the means of consumption is particularly pertinent in modern society because “in recent years, to the degree that production and consumption can be clearly separated, production has grown increasingly less important (for example, fewer workers are involved in goods production), especially in the United States, whereas consumption has grown in importance” (1999:55). Ritzer distinguishes between the end product (the commodity itself that “enter[s] individual consumption”) and the means of consumption that facilitate the consumption of goods—for instance, the shopping mall, the theme park, or the Las Vegas casino.

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