
Consumer Culture
Consumer culture is the ideological infrastructure that dictates and motivates peoples activities of consumption.
Consumer culture is the ideological infrastructure that dictates and motivates peoples activities of consumption.
These are the people who the controlling system (the wealthy, the “power elite”; those who own the media, the government, the means of production) has fooled into policing themselves and who it seeks to control even more, not just with bread and circuses, but with anxieties and drugs as well.It is no coincidence that the
Social Media/Mass Media, under the influence of market forces, functionally acts as a propaganda machine.
Art is more powerful if produced outside the art market and in the context of politics. Artists working for propaganda are truer to art than those who produce for the individual consumer. Every ideology whether political or religious has a vision or image behind it, whereas the art market does not. It merely circulates images.
The capitalist system is ruled more by brazen predation than by good old-fashioned labor exploitation. Capitalists increasingly rely on raw political power to coercively secure capital through everything from rents to cheap government-provided capital – a means of extracting surplus that looks a lot more like feudalism.