Front. Philos.

China 2008, 3(2): 282–293

DOI 10.1007/s11466-008-0018-6
RESEARCH ARTICLE

TANG Zhengdong

A path of interpreting the “consumer society”: The

perspective of Karl Marx and its significance

© Higher Education Press and Springer-Verlag 2008

Abstract • • When Western Marxist sociologists, such as Jean Buadrillard,

constructed their critical theory of consumer society, they took the consumer
society as an objective fact and methodologically restricted themselves to the
non-historical method of sociology, making them unable to grasp the correct
meaning of Karl Marx’s historical materialist methodology. Thus, they were
unable to adequately critique and transcend consumer society. After spending the
early 1850s building a theoretical foundation, Marx pointed out in 1857–1858
Economical Manuscript and 18611863 Economical Manuscript that the
governing model of capital was so complicated that it made consumption very
important to the socio-economic form. Moreover, he explained the way of
surpassing the conscious form of fetishism developed in consumer society from
the perspective of the development of capitalist production.

Keywords• • consumer society, historical materialism, Karl Marx, process of

production
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Translated by Tang Tang, Zhang Rong and Tang Ling from Xueshu Yuekan • • • • • • • •
(Academic Monthly), 2007, (6): 5864
TANG Zhengdong ( )
Philosophy Department, Nanjing University, Nanjing 210093, China
E-mail: ztang35@yahoo.com.cn
A path of interpreting the “consumer society” 283

Rather than saying that “consumer society” is a new phenomenon that is

completely different from traditional “production society,” it is preferable to say
that “consumer society” is a real text that have emerged from the power
discourse on this topic. Although many philosophical and sociological theorists
have searched for ways to transcend consumer society, research on “consumer
society” is rather lagging. “Consumer society” has been regarded as a kind of
objective reality without any analysis. Due to this lag in theoretical analysis, the
power discourse on “consumer society” was able to accumulate power in a
process that turned it into a social reality with “quasi-objectivity.” Therefore,
Baudrillard and some others condemned customers for conspiring with capital
and taking part in capital’s colonization of them: “Different from feudality, our
system operates on a relationship of collusion: modern consumers spontaneously
absorb and shoulder this endless compulsory requirement” (Baudrillard 2001, p.
183). But his words are only half right. The consumers have indeed colluded with
capital, but this is because critical theoreticians first unconsciously took part in
the collusion with capital. When capitalist mainstream economists were
constructing the power discourse and its text of “consumer society” by adopting
concepts such as “buyer’s market,” it was interesting to note that the
philosophers and sociologists who were the most critical agreed with mainstream
economists on the academic premise: via the intermediary “customer”
(corresponding to the “economic man” of the mainstream economists), on the
basis of methodology of individualism, “consumer society” is considered as a
premise, not a theoretical object needed to be proved valid. As a result, after they
accomplished empirical descriptions of the above-mentioned “quasi-objective”
social reality, and wanted to establish a kind of critical or transcendent theoretical
dimension, these theoreticians had to rely on the liberation of Utopia (such as
Henri Lefebvre), the “sudden death” of anarchism (such as Baudrillard), or
practice without theoretical instruction (such as Guy-Ernest Debord).
Therefore, I do not agree with Baudrillard, Claus Offe and others with regard
to consumer society being a new social formation different from production
society. Baudrillard said in his book Consumer Society: “In the West, at least, the
impassioned biographies of heroes of production are everywhere giving way
today to biographies of heroes of consumption” (Baudrillard 1998, p. 45). If this
is only a description of a certain kind of empirical phenomenon, it is still
acceptable. But if it stands that Baudrillard has abandoned the dimension of
production in social analysis, something is wrong. May I ask: Does this
consumer society fall from a cloud? Does it not result from some transformation
of production? Claus Offe has a similar view in his article Substitution Strategy
284 TANG Zhengdong

in the Consuming Policy: In the so-called primitive society and in the feudal
society with land estate division, the concept of “consumer” was meaningless.
There, the concept of “consumer” had no definite social realistic base. The
reason was that behaviors related to consuming had not been separated from
other behaviors (such as working, political activities and family life). Only in the
modern social structure, with the differentiation of action system, it will be likely
to mark off individuals, workers, constituencies and the heads of a household etc.
as consumers (Offe 2006, p. 185). If Claus Offe was simply a theorist who
studied consumption problems in capitalist society from the angle of empirical
demonstration, it would not be strange for him to make this analysis because
methods of empirical analysis can see mere phenomena, but not essence. But the
goal of Claus Offe’s theory is to aufhebung the present capitalist forms of
consumption. Analyzed from this theoretical view, we find that there might be
something wrong with Claus Offe’s way of thinking: he does not show concern
for the social and historical base on which the differentiation of an action system
is built. Can workers, as consumers, exist without being producers?
Certainly, when I propose the above questions to Baudillard and Claus Offe, I
am taking the historical embryological methodology. I also know that they will
not agree with my methodology, because the historical embryological method
has been declining in Western academic circles since the first half of last century.
This is partly due to the blow of the two World Wars on people’s view of
historical progress. People originally believed that history is a meaningful
process and they could discover valuable things through historical research. This
also came from the strikes of the Fordist capitalism in Europe and America on
people’s ideas. From this form, people realized that great changes in the
capitalistic social structure had taken place, leading them to interpret history
from an inconstant and interrupted foundation. Furthermore, with the advent of
economic globalization, a global world market has begun to form. Capital not only
increases the ability to realize added-value, but it also possesses the ability to
promote itself. Thus, an “empire” of capital has preliminarily formed. Under such
circumstances, for most people, not only it is impossible to image that history is a
meaningful process, but even where and how could anyone start is a big problem,
as Terrell Carver, a scholar from the United Kingdom considered (Terrell Carver
2007). Therefore, the historical process is naturally considered as a meaningless net
plaited by doings and thoughts of people, and it is purely worked by accident, just
like a story told by an idiot (Iggers 2006, p. 339), and the meaning of history is
not embodied in what it will develop into or what aim it will achieve, but in the
objective facts itself of a combination of human beings’ activities. Thus, the
historical embryological method and the interpretation of human history using
scientific logic and other academic routes have faded from the Western academic
stage. It has been replaced by the modern capitalist theory of criticism which is
A path of interpreting the “consumer society” 285

an extension of views from sociology, anthropology, space geography, and

cultural critique of daily life. Based on the above-mentioned theoretical
background, the views of Baudrillard, Claus Offe and others are not odd at all.
But the problem is, when they abandoned the historical embryological
methodology, their interpretation of this methodology was unilateral. In other
words, they only understood this methodology from the view of historical
idealism and empirical materialism. If history is considered as the absolute
spirit’s self-realization via self objectification and self alienation, as Hegel and
some other German idealists believe, then, if there is a setback or regression in
the development of history, the whole viewpoint of historical development and
the historical embryological method will surely be given up because of not being
able to interprete such phenomena reasonably. If history is only considered as a
progress of economic, social or consumption structures on an empirical level,
like the historical empiricists believe, then, when confronted with Fordist
capitalist system, globalization and such new economic phenomena, in which a
path for forward development will not be found, the historical embryological
method will definitely be abandoned. In fact, in the theory spectrum of historical
embryological methodology, except for the above-mentioned interpretation models,
there is still a more scientific, more profound model, namely the Marxian
interpretation model. Marx understood the historical process from the internal
contradiction between the productive force and productive relation; that is to say,
he understood the historical process from the angle of essential contradiction in
productive process. Marx certainly believed that history was a continuous process
of development for human beings to becoming free human associations. However,
he did not interpret this process on the basis of Hegel’s mysterious logic, but
devoted himself to figure out the objective logic of the production process.
Therefore, when this methodology confronts setbacks such as World War II,
people who believe in it will not give up the viewpoint of historical progress or
historical development, but more thoroughly study and analyze whether or not
the internal contradiction in capitalist production process has been changed or
eliminated. Based on such study, people can make a right judgement on whether
or not history will go on developing on the basis of the contradiction movement.
When this method encounters the new phenomena such as the social structure of
Fordist capitalism and the capitalist “imperialism” brought about by economic
globalization, it will not deny its historical origins or the possibility of further
development despite the appearance that everything is in agreement under
capitalism. In this sense, we can say that the decline of the historical
embryological method in Western theory is directly related to the fact that it has
not been completely and correctly perceived, the academic significance of
Marxian historical embryological method has not been truly recognized.
286 TANG Zhengdong

Actually, at the very beginning, Marx did not interpret the problem of
consumption with the historical embryological method. When facing the problem
of consumption for the first time in the 1844 Economical and Philosophical
Manuscript, Marx did not pay much attention to it and even ignored the objective
content of the phenomenon of consumption because he was accustomed to an
abstract and humanist theoretical framework. In fact, neither the consumption of
wealth nor the production of wealth received due value from Marx. According to
the research by other theorists, we know that Marx began to write “the first
manuscript” of Paris Manuscripts after reading the economic works of Say,
Smith, etc., (that is to say, after writing volume 1–3 of “Paris Notes”), and “the
second manuscript” and “the third manuscript” (volumes 4 & 5 of “Paris Notes”)
after reading the works of Ricardo and Mill. Ironically, Jean Baptiste Say’s A
Treatise On Political Economy clearly consists of three parts: the production of
wealth, the distribution of wealth, and the consumption of wealth, and Adam
Smith discussed the distribution of wealth between classes after studied the
reason for the increase of labor productivity in An Inquiry into the Nature and
Causes of the Wealth of Nations, but in the first manuscript of Paris Manuscripts,
Marx skipped over production and directly went onto distribution. The reasons of
this irony are quite easy to figure out: on the one hand Marx, unlike Smith and
Say, downplayed the economic significance of the production of wealth because
it was meaningless to him; then on the other hand, he could not analyze the social
and historical meaning of the production of wealth as well as he was able to in
his later German Ideology, because he did not have a solid theoretical foundation.
Instead, Marx just modified Smith and Say’s theory on the distribution of wealth,
particularly the disadvantaged status of laborers, and combined it with an abstract
humanist critique. Thus, at this stage his analysis has two characteristics, one of
which is an external critique of the unjust distribution between labors and
capitalists without actually studying the economic realities; the other is, even
with the inequality in the distribution of wealth between labor and capital, he was
only able to focus on the disadvantaged status of labors in the struggle with
capitalists over contracts, like Smith did, abandoning a thorough investigation of
productive relation in reality to highlight the essence of this phenomenon.
Some scholars might argue that the concept of labor process or productive
process appeared in Marx’s first manuscript of Paris Manuscripts. Sure, Marx
did refer to it, and he even went further by talking about the estrangement of this
process. However, according to his logic, it was deduced from the estrangement
of distribution. “But the estrangement is manifested not only in the result but in
the act of production, within the producing activity itself, were it not that in the
A path of interpreting the “consumer society” 287

very act of production he was estranging himself from himself?” (Marx and
Engels 1975b, p. 274) Such a deduction from the alienation of distribution to the
labor process or productive process meant that Marx’s discussion was not
derived from the productive process although he could regard the productive
process as the object of his research. As we know, production is a chain
consisting of production, distribution, exchange and consumption. Thus, genuine
and scientific analysis should originate from the basic production link, which
Marx was able to do later. But here, as Marx had no knowledge of the theoretical
significance of the productive process, the theoretical and historical significance
of the process of exchange and consumption cannot be correctly interpreted. In
the second and third manuscripts of the Paris Manuscripts and the abstract of
James Mill’s book Elements of Political Economy (hereinafter referred to as
“Mill’s Notes”), Marx did mention the issue of exchange and consumption, but
he referred to the exchange relations only from the angle of fetishism of human
relations. As for the issue of consumption, although Marx did mention the
relationship between consumption and thrift in “private property and needs” in
the third manuscript of Paris Manuscripts and illustrated it further in Mill’s Notes,
his exploration of consumption was only based on exchange relations without a
recognition of its status and role in the whole social productive process. This was
especially evident in Mill’s Notes (Ibid., p. 221).
We can explain this as follows: firstly, Marx could not give a clear picture of
production and exchange, neither could he give a direct explanation of
consumption; secondly, there was a rupture between “estanged man” and
“humanized man” in Marx’s logic, but he only emphasized their differences
while missed out on their articulations, that is to say, Marx did not make this kind
of articulations from the angle of social and historical process. For this reason,
while Marx realized that consumption was somewhat effective in creating
consciousness and social structure, he was not able to connect these two and
provide an explanation. Even though Marx, at this time, had already
subconsciously realized the effect of consumption on people’s consciousness and
the social structure, but because he did not clearly understand the complexity of
the formation of the idea of self-alienation’s aufhebung, and did not figure out a
clear distinction between cognitive insights of critical thinkers and the public, he,
as the successor of the Enlightenment thinkers, just simplified the necessity and
inevitability of abandoning one’s self, which “we have realized in thoughts.” For
example, Marx mentioned in the third manuscript of the Paris Manuscripts that
“Industry speculates on the refinement of needs, it speculates however just as
much on their crudeness, but on their artificially produced crudeness, whose true
enjoyment, therefore, is self-stupefaction-this illusory satisfaction of need —this
civilization contained within the crude barbarism of need. The English gin shops
are therefore the symbolical representations of private property. Their luxury
288 TANG Zhengdong

reveals the true relation of industrial luxury and wealth to man. They are
therefore rightly the only Sunday pleasure of the people which the English police
treat at least mildly” (Ibid., pp. 311–312). Marx even thought, “since with him
therefore the real estrangement of the life of man remains, and remains all the more,
the more one is conscious of it as much, hence it [the negation of this estrangement]
can be accomplished solely by bringing about communism” (Ibid., p. 313). At a
first glance, this seems to approximate Marx’s later thoughts on the combination
of the forms of fetishist reality and its idea, but this is not true. Actually, Marx
did not fully grasp the complexity of fetishist idea in everyday life, therefore, in
the following, he naturally concluded: “History will lead to it; and this movement,
which in theory we already know to be a self-transcending movement, will
constitute in actual fact a very rough and protracted process” (Ibid.).
Here is actually the question that the well-known Japanese Marxist
philosopher Hiromatsu has discussed. In The Figure of Reification Theories, he
pointed out, “Essence is neither the ontological entity, nor a self-serving entity,
like a prototype corresponding totally to duplication, rather the relational
stationary irrelevant to phenomenon —which deserves more attention. Some
scholars would think about this and consider it fetishism, illustrated by the image
in the objective and veil, like an illusion, not something that exists. Even in the
light of academic introspection, however, such illusion has its existential root in
real relationships that are beyond imagination and fantasy. Moreover, this image
is not only genuinely perceived by subjects, but also shapes their practical
actions. The scholars speculate that the subjects ultimately equate the image with
something that objectively exists, which directly shapes their daily practice”
(Hiromatsu 2002, p. 83). Hiromatsu’s insight on the real effect of fetishism was
profound. After all, according to the progression of Marx’s thoughts, Marx’s
exploration into this field enhanced and completed his social and historical
theories. In fact, Hiromatsu cannot match Marx’s study of the dialectic
relationship between subjective practice and the objective laws of
socio-economic process, leading him to ignore the realistic possibility of getting
rid of fetishism and realizing liberty and liberation on the basis of objective laws
of social economic process, and also making him incapable of grasping the full
practical significance of Marx’s historical materialism.

After finishing Paris Manuscripts, Marx continued to explore the position and
significance of the process of material production in social history until he came
to the conclusion that he had arrived at the correct understanding of the origins of
material production in German Ideology. From the perspective of historical
A path of interpreting the “consumer society” 289

materialism’s basic principles, it could be said, Marx had completed a new

materialist philosophy at this time, but regarding the application of these basic
principles to the analysis of realistic historical process, we must acknowledge
that there were many problems that Marx did not solve at the time, including the
complexity of the social effects of consumption. Objectively speaking, Marx
emphasized the importance production had on consumption, but he did not pay
much attention to the counter-effect of consumption on people’s consciousness
and the production process. In his critique of Grün who was a “true socialist,”
Marx said: “Herr Grün only gives answers to the problem of the moral postulate
of human consumption and recognition of the ‘essential nature of consumption.’
Since he knows nothing about the real relationship between production and
consumption, he has to take refuge in human essence, the last hiding-place of the
true socialists. For the same reason, he insists on proceeding from consumption
instead of production. If you proceed from production, you necessarily concern
yourself with the real conditions of production and with the productive activity of
men. But if you proceed from consumption, you can set your mind at rest by
merely declaring that consumption is not at present ‘human,’ and by postulating
‘human consumption,’ education for true consumption and so on. You can be
content with such phrases, without bothering at all about the real living
conditions and the activity of men. It should be mentioned in conclusion that
precisely those economists who took consumption as their starting-point
happened to be reactionary and ignored the revolutionary element in competition
and large-scale industry” (Marx and Engels 1976, p. 519). Regarding that in this
stage Marx focused on the critique of historical idealism of German ideologists
from the perspective of historical materialism, it is easy to understand why Marx
would focus on the definition of concreteness and class nature of “consumption”
from the perspective of realistic productive mode, unlike Grün, “the true
socialist,” who only wanted to talk about “human consumption.” However, it
also brought forth a problem: Marx no longer explained the positive social
function and effect of consumption or, in other words, consumer activities,
especially in capitalist society, how would it impact the development of social
history?
Here, I propose an academic viewpoint: Marx was not actually aware of the
function of consumption activities during this period. Objectively speaking, one
can not identify the impact of capitalist consumption process on the conscious
form and objective form of fetishism unless he first recognizes the difference
between capitalist consumption and pre-capitalist consumption activities. As
Karl Polanyi pointed out, although labor was a commodity under capitalism, it
was a special commodity that was different, for such a commodity could not be
separated from the people themselves. Therefore, if labors were expected to be
true commodities, not only should the capital squeeze the workers at the level of
290 TANG Zhengdong

objective economic conditions and force them to turn themselves into

commodities, but it should also make them willing to. Otherwise, the workers
could lower their standard of living, move away, etc. instead of becoming
commodities. And it did not exist in pre-capitalist society because workers had
not yet become commodities. They were in a relationship of personal dependence.
To tell the truth, Marx had to dialectically confirm the relationship between the
capitalist production process and the general production process, the capitalist
exchange process and the general process of exchange, in order to point out the
distinction between them, which Marx was not able to do completely in German
Ideology. Obviously, Marx was influenced by Adam Smith and he understood
the development of productive force from the perspective of labor division, and
understood the content of productive relation from the perspective of exchange
relation or communicative mode. But these views were criticized in Grundrisse
by Marx himself. Marx took these views as a reflection of the stage of handicraft
industrial capitalism and failed to point to the large-scale industrial capitalism
(Marx and Engels 1995, p. 404).
The 1848 European Revolution and the struggle of the proletariat in Western
European countries in the early 1850s had a great influence on Marx’s thoughts
on consumption. The working class did not reveal their class awareness in the
European revolution. In the early 1850s, the working class in western European
countries lessened the passion of their struggle because of their economic
improvement. This situation was unlike Marx’s opinions on the working class’
class consciousness before 1848. Marx’s explanation was this: the working class
was harassed by the conscious form of fetishism. In The Eighteenth of Brumaire
of Louis Bonaparte, when Marx analyzed why the Paris proletariats forgot their
class interests from the revolution, he pointed out, “the year 1850 was one of the
most splendid years of industrial and commercial prosperity, and the Paris
proletariat was therefore fully employed. But the election law of May 31, 1850,
excluded it from any participation in political power. It cut the proletariat off
from the very arena of the struggle. It threw the workers back into the position of
pariahs which they had occupied before the February Revolution, by letting
themselves be led by the democrats in the face of such an event and forgetting
the revolutionary interests of their class for momentary case and comfort” (Marx
and Engels 1979, p. 146). In Commercial Prosperity and Political Consequences,
Marx bluntly pointed out, “The mass of the people is fully employed and more or
less well off —always deducting the paupers inseparable from British prosperity;
it is therefore not at present a vary malleable material for political agitation”
(Marx and Engels 1979, p. 365). Engels, Marx’s comrade-in-arms, had also seen
this very clearly. In Real Causes Why the French Proletarians Remained
Comparatively Inactive in December Last, Engels said, “All finally, there was
this one fact which was alone sufficient to ensure to Napoleon the neutrality of
A path of interpreting the “consumer society” 291

the great majority of the working-classes: Trade was excellent, and Englishmen
know it well enough, that with a fully employed and well-paid working-class, no
agitation, much less a revolution, can be got up” (Marx and Engels 1979, p. 214).
Obviously, Marx had realized that it was also possible for labors to drop into the
quagmire of the conscious form of fetishism because there would be a
reconfiguration of workers as individuals in the consumption of wealth. Thus,
Marx’s next task was to prove both that the capitalist system would collapse
according to objective economic laws, and the proletariat’s consciousness could
be revived after abandoning the fetishist ideas.
In the draft of Das Capital, Marx profoundly analyzed the above questions. He
first advanced a pair of consumer issues. In Grundrisse, Marx pointed out that
there were some distinctions between the mode of capital operation and the mode
of its governance. In the former case, workers existed to add value and were
wage earners in a strict sense and only at this level were workers truly workers,
and this also truly embodied capitalist ownership relations. In the latter case, the
situation was different. Marx believed: “What precisely distinguishes capital
from the master- servant relation is that the worker confronts him as consumer
and possessor of exchange values, and that in the form of the possessor of money,
in the form of money he becomes a simple centre of circulation —one of its
infinitely many centers, in which his specificity as worker is extinguished” (Marx
and Engels 1995, p. 404). In other words, the special skill of capital was its
ability to construct an image: it gives the workers an equal exchange in
consumptive relations. Of course, Marx referred to this phenomenon as an
“illusion.” In his view, an equal exchange relationship did not exist from the
beginning of the capitalist exchange relationship.
“In fact this equality is already disturbed because of the worker’s relation to
the capitalist as a use value, in the form specifically distinct from exchange value,
in opposition to value posited as value, there is a presupposition of this
seemingly simple exchange; because, thus, he already stands in an economically
different relation —outside that of exchange, in which the nature of the use value,
the particular use value of the commodity is, as such, irrelevant” (Marx and
Engels 1995, p. 243). Marx’s conclusion was: “whether production and
consumption are viewed as the activity of one or of many individuals, they
appear in any case as moments of one process, in which production is the real
point of departure and hence also the predominant moment. Consumption as
urgency, as need, is itself an intrinsic moment of productive activity” (Marx and
Engels 1995, p. 35). This idea was an important theoretical basis on which Marx
could explain the social significance of consumption from the perspective of
productive process and as a result he could find the path to the liberation from
fetishism.
Secondly, Marx analyzed how the working class could be freed from fetishist
292 TANG Zhengdong

consciousness. Unlike Henri Lefebvre, Baudrillard, Debord and other Western

Marxist “consumer society” critical theorists, Marx stands firmly in explaining
the theory of consumption from production. From his point of view, a social
subject was not necessarily an individual consumer but a class subject who
expressed special productive relations. The consciousness of this subject would
definitely be limited by the characteristic of realistic productive process
expressed by its class status. Marx’s 1861–1863 Economical Manuscripts
pointed out, at the level of capital’s “external life,” the production of capital
“always linked with the circulation of capital” and this feature made the nature of
capital appear false, “into relations in which not capital and labor but on the one
hand capital and capital confront each other, and on the each other hand the
individuals as well again confront each other in the relations of simple
circulations, as commodity owners, buyers and sellers… Now the original form
in which capital and wage labor each other disappears as it were, and relations
enter the picture which is apparently independent of this” (Marx and Engels 1991,
pp. 72–73). It was in this sense that Marx said, “in the capital relation to the
extent that it is still considered independent of its circulation process —what is
essentially characteristic is the mystification, the upside-down world, the
inversion of the subjective and the objective, as it already appears in money.
Corresponding to the invented relation, there necessarily arises, already in the
actual production process itself, and inverted conception, a transposed
consciousness, which is completed by the transformations and modifications of
the actual process of circulation” (Marx and Engels 1991, pp. 73–74). When
production under capitalism is in a state of prosperity, the reversal and the
mysterious process above is likely to occur. This is where the idea of fetishism
came from. Because Baudrillard, Debord and others lived in the Fordist
capitalism during a time of relative prosperity, they looked at labors from the
consumer’s perspective. In Marx’s idea, labors’ conscious form of fetishism
could neither be moved by Enlightenment, just as what the modern
enlightenment thinkers considered, nor be eliminated by anarchic “sudden death”
as Baudrillard, Debord and others thought. The key point was: we must see that
the productive process under capitalism does not always mean prosperity. When
an economic crisis occurs, the objective economic process will encourage
workers to oppose both the material form and conscious form of capitalist
fetishism. just as Marx said, “whereas the wage laborer, who is trapped in the
same inverted notion, only from the other extreme, is driven in practice, as the
oppressed side, to resistance against the whole relations, hence also against the
notion, concepts, and the modes of thinking corresponding to it” (Marx and
Engels 1991, p. 74).
Thus, Marx’s critical view of the “consumer society” based on historical
materialism is unveiled. I think the significance of this view to analyze
A path of interpreting the “consumer society” 293

contemporary Western consumer society is: so long as you do not believe that the
contemporary capitalist production has completely freed itself from internal
conflicts and the plague of economic crises, sociological or anthropological
approach that is now widely used should be abandoned in analyzing “consumer
society,” and there should be a switch to the scientific method of historical
materialism that Marx has so successfully used.

References
Baudrillard J. (1998). The Consumer Society. London: Sage Publications Ltd.
Baudrillard J. (2001). The System of Objects (in Chinese, trans. Lin Zhiming). Shanghai: Shanghai
Renmin Chubanshe
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