Advertising, Mass Consumption and Capitalism∗

Western societies have developed into a historically new stage in the evolution of capitalism, one which is characterized by corporations exercising monopolistic power and sustaining demand by advertising through the media. While this theme has been emphasized e.g., by J. A. Schumpeter in Business Cycles; A Theoretical, Historical and Statistical Analysis of the Capitalist Process, chapter III, 1 and by J. K. Galbraith in the Affluent Society, it seems to have become a fundamental tenet of some of the most recent theoretical work in sociology, and in Postmodernist circles. The importance of monopoly power in the recent development of capitalist society has also been forcefully stressed by Marxist historians, e.g., from P. Baran and P. Sweezy, in Monopoly Capital to E. Mandel, in Late Capitalism, and G. Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century. Postmodernist theory, on the other hand, has been constructed around Marxist historicism and “social constructionism”, the view that the individual self is socially constituted (see Leonard (1997) and Anderson (1998)). As a consequence, the interaction of monopoly power and advertising has taken a new meaning in the Postmodernist literature, and concepts like “consumerism”, “commodification” of culture, and “manipulation of preferences” have become the central core what could be called a Postmodernist Critique of the organization of society. D. Harvey’s The Condition of Postmodernity is a good example of such a critique, where, it is argued for instance, that “the promotion of a culture of consumerism” is needed to “sustain sufficient buoyancy of demand in consumer markets to keep capitalist production profitable” (p. 61).