The Myth of Egalitarianism’ in the Consumption Society

  • Abstract:

    Happiness or the state of well-being, are somehow the most important ideological concepts of the modern society that we can call it following Baudrillard, the consumption society. In the middle of the twentieth century, the capitalist society tried to shift from production politics into consumption strategies. A fundamental fatal strategy, which is going to change the visage of western societies and from this time, the obsession of well being started to dominate the individuals mind. In order to have an egalitarian consumption society, the capitalism tries to change the state of well-being, into an observable and quantitative form of conformity. The commodities should be accessible for the whole citizens of a society and in order to obtain and to live permanently in the state of well being and happiness, human needs must be satisfied completely. The illusion of well being, attached profoundly to the values of the consumption society, became the new propaganda of the modern welfare states. The welfare states, tries to eliminate the discrimination in the field of consumerism in order to give the equal chances to their citizens, satisfy their needs by giving a crucial importance to economic growth so they started to create, the massive industrial manufactures, in order to satisfy the material human needs. But the point is, that the economic growth in it-self is a result of inequality and the consumption society, tries to hide the ‘exchange value’, by the ‘use value’, in order to maintain the myth of egalitarianism. In this paper, we are going to analyze the new modalities of social inequality and new social segregations related to consumerism, by the key concept of exchange value.

 

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