Can “false consciousness” explain our relationship with our Media?
Why do people consume? Why do people not just consume but consume things they do not need? This paper is an attempt to explain the forces that motivate consumers to spend: what motivates them to spend, what methods by which those forces convince people to spend. This paper also attempts to articulate where consumerist impulses originate. Is shopping a natural instinct, an capitalist form of self-preservation or is it nurtured from birth by the society that proclaims individual freedom has it’s greatest attribute while slowly indoctrinating us with it’s own ideology though a constant barrage of propaganda. In a capitalist society with capitalist ideologies and money can buy you happiness, Marx counters and provides a philosophy for the working class.
False consciousness is a Marxist term. The phrase was never used by Karl Marx but was coined by philosopher, Friedrich Engels. False consciousness refers to the idea that capitalist society presents a misleading reality to the bourgeois and the proletariat. This illusion allows the unwitting exploitation of the proletariat by the bourgeois. To understand this properly in greater detail, background knowledge in the field of Marxism is necessary as the theory and political practice introduces close to 300 new terms while incorporating German philosophy, English political economy and French socialism.
Karl Marx made a note that when workers labored for a wage, the resulting product reminded for the benefit of the factory owner, not for the worker. This turns labour into a commodity and alienates the worker: “…the alienation of the worker is expressed thus: the more he produces, the less he can consume; the more value he creates, the less value he has…” (Marx, Manuscripts of 1844.)
The factory owner is made possible through private ownership of the means of production. The worker, without the means of production, is forced to labour for the...