Individual Consumption in Capitalism. An Exercise in the Logic of Capital

Abstract

This is a systematic analysis of the apparent contradictions of private consumption - growing discrepancy between productive potential and actual needs, the degenerating quality of consumption and so on - within the frame of Marx's critique of political economy. Similar analyses of other material and social areas of everyday life such as ideology, technolo gy, forms of consciousness, etc. are referred to as a 'subsumptive ap proach'.

By this is meant a theoretical standpoint that sees the capitalist social form as the subsumptive agent that renders the fundamental social deter minants to every sphere of social life. An exercise is undertaken in order - to see what the formal social determinants of consumption are in the capitalist mode of production. For this reason the determinants of con sumption are analysed in the reproductive circuit of individual capital. The- implications and limitations of this analysis are discussed with respect to problems relating to the theoretical stipulations of the subsumption ap proach and the empirical study of the apparent contradictions of con sumption.