ABSTRACT
I should perhaps make clear at this juncture my own particular position regarding Marxism in what is after all a critique of ‘market culture’. The first thing to state is that the present work is not intended as an anti-Marxist statement. By the same token, neither is it rooted in any sense of structured political ideology or analysis of economics. Rather, the locus of dispute is between a type of Marxism that is capable of taking on board the fundamental shift to the ‘consumer society’ (and thus is able to work through the full implications of this situation) and one that either cannot or chooses not to. In this sense, this book can be seen as following the discursive line of inquiry set down by Zygmunt Bauman, Frederic Jameson and David Harvey (see Chapter 2). In particular, the way each of these theorists locates the important cultural and economic transformations of recent years – I am referring here, of course, to the transformation from production-based society to one increasingly predicated on consumption and its associated values – within the framework of contemporary ‘postmodern’ debates.6
