Alienated consumption compensates for alienated labour

Evidence

Habermas applied the findings of Friedmann and other sociologists critically and took them as evidence that alienated labour was being compensated for by alienated consumption. … He saw the advertising industry as offering only half the explanation for this astonishing state of affairs. The other half of the explanation was provided by the pauperism of consumption, which was a consequence of the pauperism of industrialized labour. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 2304

The French sociologist Georges Friedmann had taken the view, approvingly, that having a share in affluence' and in the perfection’ of the products of technologically advanced production offered workers a substitute, in the sphere of consumption, for the satisfaction they had lost in the sphere of production as a result of technological progress. Habermas applied the findings of Friedmann and other sociologists critically and took them as evidence that alienated labour was being compensated for by alienated consumption. He presented as astonishing what sociologists usually accepted as being a matter of course: that traditional needs, linked to specific cultures, were being remoulded into a reservoir of demand that could be tapped by virtually any stimulus to consumption. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 568

Categorization

• XREF: This compensation thesis anticipates Habermas’s later colonization-of-lifeworld argument; connects to his mature theory of communicative action. — connects to: Workers compensated for meaningless rationalized jobs with glittering distractions instead of class consciousness — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 469; Under capitalism consumption targets abstract value rather than bodily need — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 753; Blocked power over productive activity produces consumerism as compensation. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 689
• DEEPTHINKING: The compensation thesis links production and consumption into a single mechanism: culture-bound needs are remoulded into a limitless reservoir of tappable demand.
• SEED: Essay angle: how the advertising industry supplies only half the explanation for manufactured demand, with the pauperism of industrial labour supplying the rest.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2304; Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 568

Broader Connections

• Blocked power over productive activity produces consumerism as compensation. #corroborates (0.95) — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 689