Blocked power over productive activity produces consumerism as compensation.

Evidence

But this cultural posture is less dramatic than anti-intellectualism, because it relates to things rather than to people; and so we must try to lower the figural level. A Marxian social psychology must above all insist on the psychological concomitants of production itself. The reason production (and what can loosely be called the “economic”) is philosophically prior to power (and what can loosely be called the “political”) lies here, in the relationship between production and feelings of power in the first place; but it is something that it is preferable and more persuasive to say the other way round (not least because it helps us thereby evade humanist rhetoric): namely, by insisting on what happens to people when their relations to production are blocked, when they no longer have power over productive activity. Impotence is first and foremost that, the pall on the psyche, the gradual loss of interest in the self and the outside world, very much in formal analogy to Freud’s description of mourning; the difference being that one recovers from mourning (Freud shows how), but that the condition of non-productivity, since it is an index of an objective situation that does not change, must be dealt with in another way, a way that, acknowledging its persistence and inevitability, disguises, represses, displaces, and sublimates a persistent and fundamental powerlessness. That other way is, of course, consumerism itself, as a compensation for an economic impotence which is also an utter lack of any political power: what is called voter apathy is mainly visible among those strata who lack the means to distract themselves by way of consumption. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 689

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the core project of linking economic conditions to cultural/psychological forms — direct evidence for the ‘style is periodizable / aesthetic form as economy’s appearance’ thread the reader is pursuing. — connects to: Mass consumer choice over offered products is a token of powerlessness, not power — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from…, 226; Consumer-capitalist integration threatens rather than benefits individual freedom. — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the…, 7; Overproduction forces the apparatus to manufacture consumer needs and work-desire — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the…, 196 (+2 more)
• ADDENDUM: Consumerism-as-compensation for economic impotence parallels the sacrifice framework where ritual compensates for structural powerlessness; could be folded into a follow-up on ideological vs material compensation.