Under the Beach, the Paving Stones: Commodaties, Consummerism, Contradictions

Abstract

In this article Graham Murdock returns, after eighteen years, to his interchange with Dallas Smythe over the “blindspots” in Western Marxism. Re-reading Marx’s writings of commodities he identifies two strands: the analysis of commodification which Smythe, very fruitfully, extended from the domain of labour to leisure and media consumption, and the idea of commodity fetishism which European writers, facing the successive defeat of Left movements, focused on as the key ideological device for defusing the structural contradictions of capitalist development. Murdock argues that both strands are essential for a critical analysis of contemporary conditions. Although recent decades have witnessed the globalisation of consumerism and the consolidation of commercial media and shopping as central organising principles in everyday life they have also witnessed the rise of new oppositional movements based around the critical interrogation of commodity chains and their social and environmental costs.