Consumer culture has been inextricably bound up with two parallel transformations: the growing emphasis on self-actualization or individualization in late modernity and the rise of a particularly disengaged and predatory capitalism during the last 40 years. Wide academic and public understanding exists concerning the separate ways in which each of these forces have played out in societies, cultures and politics especially since the late 1970s. Arguably, though, there has been less attempt to plot the interconnections between them or to grasp the implications of these for a potentially radical critique of consumerism. This neglect is unsatisfactory and ignores the grounding of both consumer culture and the pursuit of self-actualization in the underlying and changing structures of the capitalist economy such that the seductiveness of both serves to either conceal, beautify or seemingly de-fang the wolf underneath. At the same time, the article explores some of the main ways in which these overwhelmingly prevalent preoccupations isolate and disempower consumers by, for example, encouraging personal debt and competitive consumption, fostering the belief that self-branding processes will liberate individuals from unsatisfactory lives or because of the social fragmentation and humiliation that result when citizens’ poverty excludes them from joining the dominant game. All this, in turn, leaves consumer-citizens socially and culturally ill-equipped to challenge the new capitalism through collective rather than purely individual action.

中文翻译：

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“和你一起吃更好！” 消费文化对掠夺性资本主义兴起的贡献

消费文化与两个平行的转变密不可分：现代晚期对自我实现或个性化的日益强调，以及在过去 40 年里特别不参与和掠夺性资本主义的兴起。学术界和公众对这些力量中的每一种在社会、文化和政治中发挥作用的不同方式存在广泛的理解，尤其是自 1970 年代后期以来。然而，可以说，很少有人试图描绘它们之间的相互联系，也很少有人试图抓住这些对消费主义的潜在激进批评的影响。这种忽视是令人不满意的，并且忽视了消费文化的基础和资本主义经济潜在和不断变化的结构中对自我实现的追求，以至于两者的诱惑都起到了隐藏、美化或表面上隐藏下的狼的作用。同时，本文探讨了这些压倒性的普遍关注通过鼓励个人债务和竞争性消费来孤立和剥夺消费者权能的一些主要方式，例如，培养自我品牌过程将把个人从不令人满意的生活中解放出来的信念或因为当公民的贫困将他们排除在占主导地位的游戏之外时，会导致社会分裂和屈辱。这一切，反过来，