I would like to preface by saying I am very sorry if this is the wrong community. This post touches on the core philosophy of Marxism, and I was hoping to get some insight.
My friend claims that the only reason companies produce things is because the working class, regular citizens, are asking for it; he does not get behind the idea of companies subconsciously persuading people to buy the items they sell. He believes that because your regular person wants a new phone, kitchen equipment, clothes, whatever - they are pushing capitalism forward and therefore it is the right / natural system.
How would you reason? I feel conflicted. On one hand, people do want things and there is almost always something to produce it for them, but on the other hand companies are steadily pushing for profit, using various tactics to drive consumerism. I would appreciate what you guys think and what you would answer, because according to him, capitalism only exists because demand exists. Whether that’s true or not, I hope we can discuss. Cheers!
The existence of the multi billion, if not trillion dollar industries of marketing, advertising, market research, “store layout specialists” or whatever you might call them, “consumer psychology” (yes, an actual thing), and so on and so on, all there to brainwash you from birth to not only consume, but consume “brand” x over y (the existence of “brands” in itself!), prove your friend wrong.
Literally everything in our life is commodified for profit, not only our basic needs and human rights like food, housing, healthcare, but also the made up concepts capitalism invents to “fix” our problems, which it created, like stress and burnout (or halitosis), with ideas like “wellness” and “mindfulness” and whatever else they can use to make us buy more while distracting us from the real cause of our problems and making us feel like we’ve done something for ourselves, when we wouldn’t need to be doing it in the first place if we weren’t existing in a for-profit society.
There’s also the whole “keeping up with the Jones’s” and “American dream” type propaganda they push to make sure we’re always “aspiring” (and so thinking like temporarily embarrassed millionaires and acting against our own interests). There is absolutely no need for there to be a new phone model being released every week, or for you to buy a new one every year, or for you to buy a new wardrobe every season to keep up with “fashion”, another industry there to sell the unnecessary (the concept of “fashion” that is, not clothes themselves) but they create a need with the industries I’ve mentioned already, but also with shit like planned obsolescence and artificial scarcity.
The whole thing is a massive manipulation to get us to work hard to make money (mostly for the capitalists, but just enough for us) to buy a load of shit we don’t need to solve problems created specifically to sell us said shit (along with the things we actually do need, which are put behind a literal pay wall by, and) to funnel even more money to the capitalists, while they make us think it was all our idea. Your friend is proof of it. And while it might be uncomfortable for them to realise that they’ve been completely taken in by the propaganda, it just goes to show how well it works.