Lecture 10- Terminal Marketing Flashcards
(12 cards)
Terminal Marketing
A critical view that consumer culture has entered a nihilistic, all-consuming spectacle. It suggested there is no meaningful escape or ethical consumption under capitalism–only commodified illusions.
What does Terminal Marketing critique most harshly?
It critiques “transformative” or “ethical” consumption narratives as false hopes that soothe us while market society collapses socially, ecologically, and existentially.
How is Terminal Marketing different from typical critical marketing?
Where typical critique seeks reform or change, Terminal Marketing embraces unfiltered pessimism — a refusal to “fix” a broken system with the same tools that built it.
Consumer Resistance
it examines how consumer push back against domination by using or rejecting market systems.
Define consumer resistance “through” markets
Using the market to push back against it — e.g., ethical consumption, brand activism, buycotts. It works within market logic to try and improve it.
Define consumer resistance “to” markets.
Rejecting or exiting market logic — e.g., anti-consumption, local cooperatives, off-grid lifestyles. Attempts to live outside commodified systems.
Downshifting, minimalism, voluntary simplicity - recognizing that it doesn’t take much to live well.
Have been critiqued for being inherently class-based elitist projects which, rather than resisting capitalism, creatively reinforce class-based market differentiation
Critique from revolutionary perspective?
both forms are often inadequate because they don’t escape the capitalist system — they’re still shaped by market structures and end up reinforcing them
When resitance becomes a product, where it gets packaged, branded and sold back to us.
even resitance, activism and ethics can be commodified and marketed for profit.
What are the four key moments in Marx’s analysis of the capitalist system?
According to Marx, the capitalist system operates through four interconnected moments:
Production – where goods and services are created (labor + means of production).
Distribution – how those goods are allocated (wages, prices, ownership).
Exchange – the buying and selling of goods in markets.
Consumption – when goods are used, consumed, or enjoyed by people.
👉 These aren’t isolated — they form a cycle, and production is the dominant force because it sets the terms for all the others.
Capitalist production
A system where goods (and even meanings) are produced for profit using wage labor.
Workers create value, but capitalists own the output and surplus (profit).
It commodifies everything — even identity, ethics, and resistance.
The bourgeoisie pay workers just enough to meet basic needs — not to thrive.
This keeps them dependent on wages and locked in endless labor.
exploited labor hidden behind the illusion of choice and freedom.
Commodity Fetishism
When we treat products as if they have value in themselves, hiding the labor and exploitation behind them.
Alienation (Marx)
When workers are disconnected from:
The product of their labor,
The process of work,
Other people,
Their own human potential.
They work not for joy or meaning, but to survive — under someone else’s control.
Psychoanalysis & Consumer Freedom (Gabriel, 2015)
Consumer “freedom” is a fantasy — a substitute for deeper, repressed desires.
We seek identity and satisfaction through commodities, but they only offer temporary relief.
