Comment on I fear this guy is right by carp30mnia

carp30mnia · 9/7/2025, 9:41:41 AM · permalink

⚠️ Btw: your link was incorrectly titled and I did not realize this until I clicked it. The actual video link goes to:   
*Consumerism is the Perfection of Slavery - Prof Jiang Xueqin*  
  
This was my response before I realized the error. (but giving the amount of energy I spent on replying to it, I'm still posting it)
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**1\. Marx’s “Success” was really just Governments Pre-emptively Defusing Potential "Revolution"**

\&gt;&gt; The lecture claims that “every industrial society adopted Marx’s ideals after WWII” by centering workers through unions, welfare states, and public services.

But this was never a true realization of Marx’s vision. It was a containment strategy from the beginning. Western governments expanded worker protections not because Marx was right, but because they feared Marxist revolution. Welfare states, strong unions, and education programs were designed to buy worker loyalty and prevent radical politics from spreading.

Even in this so-called worker-centered period, the very foundations were being laid for a transition to consumerism—alongside the rise of Big Government as a mechanism of containment and control.

**2\. Consumerism is as bad as it is because it's specifically Debt-Consumerism**

\&gt;&gt; The speaker treats consumerism as mostly a matter of desire and competition but fails to go in depth about its crucial mechanism: debt. He does not expand on debt as a structural feature of modern consumerism.  
  
%%Consumerism by itself%% (buying goods as markers of status or happiness) could, in theory, **be self-limiting**. People would only spend what they actually have, and the pace of consumption would be tied to real earnings.

%%Debt-consumerism%%, however, takes the brakes off, with debt becoming the main engine of the system. Credit cards, mortgages, student loans, and buy-now-pay-later schemes let people consume far beyond their means. Modern consumerism doesn’t just thrive on people buying things—it depends on people borrowing to buy things they can’t yet afford. Debt turns consumerism into a self-reinforcing cycle. This makes consumerism:

\- **Faster**: Credit enables people to consume beyond their wages.

\- **Deeper**: Debt ties people more tightly to the economic system, since they must keep working to repay it.

\- **Binding**: once you owe, you’re tied to the system, forced to keep working and consuming

\- **A Societal Precondition**: Industries (housing, education, healthcare) restructure themselves around easy credit, ensuring that debt isn’t exceptional but normal.  
  
This is why financial crises (2008 being the prime example) are consumer crises rooted in over-leveraged debt, not just overspending. **Without debt, consumerism would be smaller and slower.** With it, consumerism becomes turbocharged—fueling growth but also creating systemic instability, financial crises, and a population locked into repayment.

In this sense, debt-enabled consumerism specifically is what makes consumerism so horrible and enslaving as it is today.

**3\. Neglect of Identity Politics' Role**

\&gt;&gt; The lecture ignores a massive contemporary force: identity politics as the major divisionary framework today.

Workers no longer see themselves primarily as a unified class. Instead, society is fragmented along racial, gender, and cultural identities, amplified by consumer platforms and media.

\- Political coalitions now fracture more over cultural identity than over economic policy.

\- Universities, corporations, and governments often prioritize symbolic identity representation over material worker gains.

\- Social media turns identity into a consumer product (hashtags, pronouns, slogans), where individuals market themselves as representatives of a cause.  
  
**4\. Debt-Consumerism + Identity Politics = Today’s Real Divide**

\&gt;&gt; The lecture ends by calling consumerism “the perfection of slavery,” but this misses the modern twist: identity politics

\- Debt-Consumerism atomizes individuals, while identity politics tribes them back up—not as workers, but as competing cultural factions.

\-The elites no longer need to suppress class solidarity directly—identity politics does the work for them by keeping people fighting symbolic wars instead of uniting over shared economic concerns.

\- Example: Debates over cultural symbols or gender issues dominate headlines, while corporate consolidation, wage stagnation, and debt slavery go largely unchallenged.

%%Recommended Reading%%: [The Trouble With Diversity by Walter Benn Michaels](https://prospect.org/features/trouble-diversity/) (leftist):  
argues that celebrating “diversity” doesn’t challenge economic inequality — in fact, it can coexist perfectly with neoliberal capitalism. (Example: a diverse boardroom of billionaires still keeps everyone else poor.)  
  
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**Where Left and Right Both Fail at Targeting Class**: Most of the left stops its critique at consumerism, while most of the right stops its critique at identity politics. The left points out how consumerism breeds shallow competition, alienation, and endless debt, but rarely explains how consumerism fuses with identity to become a cultural battlefield. Meanwhile, the right highlights how identity politics fractures society and erodes shared values, but often ignores how consumerism monetizes identity and turns it into marketable brands. By treating these critiques separately, both sides miss the larger picture: consumerism, debt, and identity politics are not rival explanations but mutually reinforcing forces, keeping people distracted, divided, and locked into a system that benefits the few at the top.

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