On Consuming Alienation Against The Balanced Development Of Public Quality

In the preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Marx points out that"consumption produces the producer’s quality, for it brings the producers needs to pursue a certain purpose".The pursuit of need on purpose in the preliminary production behavior leads to the formation of the quality,which evolves into a new one in constant pursuit. Obviously, consumption needs are the driving force forthe development of the quality of citizens, which is manifested externally by the consumption activityeffectively performed by men to satisfy the needs for developing their own qualities.With the rapid development of modern scientific technology and productivity, men are graduallylosing the ability of self-criticism and self-control, reducing to the "unidirectional man", who values excessmaterial consumption the most in life, as Marcuse believes. Hedonism, which focuses on satisfaction ofmaterial needs, and alienated consumerism are having negative influence on a balanced development of thecivil quality. In particular, although consumption has meet the basic needs of man’s survival anddevelopment and laid the material foundation for man’s nature of possessing, the host-guest relationshipbetween man and commodity will be reversed without a scientific consumer mindset after man’s materialconsumption is satiated. Slowly, man will fall under the control of the material and become its slave.Meanwhile, the traditional value in consumption will be replaced by modem symbolic value. Worse still,the consumers will be materialized into a social symbol and manipulated by such symbol. As a result, manwill lose the dominating role. In other words, he is no longer the master of his own. The essence of manwill be alienated, triggering conflicts of interest between man and nature, man and society, man and manand man and himself as well as casting man into a troubled situation in which the quality is out of balance.Given the existence of consumption dissimilation problems, this paper carefully studies the causes ofconsumption alienation, the intrinsic relationship between consumption and the quality of citizens, theinfluence of consumption alienation on a balanced balanced development of the quality of citizens as wellas the negative effect brought by consumption alienation on the harmonious development among man andnature, man and society, man and others, man and himself. Based on such analysis, we propose a scientificconsumption mindset that citizens should erect in order to correctly handle the conflict between the infinity of man’s need and the finity of natural resources. We believe that the problem of consumption alienationcan be solved by the persistence in a people-centered consumption concept together with the educationcarried out in the whole society on a consumption concept that stresses industry, thrift, harmony andscience, thereby increasing the consciousness of harmonic development among man and society, man andothers and man and himself. In practice, we should establish a sort of scientific and rational consumption topromote the balanced development of the quality of all citizens.