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he first to address the issue of social stratification and inequality, he believed were the main result of capitalist economic system. In his magnum opus, Capital (Das Kapital, 1867—1894), Marx unites the field of economics, sociology and history to write about the capitalist system in the most detailed manner, for the subject at hand clearly required it so. His main topics feature a description of commodities, the bourgeoisie, proletariat, capitalist production and exploitation of workers, together with the complex causal relationship connecting them. Marx had little faith in the capitalist system as a viable and flourishing solution for society on the long run, as opposed to the socialist model. “Capital is dead labour, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks.” According to Marx, consumerism is the process of the working class producing goods for the rich, which will result in overproduction. He did not see how this unstable system could continuously maintain profits and also be beneficial to the individuals living in this kind of society.

American economist and sociologist, also a leading figure of the institutional economics movement is Thorstein Veblen (1857 –1929), the author of the popular work The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899). Applying both an economic and sociologic perspective in this work, Veblen pointed out two different realities concerning the capitalist economic system, namely the industry which was based on actual production, and business, which, in his view exists only to make profits for the leisure class without any work put in to compensate for it. The term “conspicuous consumption”, coined by the author, refers to the activity of the leisure class, who carelessly spend without putting in any effort of labor to compensate. “Conspicuous consumption of valuable goods is a means of reputability to the gentleman of leisure. As wealth accumulates on his hands, his own unaided effort will not avail to sufficiently put his opulence in evidence by this method.” He sees as their only purpose a display of wealth to establish a certain status in society and goes against the idea of production solely for profit.

The Frankfurt School is made up of social thinkers and theorists, founded with the establishment of the Institute for Social Research at the University of Frankfurt, in 1923. Being an elitist group, they criticized both capitalism and Soviet socialism. Max Horkheimer (1895-1973), Herbert Marcuse (1898-1978), Theodor W. Adorno (1903-1970), Jürgen Habermas (1929) are four of the most prominent members, whose main concern was stating a disapproval of modern culture and scientific progress, which they believed to be more disadvantageous to society, limiting the freedom of the individual by constructing a web of false standards one will need to live up to. The Frankfurt School is considered a further thinking of Marxist critique of capitalism broadening it to the before mentioned modern culture, without assuming that a revolution is necessary or even expected to occur, since the current system of capitalism is doing so well in getting people from all social layers bound ideologically into and physically to it.