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an exchange value. A commodity is only a commodity if it can be replaced by something else. Commodity fetishism was an idea that came out of popular culture. Capitalist organisations fetishize commodities and invest them with power that they do not really have. They discourage us from asking where the things we consume actually come from. These companies do not want us to think about this process. The idea that capitalist companies are manipulating the thoughts of the masses about what they consume and the great power that they have leads us to the term ‘mass culture’.

 

In a mass culture, industrialised society there are no longer the same traditional values. The idea of an organic community no longer exists.

 

“The individual is left more and more to his or her own devices, has fewer and fewer communities or institutions in which to find identity or values by which to live, and has less and less idea of the morally appropriate ways to live.”(Strinati, 2004.6)

 

The Frankfurt School argue that the culture industry is killing the desire that might let us imagine a better world. They have an ideal notion of what human beings are capable of. The institute believes that we could never create a better world as long as we are part of this commodity culture. Adorno stated that the culture industry does not give the mass any responsibility for the culture that they are consuming, yet the masses are unaware of this which explains their passivity in accepting it.

 

“Although the culture industry undeniably speculates on the conscious and unconscious state of the millions towards which it is directed, the masses are not primary but secondary. . . The customer is not king, as the culture industry would have us believe, not its subject but its object.” (Strinati, 2004.55)

 

This point further emphasises the power that the culture industry has on the masses. With living in a culturally industrialised society comes conformity. Conformity replaces the consciousness of the masses according to The Frankfurt School. They believed that the masses are dependent on the culture industry and that the masses themselves are no longer producing culture.

 

Through researching the works of The Frankfurt School, we can understand that the masses are oblivious to the mass controlled culture in which they live due to the face that everything is pseudo-individualised. Products that were being produced by the culture industry were all standardised. This meant that they all had certain characteristics that made them significantly similar. The Frankfurt School, Theodore Adorno in particular, realised that the industry knew that standardised products would sell and therefore they needed to be given a supposed uniqueness to provoke the masses to continue buying them. This was referred to as pseudo-individualism.

 

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