The Overspent American  This powerful video scrutinizes what…

The Overspent American  This powerful video scrutinizes what…

The Overspent American

This powerful video scrutinizes what Juliet Schor calls “the new consumerism” — a national phenomenon of upscale spending shaped and reinforced by a media system driven by commercial interests. Illustrated with hundreds of media examples, The Overspent American draws attention to the costs (both financial and social) of the relentless search for happiness and identity through spending.

Apply Marx’s theory on the organization of society (base and superstructure) to explain Schor’s “the new consumerism”.

For Marx, society’s constructions were predicated upon the idea of “base and superstructure.” This term refers to the idea that a society’s economic character forms its base, upon which rests the culture and social institutions, the superstructure. For Marx, it is the base (economy) that determines what a society will be like.