Materialism

Introduction

Materialism is defined as the importance a consumer attaches to worldly possessions. At the highest levels of materialism, possessions assume a central place in a person's life and are believed to provide the greatest sources of satisfaction and dissatisfaction. Russell Belk has framed materialism as a higher-order construct with three second-order dimensions; that are, possessiveness, non-generosity, and envy. Marsha Richins approaches materialism as the belief in the desirability of acquiring and possessing things, “a value that guides people's choices and conduct in a variety of situations, including, but not limited to, consumption arenas.” Her measure of material value has three subscales, measuring possession-defined success, acquisition centrality, and acquisition serving as the pursuit of happiness. In her study, respondents are asked whether they admired people who owned expensive homes, cars, and clothes (success); whether the things that they owned were important to them (centrality); and whether they would be happier if they could afford to buy more things (happiness). Overall, whether for pleasure seeking, self or relationship definition/expression, or status claiming, materialism is an excessive reliance on consumer goods to achieve these ends a consumption-based orientation to happiness-seeking and placing a high importance on material possessions (Foster, pp. 41).

Dialectical materialism has been defined both as a natural philosophy—a philosophical generalization of the most fundamental truths disclosed by the natural sciences and by the Marxist social science of historical materialism—and as a method of inquiry committed to a realist approach in epistemology and to materialist-monism in ontology. At the most general level it represents an attempt to synthesize elements of two pre-existing philosophical traditions: (1) the philosophical materialism of the European Enlightenment and (2) the dialectical logic of the German idealist philosopher G. W. F. Hegel. Hegel's dialectics are conceived as a corrective to the mechanical determinism of traditional materialism, and materialism is seen as the appropriate basis for challenging the absolute idealism of Hegel's system (Engels, pp. 12).

Methodological Materialism

The German economist Karl Marx (1818-1883) subscribed to the concept that there are real regularities in nature and society that are independent of our consciousness. This reality is in motion, and this motion itself has patterned consistencies that can be observed and understood within our consciousness. This material uniformity changes over time. For Marx, tensions within the very structure of this reality form the basis of this change; this is called dialectics. These changes accumulate until the structure itself is something other than the original organization. Finally, a new entity is formed with its own tensions or contradictions. Human interaction in a natural setting is a given, because people are, at their core, a part of nature. It is because of this interaction that people are able to live. Through cooperation and labor, people produce what they need to survive. People live both in a community and in a natural environment. Any study of history cannot separate people from either the social or the natural environment (Engels, pp. 41).

According to Marx, the interaction between a social organization, called relations of production, and the use ...