francis

But also homogeneous consumers by Nathan Jones

Mass production requires not only homogeneous goods and services, produced by the same molds and processes, but also homogeneous consumers, who cannot vary in their tastes, values, and patterns of consumption and who must consume if the planning of the corporations is to be effective. The comparatively compact and differentiated institutions of the bourgeois order sustain its heterogeneity and constrain the consumption of mass-produced goods and services. Managerial capitalism must therefore articulate and sponsor an ideology of cosmopolitanism that asserts universal identities, values, and loyalties, challenges the differentiations of the bourgeois order, and rationalizes the process of homogenization. In the cosmopolitan view of man, family, local community, religious sect, social class, sexual and racial identity, and moral character are at best subordinate considerations and are regarded as artificial, repressive, and obsolete barriers to the fulfillment of human potential. Cosmopolitanism thus rationalizes the adoption of the mass framework and collective disciplines that characterize the managerial regime and the homogenization of production and consumption through which the multinational organizations and economies of managerial capitalism operate.

– Samuel T. Francis in Leviathan and Its Enemies (2016)