Marx's legacy? The Story of Stuff

Everybody needs to watch this video. It's an extremely accessible look at material economy and how it harms the planet as well as us—the consumer. I don't think that Annie Leonard is a Marxist; she expresses a firm belief that democracy can work. However, her argument contains strong echoes of Marx. She talks about how material economy (the system that takes natural resources, turns them into products for consumption, and then discards them) is a linear system on a planet with finite resources; it cannot support itself indefinitely.

While Marx focuses on the worker and production, Leonard is focusing on the average American consumer. Though she certainly addresses the oppression of workers, what really drives her message home is her emphasis on the oppression of the consumer. It seems that, in a post-industrial society, consumption has displaced production as the target of criticism. This makes sense to me: if we can diminish our absurd consumption, production might become less of a problem (still a problem, but perhaps a more manageable one).

If you have 20 minutes, I can't recommend a better use of your time. Please watch this.