How Characteristics Of Culture Maintain Capitalist Society

The purpose of this paper is to examine how characteristics of culture maintain capitalist society. I will be using Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s The culture industry: enlightenment as mass deception, as the backbone of my analysis. This will be accomplished by assessing aspects of society such as: monopoly capitalism, the entertainment industry and relevance to modern day society. This paper argues that capitalism transformed culture into an ideological means of domination, and acts as brainwashing tool over the masses. Capitalism in The Concise Encyclopedia of Sociology is defined as: â€Å"the system that provides for needs and wants, animated by a particular ethos, coordinated and organized by establishing practices, regulations, and laws, privileging particular types of knowledge.† (Weber 1927, 47). Theodor Adomo and Max Horkheimer created a term known as â€Å"culture industry† which is the commercial commodification, and the mass-production of pseudo culture by corporations (1947, p.29). The creation of the culture industry resulted in the standardisation of the cultural form, which eliminated an individual’s ability to think critically. This occurred because of the greed that capitalism creates, the heads of production firms mass produce cultural goods that are aimed at people’s desires to increase profitability. They argued that capitalism abandoned its liberal roots and began to monopolize industries, thus creating monopoly capitalism. In society, the cultureShow MoreRelatedAlienation And Individualism : The Social Structures Through Industrialization And The Division Of Labour1567 Words   |  7 Pagesalienation and anomie signify how individualism has impacted the social structures through industrialization and the division of labour. 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