1. See John Kenneth Galbraith, The New Industrial State, third edition (New York: New American Library, 1978); Eli Zaretsky, Capitalism, the Family and Personal Life (New York: Harper and Row, 1976); Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World System (New York: Basic Books, 1974); Ralf Dahrendorf, Class and Class Conflict in Industrial Society (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1958); Harry Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1974); and, David Noble, American by Design: Science, Technology and the Rise of Corporate Capitalism (New York: Basic Books, 1977) as well as older works like Siegfried Giedion, Mechanization Takes Command (Fairlawn, NJ: 1948) or James Burnham, The Managerial Revolution (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1960).

2. Herbert Marcuse, Counter-Revolution and Revolt (Boston: Beacon Press, 1972), 11.

3. As Edward W. Soja suggests, modernity always is composed out of "both context and conjuncture. It can be understood as the specificity of being alive, in the world, at a particular time and place; a vital individual and collective sense of contemporaneity....spatiality, temporality, and social being can be seen as the abstract dimensions which together comprise all facets of human existence. More concretely specified, each of the abstract existential dimensions comes to life as a social construct which shapes empirical reality and is simultaneously shaped by it. Thus, the spatial order of human existence arises from the (social) production of space, the construction of human geographies that both reflect and configure being in the world....the social order of being-in-the-world can be seen as revolving around the constitution of society, the production and reproduction of social relations, institutions, and practices," Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Theory (London: Verso, 1989), 25.

4. Max Horkheimer, Critique of Instrumental Reason (New York: Seabury, 1974), 27.

5. For more elaboration, see Ernest Mandel, Late Capitalism (London: Verso, 1978).

6. Jean Baudrillard, The System of Objects (New York: Verso, 1996), 199-205.

7. Baudrillard, For A Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign (St. Louis: Telos Press, 1981), 85.

8. Daniel Boorstin, The Americans: The Democratic Experience (New York: Vintage, 1973), 89-166.

9. See Timothy W. Luke, "On Environmentality: Geo-Power and Eco-Knowledge in the Discourses of Contemporary Environmentalism," Cultural Critique, 31 (Fall 1995), 57- 81).

10. See Kirkpatrick Sale, Dwellers in the Land: A Bioregional Vision (San Francisco: Sierra Club Book, 1985); Jonathan Poritt, Seeing Green (London: Blackwell, 1984); and, perhaps most importantly, Thomas Berry, The Dream of Nature (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1988). For more extended discussions of the crisis facing the Earth's bioregions, see Lester Brown, Christopher Flavin, and Sandra Postel, Saving the Planet (New York: Norton, 1991); Barry Commoner, Making Peace with the Planet (New York: Pantheon, 1990); and, Lester Brown, Building a Sustainable Society (New York: Norton, 1981).

11. Although it takes an extremely technocratic and fairly alarmist form, one example of this sort of thinking is the annual State of the World reports from the Worldwatch Institute. For recent examples, see State of the World, 1995 (New York: Norton, 1995), State of the World, 1994 (New York: Norton, 1994); and, State of the World, 1993 (New York: Norton, 1993). Also see Eugene Odum, Ecology: The Link Between the Natural and Social Sciences, second ed.

Americanism and Fordism: The Second Industrial Revolution

As large corporate firms claimed a monopoly over planning purposive-rational action in the workplace during the Second Industrial Revolution over a century ago, individuals and families increasingly accepted new disciplinary definitions given by the state and corporate capital to their individual ecological wants and private material goals.¹ Organic needs for air, drink, food, clothing, shelter, transport, and productive labor, hitherto defined by the homespun crafts of the pre-capitalist or entrepreneurial capitalist household, underwent rapid commercial redefinition in the rapid urbanization of the 1870s through the 1920s. Scientifically engineered solutions began by embedding incessantly commodified satisfactions for these organic needs in corporate products, which were made available in national markets. These rationally designed corporate interventions into the ecological and economics reproduction of society, in turn, enabled the aggregate planning system of corporate production "to organize the entire society in its interest and image".² Such systems of mass production presumed a regime of mass consumption in which masses of consumers chose between massed arrays of energy, information and material to close the circulation and accumulation of capital made possible by mass production.³

Few consumers, however, were aware of the original significance of their new, highly prized economic status. To consume, following from the Latin consumere, means to take up completely or lay hold of altogether. It also is to devour, waste, destroy, squander, or devastate. Consumers make away with food, drink, land, capital, or wealth, wearing them out by use or spending without heed. Consumers exhaust exchangeable values or devour useful goods. Consumers also stand in opposition to producers, or those who, in keeping with the Latin producere, lead, bring forth, extend or promote things. Producement leads to consumptiveness, and the consumptuous follow from the producent. Thus, markets have been made with a guarantee that whatever has been brought forth will be taken up: production presumes consumption, and consumption assumes production. As a result of this collaboration in capitalist circulation, Horkheimer notes,

Whether it is defined as "Americanization," "development," "modernization," or "progress," the Second Industrial Revolution granted to the managers of corporate capital, usually with the consent of state power, the authority to decide the ground rules of a new ecology.⁵ They planned those particular material packages and behavioral scripts that could be produced and provided in various markets along a multiple spectra of quality-graded, quantity-controlled, and access-limited alternatives to the masses of consumers. Ford Motor Company was one of the first, the biggest, and the best expressions of this strategy as Henry Ford built an assembly line to construct cars that his own workers could afford to buy on their $5 a day wage. Nonetheless, Ford Motor Company also only gave them any color they wanted for their cars as long as it was black, supervised their lives with its corporate Sociology Department, and suppressed labor troubles with its own corporate toughs. Consumers were left, like model T buyers, to simply exercise their "free choice" among the various buying alternatives presented by corporate suppliers. In exchange, individuals were not look beyond these packaged material alternatives, or back to more organically-grounded preindustrial practices for more natural options, because such resistance could be destabilizing.

A. The Logic of Consummativity

This circuit of economic reproduction expresses the basic logic of "consummativity" that has anchored the transnational economic system for decades. Instead of maintaining the irreducible tension between the "public" and "private" spheres, which liberal economic and legal theory still hold true in the individual contingency of rational living, the public and private have collapsed in mostly closed circuits all across the coding systems of corporate consummativity. At the same time, the collective imperatives of the firm and/or the state are internalized by individuals as personalized modes of consumption in the family, firm and mass public.⁶ Under modern corporate capitalism, then, this plannable life course for individuals qua "consumers" becomes a capital asset in that their consummative mobilization of production in any given market directly boosts the productivity, profitability and power of corporate capital's increasingly automated industries. Within its markets, corporate capital finds in consummativity

As a result, the disciplinary managerial planning of corporate capital continuously can generate new hierarchies of status, power, and privilege out of an economic democracy of mass consumption by developing different "consumption communities" around distinct grades of material objects and professional services.⁸ Hence, Ford, Lincoln, and Mercury often are, for example, essentially identical masses of metal made distinctive by style, advertising, and price. And, by internalizing the expectations of these packaged choices of imposed consumption, consumer choices are tied directly to "discretionary income" and "leisure time," so fully that individuals accept new kinds of collective responsibilities. If they do not shop until they drop, the shops will drop.

B. The Logic of Consummation

Unfortunately, the social contracts of consumption forged during the Second Industrial Revolution often have been based upon the obscene overproduction of standardized goods through mass consumption. Wasteful industries required markets organized around overconsumption, excess, and style. Thus, the object of the system within this system of objects is an unnatural aspiration rooted in an ecological impossibility: endless growth. From the 1960s until today, various types of radical and mainstream environmentalist have assailed transnational enterprise to redefine the scope of Nature's use. Yet, it is only now, during today’s on-going Third Industrial Revolution, that opportunities are found to move past old-wave principles of economic reproduction by finding digital systems of re-rationalization.

Existing capitalist social relations can be made far more rational by admitting to their environmental failings. This mode of productive organization uses much more energy than it creates, it destroys its own ecological base, it does not meet local needs in local habitats, it destroys multiculture in favor of monoculture, and it tends toward chaotic carelessness. Reducing these excesses now gives mainstream environmentalism and big business an operational opportunity to reconstruct transnational exchange in accord with another more perfect form of corporate rationality pegged to an ecological mentality.⁹

Consummativity seems to be evolving, therefore, along with some blocs of transnational capital in a Third Industrial Revolution after 1989. These firms are pushing beyond the economic exhaustion of mere consumptiveness, devouring fixed definite stocks of product, in order to complete or perfect the processes of production as consummation, generating fluid flows of performative improvements to refine the market's perpetual motion machines of creative destruction. The consumer as consummator might bring to perfection, or accomplish in full completion, more informationalized cycles of systemic global exchange, moving them away from purely energized or materialized cycles of valorization. Exhaustible stocks of natural resources--defined and appropriated as mere matter--might become inexhaustible systems of natural resourcing--recast as information, molecular codes, space, or sign values. Consummation resonates with meanings from its Latin origins, or the consummatus: that which brings forth the highest, the supreme, or the perfect in finished completion to the utmost degree. In the 1990s, a key modality for imagining such perfection or realizing this supreme rationality has been an inchoate, albeit vital, sense of ecology, the environment or sustainability.¹⁰

Some more sophisticated schools of environmentalism now aim to abate fast capitalism's consumptive characteristics in favor of accentuating its consummational potentialities with green engineering and green consumerism. Industrial capitalism classically has identified with a regime of consummativity--wasteful, expensive, costly--that must now undergo the rigorous restructuring in ecological modernization. And, today's fast capitalist managers accept that old wave consummativity must be reshaped to serve the informational ends of consummation--as their economic actions would become more fully fulfilled, perfected, or organized ecologically--in the new environmentalized forms of transnational exchange.¹¹ Ford Motor Company is an interesting case to point to examine these changes.