QUOTE : Unlike consumption, primarily a trait and occupation of individual human beings, consumerism is an attribute of society. For a society to acquire that attribute the thoroughly individual capacity for wanting, desiring and longing needs to be, just as labour capacity was in the producers' society, detached ('alienated') from individuals and recycled/reified into an extraneous force which sets the 'society of consumers' in motion and keeps it on course as a specific form of human togetherness, while by the same token setting specific parameters for effective individual life strategies and otherwise manipulating the probabilities of individual choices and conduct.