Ack! I'm a good socialist, I swear! Don't take away my credentials!
I certainly didn't mean to defend capitalism as the logical and "natural" product of human nature. I can see how you'd get there. I'm 10 years out of grad school so my Marx is rusty and I was showing off my big words. So sue me.
I do, however, stand by my assertion that symbol use is inherent to human nature - quibble with the term if you like, but show me any humans who don't automatically imbue objects with symbolic value beyond their use value.
I didn't mean this to suggest that capitalism is the natural consequence; simply that this propensity makes consumerism all the more insidious for exactly the reasons you state:
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one result of this blurring is the disable any sense of the historical nature of capitalism as a social form. another is to erase any sense of alternatives. a third is a fundamental, basic error: it conflates the uses of commodities within the capitalist mode of production with human capacities to generate symbols in general. which makes capitalism an expression of "human nature" which makes capitalism appear far more rational than it is--and worse, makes it appear inevitable.
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Maybe I'm a victim of this process, hence the capitalist tautology in my argument.
Anyhow, roachboy (or whoever else wants to chime in), what do you (or Marx or Veblen or Foucault or whoever you can dredge up that I was supposed to remember from grad school but don't) suggest as an alternative? What are alternative means of expression that accommodate the human need? propensity? to express the self through objects? Am I just flat wrong that this is a basic human behavior?
Unobscure the alternatives for us. (Really, I'm not being snarky. I wanna know, because as my post would suggest, I feel pretty trapped inside The System.)