In the span of modernity’s five centuries, the world has witnessed increased levels of production
in the hands of fewer and fewer owners who are strictly separated from the working class. This
period saw the development of society around production under a strict division of labor which
resulted in workers being isolated from both the products of their labors and other workers.The
dominant form of social organization changed from that of feudal communities to the one of
nuclear families living under the protection, or the domination, of diverse political leaderships.
Mass industrialization was ideologically bound to grand theories with a common focus: that
progress and welfare could only come through material goods (van Raaij 1993). From the 19th
century, ideas were also mass packaged and delivered in the concentrated and easily digestible
form of a variety of -isms. Since the middle of the 20th century oppressive ideologies have been
further compressed into an amalgamation of shreds of lost utopias and fantasies of globalism;
fragments of cultures that came to be known as Pluralism (Lyotard 1984).
On a micro-scale, families have been evolving into new and fluid compositions, thus altering
the structure of the consumption decision-making process without challenging its fundamental
objective of happiness through having. On a macro-scale, supra-national organizations seek to
evolve global forms of governance (Mandelson 2009) and even statesmen have been issuing a
“clarion call” for the re-examination of the role of the nation-state (Papandreou 2010;Wiesmann
2011; Μουτζουρίδης [Moutzouridis 2012]. So far, however, the world has yet to witness the
“invisible hand” (A. Smith 1761, 1863) “make nearly the same distribution of the necessaries of
life, which would have been made, had the earth been divided into equal portions among all its
inhabitants.” It appears that Smith’s (1761: 273–274) fundamental assumption that “the capacity
of [the proud and unfeeling landlord’s] stomach bears no proportion to the immensity of his
desires” does not hold for the Transnational Corporation, the post-industrial equivalent of the
“landlord.”
Although the masses have been acquiring ever increasing amounts of a variety of coveted
material possessions, their collars have turned from blue to white and the object of their labor
has become information and images, rather than machinery and material product, the bases of
social organization have not been challenged and the power structures of modernity seem to be,
if anything, more firmly entrenched. After the early sixties, with the emergence of the pop-art
movement, the important segmentation between those that own the means of production and
those that live to consume was spread by other means.