Commercialism

Commercialism is the application of both manufacturing and consumption towards personal usage, or the practices, methoids, aims, and spirit of free enterprise geared toward generating profit.

Commercialism can also be used in a negative connotation, often by those who hold liberal political views, to refer to the possibility within open-market capitalism to exploit objects, people, and/or the environment for private gain for the purpose of generating profit. As such, the related term "commercialized" can be used in a negative fashion, implying that someone or something has been despoiled by commercial or monetary interests.

When used in negative terms, it can be useful to distinguish between three types of profit: material, intellectual and spiritual. In some way, all of our individual and collective activities are geared towards generating some kind of profit which ultimately normally is linked to pursuit of happiness or truth (or both). The happiest and healthiest people will concentrate most of their activities in achieving some kind of spiritual (that is, selfless or non-egotistical) profit. Lukewarm people will tend to concentrate their activities in intellectual profit (they sometimes will act to find out some "truth" about something, but distancing themselves from the world and usually also acting in some kind of egotistical manner in the pursuit thereof). Finally, miserable (or mostly) people will concentrate their efforts on material profit. In their ignorance, because matter is what is most easily perceived by the senses, they will associate matter with happiness and thus engage most of their activities in the pursuit of ever more matter and mostly egotistical sensual gratification. When attempting to describe this kind of latter people (i.e. materialists) and sometimes intellectualism, this kind of term is sometimes used (for example, a "commercialist corporate pig" in common parlance will refer to an individual working for a corporation who cares very little about things other than maximizing his and his corporation's capacity to "earn" material money)

Commercialism can also refer corporate domination (positively or negatively). Commercialism is often closely associated with the corporate world and advertising, and often makes use of advancements in technology.

See also

• Laissez-faire
• Corporation
• Productivism
• Free market
• Free trade
• Economic materialism
• Economic liberalism
• Consumerism
• Over-consumption
• Consumption
• List of things which are neither production nor consumption
• Post-materialism

External links

• www.media-awareness.ca