To facilitate tomorrow's interview [and not because I'm a gluttonous narcissistic windbag ;-)], I post again.
I reject Marcuse and Ewen because they fail to provide a coherent account of the means of ruling-class intervention in product-usage and its socio-environmental determinants. They trash "consumers," but provide them with no real ammunition for fighting back.
I actually don't think ordinary folks are either very much brainwashed or very much complicit in "their" malconsumption. I believe the real problem is lack of democractic access to commanding-heights economic decisions, which I call "macro-choices." I would contend that both Marcuse and Ewen portray "consumers" as being much more robotic and brainwashed than I do.
As you'll see in the last two chapters, I don't think big business marketing campaigns have deep psychological effects on ordinary folks. Quite the contrary. The controversy lies not there, but in the financial and social costs of the marketing juggernaut, and in the capitalists' outdated dictatorship over the biggest economic decisions. Marketing's main function is to preserve this dictatorship and the profits it facilitates.
The point of explaining the details of marketing is to arm ordinary people with accurate information about how big businesses view and treat them, not to tell people they're robots. As I argue in Chapter 9, the actual direct impact of marketing tactics is minute, and matters much more in the aggregate than in the individual case.
Marcuse and Ewen make me want to slit my wrists. They reveal virtually nothing about how and why power impinges more and more upon our "free time," and much of what they do reveal is taken way out-of-context. "You're robots, so rebel!," is their message. Rebel against what, and for what?