Kester Brewin

[ Gift, Market and Plunder [1] ] | [ Gift, Market and Plunder [2] ] [ Gift, Market and Plunder [3] ] | [ Gift, Market and Plunder [4] ] In the third post in this series – in which I am exploring an update to the ideas of gift presented in the book – [...]

[ Gift, Market and Plunder [1] ]  |  [ Gift, Market and Plunder [2] ]  |  [ Gift, Market and Plunder [3] ] OK, sorry if the last post was hard work. But sometimes you have to mine deep… To summarize for those who didn’t make it: Veblen identified the ‘leisure class’ as those who [...]

[ Gift, Market and Plunder [1] ] | [ Gift, Market and Plunder [2] ] In the previous two posts I’ve begun reflecting on Thorstein Veblen’s Conspicious Consumption thesis about ‘the leisure class’ – a group of people he identifies who feel that work is somehow below them: ‘The upper (leisure) classes are by custom [...]

In the previous post I began to set out some further thoughts on gift, springing from my reading of Thorstein Veblen’s 1899 satire Conspicuous Consumption. I want to continue to develop the thoughts outlined there about the ‘leisure class’ that Veblen describes. Essentially, we might now see them as the aristocracy, or celebrities. They are [...]

As some of you may know, I’ve been working on a novel for the past few months, playing with themes, among others, of the links between identity and consumption. One of the books I’ve picked up to feed the furnace has been Thorstein Veblen’s 1899 satire Conspicuous Consumption (an excerpt from his longer work The [...]