Wealth and Poverty in Postindustrial Societies. The Pragmatistic Approach to Their Empirical Assessment

On the terms of Karl Polányi's concept of the "Commodity Fiction" a theoretical conception of poverty is developed, which defines "absolute poverty" as a process, the terminal state of which is "annihilation". Within this process of "totalitarian consumption" consumer goods do not serve human needs in the first line but turn more and more into "consuming goods" which destroy the independence of human actors step by step and finally transform them into "cyborgs", i.e. creatures, whose lives and intentions become fictions of this system of totalitarian consumption.