The Consumer Trap blows the lid off the ways the trillion-dollar-a-year business marketing industry soaks up economic and environmental resources and dominates the personal lives of citizens. Flouting conventional mainstream and radical thinking about consumer culture, Michael Dawson reveals how corporate marketing embodies and extends into personal life the scientific management principles famously enunciated by Frederick Winslow Taylor, whose earliest disciples predicted the big business marketing revolution.

Corporate capitalism fuels an ever-increasing marketing race, and Dawson's step-by-step account shows how the marketing behemoth works and expands. His analysis illuminates how big business marketing campaigns penetrate and profoundly affect the lives of ordinary Americans. Dawson argues that if people are to escape the costly consumer trap set by the overclass, they must renew class struggle from below, inventing new institutions for democratic governing and the implementation of major economic decisions.