Ladies and gentlemen, we have started our descent. From now until closing time on Christmas Eve, we are destined to fall towards an existential abyss. Some of us are fated to experience an unpleasant altercation with another shopper on Black Friday over the last discounted PS4 in a warehouse on the North Circular. Others will be on our knees in Hamleys begging the assistant to check again in the storeroom to see if they have that on-trend Zoomer Chimp, a £119.99 plastic robotic ape that comes complete with voice command recognition and – please God, no – 100-plus tricks. And then, sometime around 10am on Christmas Day, our nation will be united by a warm fuzzy feeling. What’s that feeling called again? Buyer’s remorse.

Walter Benjamin ... ‘the “modern” [is] the time of hell’ the Frankfurt School leader wrote. Photograph: Alamy

One thing I’ve learned in researching the lives of that bunch of mostly dead neo-Marxist German Jews called the Frankfurt School is that shopping isn’t so much a satisfying pastime that boosts the economy as a burning wheel of Ixion on which we are bound until death secures our release. “The ‘modern’ [is] the time of hell,” wrote Walter Benjamin, the brains behind the Frankfurt School operation, in his critique of consumer capitalism, The Arcades Project. He wasn’t writing about Saturday at 5pm in Toys R Us, but he could have been. Here then are 10 lies about shopping to help you escape the seasonal consumerist circle of hell so appalling that even Dante didn’t dare imagine it.

1 More choice makes us happier

No, it doesn’t. The idea of shops offering us 101 kinds of muesli is that we are rational utility maximisers who have the time and temperaments to make sense of endless options. But we aren’t: that’s why Nobel economics laureate Herbert Simon came up with the idea of “satisficing”. Any firm that tried to make decisions that would maximise its returns would bankrupt itself in a never-ending search for the best option. Instead, they “satisfice”, which means they content themselves with results that are “good enough”. And what goes for firms goes for shoppers: endless choice makes us miserable and so to reduce that misery we make bumbling choices that are good enough. The Frankfurt School argued that we have been conditioned to accept the goods that are on offer; effectively, we are ideologically shaped to demand what is supplied. That is why Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer in their classic Dialectic of Enlightenment wrote, “freedom to choose an ideology – since ideology always reflects economic coercion – everywhere proves to be freedom to choose what is always the same”.

We are ideologically shaped to demand what is supplied ... Christmas shoppers in Oxford Street. Photograph: Lauren Hurley/PA



2 Stuff comes for free

On the back of the Zipvan in my street is a logo telling passers-by that the rental car firm pays for fuel, insurance and the congestion charge, adding in brackets, “We’re nice like that”. Did these guys never hear of Milton Friedman? “There is,” said the economist, “no such thing as a free lunch.” Somebody always pays for it, usually me. Businesses are never “nice” and don’t give stuff away without expecting to cultivate misplaced positive feelings from their customers and as a result prise more cash from their bank accounts. When Adorno and Horkheimer wrote the following words, they weren’t thinking of my experiences in BOGOF bookshops or with on-street car rental firms, but they apply to them perfectly well: “All the violence done to words is so vile that one can hardly bear to hear them any longer.”

3 Stuff is built to last

No, it isn’t. In 1921 the Phoebus cartel created lightbulbs that would break after 1,000 hours instead of providing the 1,500-2,000 hours previous bulbs managed. Why? To make profit from, as far as I can tell, consumer misery. The nightmare of ending-is-better-than-mending consumption imagined by Aldous Huxley in 1932’s Brave New World has been realised. Nowadays the practice is everywhere: you have to buy a new toothbrush because the batteries can no longer be replaced.

Walter Benjamin recognised that in consumerist society we’re locked into a kind of degrading compulsion: we buy new stuff to conceal from ourselves our disappointment about the failings of the old stuff. And then the new stuff becomes old, and so we upgrade – in part to hide from ourselves our disappointment at the unbearable failure of our earlier purchase. Benjamin strove to make us see that what we’re doing is nuts. As Benjamin scholar Max Pensky puts it: “The promise of eternal newness and unlimited progress encoded in the imperatives of technological change and the cycles of consumption now appear as their opposite, as primal history, the mythic compulsion toward endless repetition.” Which is just one reason why you shouldn’t upgrade to an iPhone 7.

4 Some brands can be trusted to make great products

Remember the Apple Newton? Of course you don’t. Steve Jobs pulled the plug on this much-mocked disaster in 1997, four years after it was launched. It was supposed to be a personal digital assistant that worked through handwriting recognition: you scribbled on the pad and – lo! – a digitised note appeared. Except it didn’t: like Mr Magoo, it was always mistaking something for something else. Garry Trudeau satirised the Newton in his Doonesbury cartoon strip: it misreads the words “Catching on?” as “Egg Freckles”. Maybe some of you are thinking Apple’s Siri is the Egg Freckles of voice recognition software. I couldn’t possibly comment.

If Benjamin were still alive, he would own an Apple Newton. He collected the worthless, the trashy, the things that seemed to promise utopia but quickly became embarrassingly naff, obsolete. In doing so he thought he could expose the lie at the heart of consumer capitalism and effect revolutionary change. But the revolution, you’ll have noticed, didn’t happen. Argos still exists; Amazon Prime still seems like a solution to, rather than cause of, our problems. We’re still in the hell he diagnosed.

5 You can never have too many shoes

Well heeled ... some of Imelda Marcos’s shoes. Photograph: Sipa Press/Rex Features Photograph: Sipa Press / Rex Features

Such, at least, is the wisdom of Joanna Lumley’s Patsy Stone from Absolutely Fabulous. (The full quote is even more bonkers: “You can never have too many hats, gloves, and shoes.”) In fact you can. Consider Imelda Marcos. She left behind 1,220 pairs of shoes when she fled Manila with her husband, President Ferdinand Marcos, during a 1986 uprising. That’s too many. Thirty years later that collection of shoes is reportedly worthless.

And the same goes for hats and gloves ... Joanna Lumley as Patsy Stone. Photograph: Everett Collection/Rex Features

Marcos’s shoe fetishism is an example of what Marx called the fetishism of commodities, and which the Frankfurt School thought had become more widespread since their mentor wrote Das Kapital in the Victorian era. What is the fetishism of commodities? When a pair of shoes or an iPhone is sold, it is exchanged for another commodity (money for instance). The exchange takes no account of the fact that, for example, some of Apple’s overstressed and underpaid workers contemplated suicide in order to escape the penal servitude of manufacturing must-have commodities for you and me. That erasure of the economic circumstances in which a commodity is made, and the phantasmagoric, unreal life it takes on as a result, makes us fetishists.

György Lukács, the great influence on the Frankfurt School’s developing neo-Marxism, put it in his classic History and Class Consciousness that a new kind of human arises in this world of rampant commodity fetishism, along with 20th-century mechanisation and specialisation of industrial work processes. That new human sees the world as a series of commodities and his or her own self as a thing to be bought and sold. That new human is so degraded that buying and selling is its essence: truly, the new human Lukács envisaged can say: I shop therefore I am. Instead of uniting to start the revolution, we buy more shoes.

6 It’s worth paying more for quality

Vivienne Westwood (centre) ... her ‘choose well and buy less’ advice isn’t so simple. Photograph: Steve Wood/Rex Features

When Vivienne Westwood launched a collection in 2010, she said we should not buy new clothes for six months. “My message is: choose well and buy less,” she said – as if to suggest you should buy one Westwood dress rather than filling Primark trolleys regularly with disposable tat. But, Dame Vivienne, sustainable consumerism isn’t that simple. A couple of years after I interviewed Westwood about her fashion worldview, a friend bought me a Vivienne Westwood watch. It was beautiful and I was happy, thinking it was built to last. Then the numbers fell off, the strap broke and the clock hands collapsed within a year. Next time I need a new watch, I’ll try Poundland.

Just as, in some religions, an object invested with supernatural powers becomes a fetish for those who worship it, so commodities under capitalism are accorded magical powers and illusory autonomy. The Vivienne Westwood brand had, for me, just such magical powers. Even when its logo appeared on a dodgy watch made under licence. Reading the Frankfurt School disabused me of this fetish. When it comes to shopping, I don’t trust anyone anymore, not even one-time punk couturiers.

7 There are things that we “must have”

Actually, too much choice makes us miserable ... Photograph: Erik S Lesser/EPA

Hollister has a range of must-have T-shirts. Business Insider can direct you to a list of 20 must-have tech accessories for under £20 (including a multi-port USB wall charger, armband phone case and a carphone mount). And then there’s musthave.co.uk, whose beauty products include a 15ml pot of Truefitt & Hill Moustache Wax for £17.50. What do all these must-haves have in common? You don’t need them.

Why haven’t we revolted against consumer capitalism and its system of lies masquerading as injunctions? Because, for the Frankfurt School, we’ve become comfortably corrupted. Such at least was the view of Herbert Marcuse in his 1964 classic One-Dimensional Man, where he despaired of the working classes to rise up and cast off their guided chains: “If the worker and his boss enjoy the same television programme and visit the same resort places, if the typist is as attractively made up as the daughter of her employer, if the Negro owns a Cadillac, if they all read the same newspaper, then this assimilation indicates not the disappearance of classes, but the extent to which the needs and satisfactions that serve the preservation of the Establishment are shared by the underlying population.” As Malcolm X put it in a different context: “I say you’ve been misled, you’ve been had, you’ve been took.”

8 There are things that are “investment pieces”

Most cars lose between 50% and 60% of their value in the first three years of ownership. The great French novelist Marcel Proust, who was a profound influence on the thoughts of Walter Benjamin, saw through that kind of nonsense at the age of 18: “Desire makes all things flourish,” he wrote, “possession withers them.” True, he was mostly focused on the objects of sexual desire, but his words apply equally to a used BMW X5.

9 Flatpack furniture makes a happy home

When we buy Ikea we’re buying flat-packed misery’ ... Photograph: Alamy

Earlier this year my wife and I assembled a Pax wardrobe. Only because we have agreed to lock the memory of that weekend in our marital psychic vault does our relationship survive. Indeed, there’s a very useful pie chart showing how time is spent immediately after shoppers return from Ikea: just under 25% involves making “that’s what she said” jokes, more than 40% involves swearing, and a substantial proportion includes taking whatever you were assembling apart because you did it wrong.

But here’s the twist, diagnosed by the Frankfurt School 70 years ago. We all know that when we buy Ikea we’re buying flat-packed misery, but we carry on shopping regardless. Our knowing cynicism about shopping doesn’t stop us buying, since we’re too ideologically entrenched. As Adorno and Horkheimer put it: “The triumph of advertising in the culture industry is that consumers feel compelled to buy and use its products even though they see through them.”

10 Happiness rises in line with material possessions

On the contrary. “Strong materialist values are associated with a pervasive undermining of people’s wellbeing, from low life satisfaction and happiness to depression and anxiety, to physical problems such as anxiety, and to personality disorders, narcissism, and antisocial behaviour,” wrote psychologist Tim Kasser in The High Price of Materialism.

For the Frankfurt School, the pursuit of happiness through shopping and material acquisition is obscene. Benjamin wrote: “There is no document of civilisation which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.” One application of this dictum is that the pursuit of happiness through buying consumer goods involves erasing the human misery and exploitation that made the degrading and, ultimately, self-defeating pursuit possible.

Merry Christmas, everybody!

• Grand Hotel Abyss: The LIves of the Frankfurt School by Stuart Jeffries is published by Verso. To order a copy for £15.57 (RRP £18.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.