In this paper, the authors explore what citizenship means in an age that is largely defined by consumption and when education--both within and outside of schools--has become increasingly commodified and commercialized. They raise questions regarding how citizens, publics, and axiological dispositions are formed and deformed by the parasitic relationship between market ideology and educational institutions, and they discuss the tensions between reproduction and possibility in acts of resistance to these constrained spaces. They also describe how the acquisitive society has taken rise via explorations of educational and sociological literature addressing consumerism in three primary arenas: (1) social life; (2) education; and (3) the individual psyche. In these spaces, they argue that the consumptive force of late capitalist social formations dismisses, undermines, and potentially colonizes the educational project of democracy. They conclude with their vision of the potential pedagogical interventions that can be developed despite the cultural ubiquity of problematic patterns and ideologies of consumption, based largely in the notion that Dewey's democratic utopia might not be completely lost, but rather displaced, deposited elsewhere in the cultural landscape and awaiting rediscovery. (Contains 4 notes.)