Politics of Consumption, Politics of Justice : the Political Investment of the Consumer

For a long time consumption was thought of as a private act, untouched by power: aligned with the market, commerce, the family and pushed into the private sphere, consumption was opposed to the public and political spheres of the State, of citizenship and rights. However, it has become increasingly evident that the ways in which consumption is both represented and articulated are deeply intertwined with power relationships. Recent literature in sociology and anthropology has shown that contemporary consumer practices are characterized by ambivalence in terms of power effects. Consumption neither frees subjects nor is it the expression of absolute freedom outside of social norms. Likewise, it is not totally determined by advertising and the culture industry, by commodities, shopping centres, theme parks, fast-food chains, and such like. All in all, it is because of its ambivalence – as the various practices of using goods may be occasions for self-realisation and emancipation as well as for frustration and subjugation - that consumption is essentially a site of politics. Of course, there are various dimensions to the politics of consumption. Firstly, as a vast literature documents, choices of consumption are the site of what may be defined as a politics of difference: they are means of social inclusion as well as exclusion. We can add to such, often implicit, politics of difference, other more structural and overt relations of power, which have to do mostly with the ‘normality’, ‘legitimacy’, ‘fairness’ or otherwise of certain goods and practices and with the identity thereof ascribed to consumers. There is thus a politics of normality. That which we today consider as' normal’ in consumer practices is in fact a social construct which has consolidated historically. In contemporary Western societies such normality is fixed by opposition to negatives such as addiction or drugs. The politics of normality points to the normative view of the consumer which is conventionally sustained by the market economy as we know it: it portrays consumers as looking for personal satisfaction but doesn’t allow them to fall into excess or dependency being asked to behave as self-possessed hedonists. This individualistic outlook clashes with another dimension of the politics of consumption, that which has to do with the systemic and often unintended effects produced by consumer practices on other spheres of action. We may call this dimension politics of effects. Even though consumption may be conceived of as a process of de-commoditisation, consumers' power is however neither reducible nor symmetrical to that of agents in the supply or retail sectors. This indeed opens the space for power effects and strategies of different sorts, including global division of labour (with consumerist Nations consuming a disproportional share of global produce) and environmental effects. After discussing the politics of consumption as a complex set of intertwined issues, in this chapter I concentrate on the latter dimension, the politics of effects. In particular, I focus on critical and alternative lifestyles. The chapter examines the growing wealth of literature on the spread of social movements which question the commodity frontier and the relationship between production and consumption. Critical or alternative consumption addresses globalization as de-territorialization, the disarticulation of production and consumption, and the separation of politics and the market. This begs the question whether social mobilization and the awareness of systemic, unintended effects may translate (alternative) consumption into a genuine politics of justice.