Ethical Production and Anti-consumerism as a Movement

There are many well-intentioned activists on the left who are anti-consumerists. They are aware, to a certain level, of the base injustices present in modern society. This growing movement has influenced not only the way we think, but the very way we purchase (and consume) commodities. For example, the non-profit organisation Ethical Consumer keeps a list of companies that people have suggested that consumers should boycott, along with information with how to best use the products we buy to reduce waste. It is quite probable that the average person considers the subject from time to time. In this essay, I intend to show how anti-consumerism as a movement is invariably flawed and fundamentally cannot achieve its purported aims.

To understand anti-consumerism however, we must first be familiar with what consumerism is. After all, how does one oppose something they don’t understand?

Consumerism

In Consumerism in World History: The Global History of Desire ¹, Stearns defines consumerism as: “A society, family or individual is consumerist when they stake considerable importance on acquiring things, or experiences, that go well beyond the needs of survival” (Pg. 3).

It is difficult to not be immediately struck by the absurdity of such a definition. Stearns, with a single phrase, turns consumerism, a phenomenon that has only taken form in the last few centuries, into a trans-historical and abstract evaluation of the basic needs of survival. How he can concieve of consumerism without the global market and modern currencies is unclear. He himself seems to understand this problem on some level when he states:

“The boundary between consuming and consumerism, however, is not easy to define. Is the wealthy peasant who regularly eats more meat than others in his village a consumerist, even though he does not own a lot more “things” than his colleagues? What about the peasant woman who buys a colorful ribbon from a peddler, but otherwise dresses the same way other women do?” (Pg. 3)

He then concludes:

“Clearly, it is vital to recognize that the label consumerist is a floater, whose precise definition will depend on circumstance… The definition stands: consumerism involves acquisitive interests beyond necessity, but necessity has to be carefully defined; it is not a fixed quantity”

Stearns here creates even more confusion. Lacking material grounding for his thoughts, consumerism can now basically be anything, as long as necessity is placed in the correct way. That is, a crown worn by a medieval lord is not a consumerist act because a crown is just as socially neccessary as food to the lord insofar as it serves as the very basis for his social position. He does just this, as he goes on to absurdly link consumerism with the advent of human agriculture.

As we will see, the opposition to this amorphous blob will present us with problems.

Anti-Consumerism

The anti-consumerists have taken this definition and expanded it. As activists, they seek to target what they percieve as the worst effects of consumerism. For convenience, I have summarized the anti-consumerist position into four main points.

1. For ethical production, that is, reducing the exploitation and bettering the working condition of workers in the production process.
2. For ethical consumption, that is, buying commodities from sources that have ethical production processes
3. For encouraging waste-saving measures such as re-use and DIY
4. Individualism, in the sense that it encourages people to pursue change through personal habits and consumer choices (i.e. boycotts, saving, asceticism, avoiding fads etc).

Given this, it is clear that anti-consumerism is at the very same time an anti-capitalist and an ethical movement. That is, it both recognizes the market as the problem and has a specific way it expects adherents to act. Undeniably, this movement has been indispensable for the public conscienceness when it comes to informing us of capitalist business practices.

It must be noted that I do not view anti-consumerism as a real anti-capitalist movement but rather a pseudo-anti-capitalist movement. This is because they misunderstand the very nature of capitalist production. Instead of seeing the adverse effects of capitalism as the inevitable outcomes of commodity production, it instead turns it into a moralism. The world is burning not because of how capital works, beyond the control of any one individual, it is because of the timeless human vice of greed. (In here we see the seeds of the definition of consumerism laid out previously.)

This moralism expresses itself in boycott movements that seek to push capitalist enterprise into accepting more ethical business practices. Far from being a simple consumer boycott, it is also accompanied with assertions such as “Buying from Amazon is inherently immoral”.

All of these more recent movements have failed to put any real pressure on the companies it makes a boogeyman out of. In response to this observation the anti-consumerists point to consumer boycotts that have brought real changes in consumption and production levels (See the recent Canadian Boycott of American Goods) ². What they fail to see is that those boycotts were mass events supported by institutions such as unions, popular figures, or even governments themselves (which is the case of the Canadian boycott). Their uncoordinated and demandless boycotts, waste-saving strategies, and asceticism amount to nothing more than a personal cleansing of the soul.

Another anti-consumerist demand is of the government to step in to enforce better wages and changes in the production process, even when capitalist production reaches far beyond national borders, such as the general prohibition of child labour in any part of the process. To put it in another way, their program is for the ethical business, that does not at any step infringe or exploit the worker or the environment.

But they kid themselves with this demand, again they forget the nature of capital. The capital in question that at every turn seeks to force down the price of workers to extract more value from them, and sees natural resources as nothing more than raw material to be made into commodities for the continued demand for further accumulation. Even as child workers are subjected to the most abominable conditions in the third world, and forests, oceans, and the atmosphere is polluted into ruin, at no step did capital intend to be unethical or unsustainable. It is in fact incapable of such a thing, as capital has no interest in it. In the dreams of these activists, how is it possible to legislate away every possible injustice that capitalism creates? Even if a government was able to do such a thing (without causing the ruin of the national economy), how can they guarantee that capital does not nest itself in another area, repeating the same exact process?

Capitalism is a global system, and in it commodities appear on the market seemingly without a creator, insofar it is a result of combined labour from multiple different nameless hands. Try to start a ethical T-shirt business, for example, and you will immediately be met with problems. Not only must you source T-shirts from more expensive places (and take the other’s word that all the tools, raw materials and transportation were all made in accordance to guidelines as well). You are then immediately constricted in the way you can participate in the system. Internet devices, machines, transportation, and retail stores, important elements of the production and distribution of commodities, are all products of labour that come from sources that cannot be verified to be ethical in a costly manner. So such a business would be forced to recreate the whole ethical infrastructure anew, and no doubt be left with a monstrous final price that cannot compete in the market.

So-called ethical companies in practice limit themselves to one step in production. In the case of a T-shirt company, they might pay good wages for the imprinters, stitchers, designers and transporters, but this immediately forgets how the means of production themselves are products of past labour. Whether they like it or not, they cannot escape the blood-covered beast of global capitalism. As we have seen, even with this small concession to ethics, they limit their growth, unable to dominate the market, and sometimes even betray the very mission they set out to accomplish because of the imperatives of capital.

So the anti-consumerist, unable to see the true nature of commodity production and stuck in the framework of moralism, does not seek to negate capitalism, but rather perfect it: The dream of the small producer.

What is the solution?

Nothing will change about the nature of capital until society can move from a capitalist mode of production to a social mode of production, where production is organized to meet the needs of a society (whatever those may be). Nothing significant can ever be won until humanity as a whole realizes capitalism as a now-regressive beast with nothing left to give. That is the realization of a society of no more bosses, no more wage labourers and no more private property.