Ethical Consumerism: Is it any good?

[ChangeAndChance]

I'm in my last year of high school and taking "Social Justice 12." Modern food production is a huge topic in this class and, by looking at the posters hung around the class advocating the buying of "free trade chocolate", I'm certain we're going to cover the concept of "ethical consumerism".

I'm rather ambivalent on the whole issue. While I understand that it has some charitable benefits to the workers who produce the raw goods (like cocoa), I've also seen Slavoj Zizek's critique of what he calls "cultural capitalism" here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hpAMbpQ8J7g

Oscar Wilde, in his essay "The Soul of Man under Socialism", insisted that the misapplication of altruism in the form of charity does not actually solve the problems that the poor face as a result of the systemic oppression and exploitation they face in capitalism, it merely prolongs their life under capitalism and therefore their suffering.

I've picked through a number of ancient threads on this site but found them a bit unsatisfactory. So, what do the users of RevLeft think of this issue today?

[Brandon's Impotent Rage]

Ethical consumerism is one of the biggest frauds on the planet. In an attempt to make capitalism more 'humane', it attempts to use the power of money to try and guilt various corporations and businesses into making concessions. It does nothing to solve the essential problems, but only serves to make the ethical consumer feel better.

[Comunero]

I pretty much agree with Zizek's criticism.

[Rudolf]

The whole fair trade thing i find is deceitful. Assuming that farmers receive same a global average price for their produce (which by all accounts probably doesn't happen) the focus on, for example, sugar or cocoa is deceitful as what's then ignored is all the steps involved: it ignores packaging, the production of the materials for that packaging (if there's any metal i'm pretty confident some child was involved in its production), transportation, the production of the transport equipment, refining of materials etc etc etc. Fact is that production is so interconnected that even if the production of the cocoa or sugar etc can be considered 'ethical' or 'fair' (ambiguous terms for sure) the rest of the concrete production process and its distribution is bound to be covered in human blood.

[Creative Destruction]

It's a dead-end and mostly only available to petty bourgeois activists and consumers. In Oregon, we have a "worker owned" supermarket chain called WinCo (it's "worker owned" through an ESOP, which is stretching what that term means), which serves as a good counterweight, I guess, to other supermarkets. It's cheap, so we shop there. But in Texas, we shopped at HEB and WalMart. We can't afford anything else -- certainly not fair-trade crap. I'm not going to have a self-admonishing session because of the system that forces me to shop there.

It's also a really condescending movement -- the assumption that people have the time or money to spend into "ethical consumerism" as if it is the issue. In some ways, it enables other horrible things, like gentrification. There is a grocery store in Austin called in.gredients that is encased in this "ethical consumerist" "locavore" crap. The idea is nice -- less packaging, mostly bulk and what not. But it's expensive as hell. And, to rub it in, it was built in a poor neighborhood filled with (at the time I lived there, anyway) people who mostly couldn't afford the stuff they were selling. It's a liberal hipster tourist spot. Not only that, when you point this out to them, they usually come back with some dishonest shit, like "Either you spend lots of money now on this food, or you spend lots of money later in medical bills." It's the worst kind of emotional blackmail that isn't even true.

Ethical consumerism doesn't do shit. Changing the system does. Anything else is window dressing and liberal snobbery.

[Counterculturalist]

Not only that, when you point this out to them, they usually come back with some dishonest shit, like "Either you spend lots of money now on this food, or you spend lots of money later in medical bills." It's the worst kind of emotional blackmail that isn't even true.

That kind of argument is fucking infuriating. It's made by the kind of people who have never had to struggle to put food on the table, and can't understand that some people just don't have a disposable income. Only people with trust funds can fight the system, apparently. And then the "left" wonders why working people don't take them seriously.

The argument comes from the same place of clueless condescension and insulation from real peoples' lives as the conservative argument that if you can't afford to live on minimum wage, you should just get a better job. Or the career counsellor at my university who told me that I had made a "big mistake" by spending years working in a factory, because it doesn't relate to my current field and won't look good on my resume.

As if I'm going to starve myself and my family to improve my resume, or a fast food worker chooses their job because they like it, or a struggling family is going to spend half of its income on a couple of organic bananas. Fucking clueless.

[Bala Perdida]

Back when I was transitioning I was slightly under the illusion. It didn't last long, especially after seeing how much all that shit costs. I just buy used stuff, since it's cheaper anyways. All the fair trade stuff I found ended up being online, being overly specific, and costing around $35 USD for one goddamn shirt. As for food, you can get that out of the trash if you really don't want to be wasteful. But if you don't like your groceries smashed doing some shopping is always necessary.
When it comes to technology, used is always good. But there's really no making 'humane' technology. So just go ahead and buy that iphone and leave us alone ;).

Also I don't know whether I love or hate when these people are a walking contradiction. I guess I love pointing it out.

[Mr. Piccolo]

I agree with what most of the posters have already said about ethical consumerism being a phenomenon of the affluent. I would also add that if people criticize leftists for consuming products made under sweatshop conditions (and I think this may be the reason for the existence of ethical consumerism, as a counter to that criticism) the best answer is that we are all constrained by capitalism to make certain decisions that we may find distasteful.

Most people are constrained to sell their labor power to capitalists in order to survive, just like most people are constrained to buy products made by capitalist companies, often utilizing labor working under horrible conditions. Neither selling your labor power to survive nor buying products made by sweatshops means that you support capitalism or sweatshops in a political or moral sense. It just means that you are constrained by your material conditions to make certain economic decisions.

Similarly, a person living in the former Soviet Union could absolutely hate the Soviet system, but he or she would have been most likely required to work for a Soviet state-owned enterprise and buy and use products made by state-owned enterprises.

People calling out socialists for wearing shirts made in Chinese or Honduran sweatshops is just as silly as someone calling out a Soviet dissident for wearing shirts made in a Soviet shirt factory or riding on a bus or train controlled by the Soviet Transportation Ministry.

[OnFire]

As long as capitalism exists there will be exploitation. Ethical consumerism is therefor an oxymoron as there can be no ethics in consumerism, and it is promoted by the bourgeois as a means of hiding the plight of the laborers.

[cyu]

More importantly, ethical workplace takeover - is it any good?

If you let your boss keep his office and special parking space, but just ignore everything he says, is that better than shoving him out the door or whacking him upside the head?

If you actually accept your boss's offer to help after you've taken over, is that better than laughing as he flails around like an idiot?

These are life's truly important questions ;)

[rylasasin]

If Ethical Consumerism worked, Wal Mart would have gone out of business decades ago.