Ethical Consumerism?

When I turned on the CBC Radio the other day, I came across a discussion about the ethics of oil. Ezra Levant, right-wing activist and author of Ethical Oil: The case for Canada's oilseeds, was debating environmental journalist Andrew Nikiforuk on the ethics of purchasing and consuming oil.

Levant defended the tar sands, saying that it was the most ethical oil on the planet because it didn’t fund terrorism or Chavez. Nikiforuk, on the other hand, stated that there is no such thing as ethical oil.

In his book Levant totally ignores the sovereignty and health claims of Indigenous communities downstream in the Athabasca river from the oil sands. He also doesn’t count the high amount of energy and water needed to extract the oil from the tar sands, or the massive amount of pollution dumped into the land.

As I listened to the debate, part of me wondered: Why does Levant even bother to justify the tar sands using the language of ethics and social responsibility? What happened to the good old “up your ass, man needs his gas” conservative logic?

What is noteworthy is not Levant’s argument (his arguments are rarely worthy of note), but the form in which the debate is framed, and what this frame says about our current predicament. The old logic of capitalism of production and alienated, meaningless consumption (think Mad Men) is no more. Capitalism has perversely incorporated the critiques levied against it.

In the 1980s and 1990s, products were increasingly sold not as things but as experiences, as a way of life. Now, products are not just sold as personal experiences or lifestyle symbols: they are now marketed as ethical choices. This “cultural capitalism” allows consumers to do something meaningful while buying and consuming. The Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek has noted, “the very act of participation in consumerist activity is simultaneously presented as a participation in the struggle against evils ultimately caused by capitalist consumption.” Shopping and doing good in the world can be accomplished with just one gesture of buying an ethical product.’

The freedom to choose in our society is now not on the collective political level, but at the grocery store. Individual consumption is now the place where we make our ideological preferences known. Rather than fighting to make trade fair, we accept an individual responsibility to purchase a fair trade product. Instead of having real alternatives, we are forced to choose among a range of options that may makes us feel better but do little other than sustain market operations that are creating the problems we are trying to counteract.

Most “ethical products” are also expensive, making ethical purchasing a largely western middle class gesture. In the west, the people who can live the most sustainable lives are those who can afford it. George W. Bush, for instance, has one of the most eco-friendly homes in Texas. In this neo- colonial model, the rest of the people on this earth are subject to the whims of western consumers and multinationals.

Let’s think about this on the political level. During last year’s United States health care debate, universal single- payer health care was a non-option not because it was more expensive, but because it was ideologically unpalatable. Hillary Clinton famously said that single- payer was not on the table, despite poll after poll showing that Americans supported some sort of single-payer health care system. Americans were then forced to choose between already broken options, such as government- subsidized private insurance.

With health care as with oil, when capitalism absorbs the realm of the ethical, the root of the problem is neither addressed nor discussed.

When we talk about ethical consumerism, it is important to keep in mind the framework in which that debate takes place. It locates problems and their solutions on the individual level. Your purchases or lack thereof may express your anti-consumerist position—nonetheless, you have still assumed that large structural problems, such as climate change and global poverty, can be solved with individual choices. This logic renders the systemic causes of these problems all but invisible. We can’t change the world by just changing our personal shopping habits. We can no more consume our way out of the coming ecological crisis than we can dig ourselves out of a hole.

This doesn’t mean that we should stop buying fair trade coffee. It does mean that we should stop expecting those choices to have tangible impacts, or replace the necessity of collective political action. We should be critical of utopian liberals and conservatives who insist we can buy our way out of capitalism’s problems. The only realistic solutions to our various collective problems are the seemingly impossible options. To understand what those options are, we have to ask the questions that are not being asked, the type of questions which grapple with the root of the problem.

The Brazilian priest Dom Helder Camara once said, “I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a communist." In this sense, if we are serious about dealing with issues such as climate change and global poverty, we should not shy away from being called communists.

Another version of this article appears on my blog

http://hammerhearts.wordpress.com/

This article originally appeared in the Dal Gazette:

http://dalgazette.squarespace.com/home/2010/10/1/rethinking-the-ethics-of-capitalism.html