The last century has been a time of dizzying social upheaval. Retelling such a familiar story is unnecessary, but the scale is worth remembering. World wars and local fighting killed millions of soldiers and citizens. Revolutionaries bulldozed ancient cultures. Waves of economic boom and bust brought stunning riches and grinding poverty. Scientific leaps generated immense benefits (e.g., average human life-spans more than doubled) and terrifying fears (e.g., of nuclear war). Cars and planes and computers sped up the pace of life. And global ecological crises began to rock the earth.
Activists took up every imaginable cause during this tumultuous time. With so much change, today the lives of activists and the socioeconomic setting for activism are nothing like they were even twenty years ago. Time and again, in every culture, states and corporate allies have ripped and sewn and ripped again the fabric of civic life to promote self-reliance and subordinate society to economic interests.
Now, radical collective action faces sky-high hurdles. Associational bonds have become more transitory and brittle in a world of wealth and wealth-dreams, where social life is privatizing, and where transformations in culture comprise nothing short of “the triumph of the individual over society.”1 Reinforced by individualism, market relations and consumerism now infuse the “structures of everyday life” – what French historian Fernand Braudel describes as “those thousands of acts that flower and reach fruition without anyone’s having made a decision, acts of which we are not even aware.”2 Under these conditions social life has broken down, destabilizing the historical associations of social movements, distancing what is social from what is personal and further contracting the limits of what people think is possible to change.
A constellation of forces are continuing to privatize social life: societal and political; institutional and ideational; economic and material. This chapter zeros in on two especially important and interlocking factors contributing to the corporatization of activism – changes to the infrastructure and ethos of activism. During the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century, social movements wove into and relied upon longstanding networks and structures within communities, religious groups, and workplaces – what, as we said in chapter 1, Alan Sears calls “the infrastructure of dissent.”
Yet, as historian Eric Hobsbawm captures so well in The Age of Extremes, as the twentieth century progressed, many “of the threads which in the past had woven human beings into social textures” snapped or frayed.3 Rising incomes and consumerism, as well as political and economic restructuring of neighborhoods and workplaces, have sapped the organizational and communicative capacity of activism with an identity at the core (e.g., class) to challenge and change capitalist principles and the base structures of the world order. Activism with a cause at the core (e.g., human rights and environmental protection) did thrive in this context during the 1960s and 1970s. Yet, as we show in chapter 5, since the 1970s, both identity- and cause-focused social movements have given way to activist bureaucracies mirroring corporate organizational hierarchies and echoing corporate strategies and ideologies. Radical activism today, as Sears says pithily, “has less soil in which to thrive.”4
Surging consumerism and individualism are further bringing about, and are reinforced by, the privatization of social life. Not only are people living more private and insulated lives, but increasingly the values and choices about what to do with one’s time and energy reflect a life of ever rising consumerism. As states and corporations channel activism into (rather than against) the establishment, more people are searching for ways to match beliefs with personal consumption, striving to live with less duplicity through market responsibility. This is advancing corporate social responsibility, but it is also fortifying the power of corporations to mold the decisions of individuals as both consumers and citizens.
Changes to the infrastructure of dissent and the character of activism do not fully explain how or why the privatization of social life is circumscribing the limits of what is politically possible. Our goal in this chapter is more modest: to lay the groundwork for understanding the analysis of the institutionalization of activism in chapter 5 and, more broadly, to highlight the consequences of the privatization of social life for the corporatization of activism. In doing so, we are not imagining that the privatization of social life has been (or will ever become) a single or unswerving trend. Further, by underscoring these processes of social transformation, we are not implying, as some others do, that, under globalization, “working-class organizations have become fragmented or been destroyed altogether, and the working-class movement rendered impotent.”5
Once again, to avoid any misunderstanding: activists can – and are – resisting globalization. And, as political economists Stephen Gill and Adrienne Roberts appropriately highlight, a “counter-hegemonic movement of political forces at both national and global levels” continues to fight against the world order.6 Nonetheless, this does not change the fact that sustaining radical activism of any kind under the pressures of economic globalization is astoundingly difficult, and that ongoing changes to the infrastructure and ethos of dissent are furthering the corporatization of activism.
Early socialists, feminists, civil rights activists, and a host of others not only strove for particular goals but, while doing so, as Sears says, built an infrastructure “through which oppressed and exploited groups developed their capacities to act on the world.” This infrastructure included neighborhood and workplace associations, cultural events, physical spaces for radical dialogue (from pubs to cafés to bookstores to temples), community newspapers, and trade union activities. These spaces sustained cultures of resistance, providing a way to reflect on struggles, rouse debate, and mobilize for action. By rooting activism in the day-to-day social fabric, this infrastructure enabled communities to confront violations of rights and freedoms and support social movements to sustain protest campaigns.7
Infrastructures of dissent were at the heart of every major social movement of the twentieth century. Ties of solidarity and political consciousness of labor movements, for example, were forged in bars and factories in working-class neighborhoods. Social segregation united workers, as did “the constriction of life chances which separated them from the socially more mobile.”8
Labor activist Dan La Botz describes the importance of “social texture” for the US manufacturing states around the Great Lakes: “The unions’ power had been rooted in the social texture – the neighborhoods, schools, churches, bars, social clubs, and little league teams – of the descendants of the Eastern and Southern European immigrants who had arrived at the opening of the century and of the offspring of African Americans who had made the great migration from the plantations of the South.” Similarly, in Europe during the Great Depression and World Wars and in times of state repression and surveillance, personal networks were essential for those fighting wartime occupiers, discrimination, and authoritarianism. Solidarity came not only from a belief in a cause but also from common values and experiences within work and religious associations, as well as family bonds, personal relationships, and friendships.9
The American civil rights movement, for example, grew strong out of deep-rooted networks among African Americans in the southern United States, especially through churches and neighborhood associations. Church-based networks infused civil rights activism with bonds of faith and trust, as well as a collective and institutional memory of historical protests against abuse and slavery. Aldon Morris, in The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement, explains: “internal organization was the critical factor that enabled the movement to gather momentum and endure in the face of state power and widespread repression.”10
Central to all influential movements over this time was the shared daily lives and experiences of both organizers and ordinary members. Activists identified with and were part of social structures and networks that gave rise to a politics of change, producing a shared (and even on occasion revolutionary) energy – what more than a century ago the French sociologist Émile Durkheim called “collective effervescence.”11 Unlike today, the politics of social resistance almost always arose out of pre-existing collectivities rather than ones forming to achieve particular political demands.12 For this reason, protest and activism in the early years of social movements can be seen as “organic,” emerging and evolving through the social structures and relations of daily life.
The beginning of the privatization of social life goes back at least to the beginning of the Industrial Revolution in the mid- to late eighteenth century. The post-World War II economic boom, however, caused a momentous shift in the global North in the nature of associational ties. Increases in incomes, home ownership, and private leisure time weakened organic associational ties. So too did suburbanization and new technologies such as TVs and automobiles. State and corporate restructuring of labor and the welfare state also took an equally great, if not greater, toll on the cohesion and power of these associational ties. Documenting the full complexity of such shifts is impossible here; sketching the most important trends, however, does reveal a waning of historical forms of collectivity from the 1950s to the 1970s, laying the groundwork for even deeper and more global changes to associational ties with the upsurge of economic globalization since 1980.
Intense cultural change and “social liberalization” disrupted social life and deepened the commodification of everyday life in the second half of the twentieth century.13 In the global North, post-World War II economies revolved around a Fordist model of mass production and consumption. Many places saw labor and welfare interests entwine into consensus and cooperation, with business conceding limited benefits to labor in exchange for support of capitalism – what many, such as political economist Leo Panitch, call the “post-war compromise.”14 Fiscal and monetary policies constrained capital mobility to keep unemployment low, and, along with employers, governments took on some of the costs of social services.
Postwar economic growth, along with the security and higher wages of union jobs, spurred a boom in home ownership. In some countries, including the US, suburbia came to define social life – as places, as Sears says, to escape from “the ongoing demands of work, finances, politics and urban existence.”15 Historian and poet Dolores Hayden goes even further: for her, suburbs became a place where workers could locate “ambitions for upward mobility and economic security, ideals about freedom and private property, and longings for social harmony and spiritual uplift.”16
Communal ties in many places, including those in workplace and neighborhood associations, began to weaken or break with rising home ownership, suburbanization, and private leisure time. Greater car ownership and longer work commutes further fractured day-to-day routines and any sense of community. More people had less interest, opportunity, or time to join the social networks that in the past had given rise to a politics of change. The changing nature of work in the global North also partly explains the weakening of associational bonds, as more people came to work “unsocial hours,” such as during the weekends and evenings or through the night.17 At the same time the discourse of electoral politics and the images of advertising were increasingly defining a good life around earning more income, consuming more things, and living in private.
Changes in the first few decades after World War II were especially far-reaching for the working classes. “Life” for most workers in industrializing economies in the first half of the twentieth century, as Hobsbawm depicts in The Age of Extremes, was centered in “public.” Homes were generally overcrowded, dark, and dank. Children played in the streets and adults went to churches, bars, the cinema, public markets, and outdoor dances. After the war, resurging economic growth, new technologies (e.g., TVs and computers), and a spreading ideology of individualism gradually shifted more and more of life into “private space.” Hobsbawm sums up the change: “prosperity and privatisation broke up what poverty and collectivity in the public place had welded together.”18
This privatization of social life, along with strengthening consumerism and a growing confidence among workers in the possibility of upward mobility, altered civic participation. Union meetings, political rallies, and public protests lost their allure as occasions for socializing and entertainment. People increasingly saw other ways to spend time as more enjoyable. And, with incomes rising, values shifting, and living conditions becoming more comfortable, many saw such activities as less necessary, or at least less urgent. More and more people, prompted by nonstop advertising, came to see the market as a source of freedom and a good life, usurping ideologies where communal interest took precedence.
Slowly, as the twentieth century unfolded, such changes chipped away at non-economic solidarities and group ties, including the accompanying ethics. “The old moral vocabulary of rights and duties, mutual obligations, sin and virtue, sacrifice, conscience, rewards and penalties,” Hobsbawm explains, “could no longer be translated into the new language of desired gratification.” Market structures began to subsume social exchanges. People began to live to consume.19
With social life privatizing and fragmenting, activism and politics requires more time, just as people have less and less time to become involved. At the same time, since 1980, more people have been channeling more time and energy into the market – from working to consuming to vacationing. With people spending more time commuting, watching TV, or playing on a computer, the strength and number of close friendships has been waning too, further weakening social networks and alienating individuals from their community.20 In this context, family, friends, and neighbors have disengaged from one another, and, as Harvard University professor Robert Putnam charts from his team’s surveys of hundreds of thousands of people, in countries such as the US, membership in unions, churches, community leagues, clubs, and civic associations has declined steadily since the 1950s, accelerating particularly since the 1970s. At least in the case of the US, Putnam sees this decrease in social interaction as a crucial reason for a corresponding decline since the 1950s in civic discussions (and education) necessary for building the trust, networks, and norms of social institutions (the “social capital”). The title of Putnam’s 1995 article (and bestselling 2000 book) captures this decline in social capital in a memorable metaphor: people are now “bowling alone.”21
During the first three decades after World War II, the ebbing of trust and social capital, the deepening of consumerism into the rhythms of daily living, the atomization of time and space, and the breakdown of traditional communities reconstituted the infrastructure (and, as we will see later, nature) of dissent into a capitalist logic. This was not a totalizing process. Nor was it a complete rupture from the past. Rather, it was a slow “permeation” arising out of an historical arc of socioeconomic change going back, as we said earlier, at least to the Industrial Revolution.22
These changes to traditional associational forms, moreover, did not prevent a surging wave of global activism in the 1960s and 1970s as citizens took to the streets to protest war, racism, sexism, pollution, and human rights abuses. Fiery student sit-ins swept universities. Hundreds of thousands marched and sang their way across capital cities. Campaigners mind-bombed the global media. And racial and political turmoil intensified.
The intensifying market logic of private life after the war was a big reason for this social turbulence, and resulting counter-movements and counter-cultures help to explain why so many anti-war and civil rights campaigns turned antiestablishment and anti-capitalist. At the same time, however, the privatization of social life helps to explain the upsurge in institutional forms of activism in the 1970s, including transnational NGOs such as Greenpeace and Amnesty International, as activists sought to form and sustain associational ties with the capacity to reform global capitalism. Since then, economic globalization has washed away even more of the traditional associations of dissent and left more and more individuals and activist organizations open to corporate and market influence.
Order was also breaking down on factory floors by the early 1970s. In countries such as the United States, “sabotage, drug abuse, and wildcat strikes began biting into Fordist production regimes,” causing productivity and profits to fall.23 Wage and price controls (e.g., in the US in 1971) and the world oil-price shocks (most notably in 1973) wreaked further economic havoc in the global North. Stagnating Third World economies were adding to the downturn. Partly in response, and with inflation staying high and economic growth slowing, ever more powerful political and corporate forces began to question protectionism and state ownership, as well as welfare state policies and the value of strong unions and secure job status (which some saw as a source of laziness).
Led by the examples of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher (1979–90) in the UK and President Ronald Reagan (1981–9) in the US, capitalist economies in both the global North and South attacked unions, imposed regressive taxes, and revoked welfare reforms. At home and abroad, governments called for deregulation, liberalization of trade and investment, and privatization of industry. More confrontational unions in particular, such as auto-workers and steelworkers, lost political influence and negotiating power.24
Resulting changes further splintered the traditional foundations of activism. Since the 1980s, equity and human rights organizations, such as women’s centers, have lost funding.25 Independent bookstores have closed in the face of big-box retail stores and online retailing.26 The growth of online life has put many other community gathering places into decline, too. At the same time, police have been monitoring – and at times even raiding – the few remaining bookstores and cultural centers of activists.
Flexible employment practices have also made working life more precarious since the 1980s. In many places unemployment and personal debt crept up; across the global North, the average number of paid working hours per person has gone down, but an upsurge in the number of “part-time” workers explains much of this seeming benefit.27 Concurrently, the work of providing for day-to-day needs has largely shifted back to families and the market as states cut social and welfare spending – what feminist scholars such as Isabella Bakker and others call the “reprivatization of social reproduction.”28
To some extent online “friendships” since 2000 have been replacing “community.” The social networking Internet site Facebook, founded in the US in 2004, now has more than a billion active users, with more than 80 percent residing outside the United States. Sometimes, as we said in chapter 1, social networking can mobilize mass protests with breathtaking speed. Yet such ethereal ties are not a substitute for the lasting relationships once at the organizational base of dissent. And growing state surveillance of online activism should make us further doubt the capacity of social media ever to form and retain the trust, memories, camaraderie, and solidarity characteristic of past social movements.29
Since the early 1980s, states have rewritten social policy to fit with the tenets of an “open” market economy. Accountability for social and economic ills has edged away from governments and toward voluntary corporate responsibility and self-regulating markets. In the process, cultural and political theorist Colin Mooers sees “a full-scale assault on the meaning and content of citizenship rights.” The idea of “social citizenship,” he argues, has been “giving way” to “lean citizenship”: an “attempt to strip citizenship of any collective or social attributes in favour of a wholly privatized and marketized notion of rights.”30
Social citizenship in the global North from the 1940s to the 1970s was not only about the right to vote; it also comprised rights for workers, social services, and civil freedoms. Without a doubt, as Sears correctly emphasizes, even in welfare states many groups – from women to aboriginal peoples to immigrants – did not gain anything close to complete social citizenship.31 Still, social citizenship since the beginning of the 1980s has taken a big step backwards, as states claw back the right to strike and assemble, deregulate and devolve social services to the private sector, pacify civic participation in politics, and, as we saw in the last chapter, securitize mass protest and political dissent.
A belief in extreme individualism, of the need and value of total personal responsibility, justifies the assault on social citizenship. Those with problems, the homeless and jobless, Thatcher once said, “are casting their problems on society and who is society? There is no such thing! There are individual men and women, and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people and people look to themselves first.”32
The discourse of extreme individualism challenges the very idea that structural inequality exists and silences calls for state policy to reflect shared responsibility. It further justifies and legitimizes state policies to devolve responsibility for inequalities and ecological decay to “society,” tasking entrepreneurs and consumers with finding solutions in the “self-regulating” market.
Together, the decline of social citizenship and the rise of extreme individualism have swept away many social and political rights of workers and disadvantaged peoples, eroding shared identities and the power of collective action. The market takes priority. And workplaces and neighborhoods have been remade in the image of efficiency and productivity. Accompanying this restructuring has been a steady increase in the coercive powers of states: tighter controls on taxation, immigration, surveillance, and civil action.
A strong infrastructure of dissent, as Sears reminds us, means that, “in every struggle, we do not need to relearn from scratch the way the system works or how to fight it.”33 This is necessary as well for imagining and carrying out any radical campaign for political change. Yet, even as protests and uprisings continue worldwide, this infrastructure is weakening as life atomizes, community life fractures, and the wrecking-balls of globalization and securitization slam into civil societies. A politics of change no longer courses through work and neighborhood life. Friendship and trust are harder to sustain within social movements, and people tend to join causes and take part in politics as individuals. That said, as McNally correctly emphasizes, over the past three decades “Antipoverty activists, feminists, antiracists, queer organizers, and rankand-file unionists still fought good fights. And most people, even where they gave their assent to the mantras of the new individualism, continued to care deeply and profoundly about their social, familial, and community connections. But there could be no denying that a cultural shift of real substance had occurred.”34
Individualizing responsibility brings a faith in the “power of the individual” not only to better one’s lot in life but also to solve collective troubles. Shifting responsibility to individuals is in the interest of big business and governments. Just about every state and company now tells citizens that even the littlest of personal changes can “save the world.” And most NGOs are saying something similar. “Recycle cans to protect the oceans.” “Buy ethical chocolate to prevent child labor.” “Plant a tree to stop deforestation.” “Drive a hybrid car to avert climate change (and receive a rebate).”
Such “solutions” diffuse societal and political demands for legislation to require producer responsibility. They fit squarely into a worldview that sees markets as the most efficient and effective fix for every problem. And they do not contest the growing power of corporations over land and water, question mass consumption of discount goods, or confront the crass inequalities of world production.35
Individualization of responsibility is gaining force and reaching more deeply as globalization integrates economies and cultures. For some people, being globalized is bringing fabulous opportunities and wealth; for many of the world’s poor, however, it is bringing cultural decay and economic turmoil. This process of economic globalization is delinking production from social life. Production of most consumer goods now occurs far from the point of sale, with long supply chains connecting manufacturers in emerging and developing countries with consumers in the global North. Consumer products zigzag over continents and across oceans, while production occurs far from the minds and homes of consumers, and even those who care cannot discern the consequences.36 Keeping morals and beliefs consistent with personal consumption is virtually impossible. The market, once a discretionary opportunity for the wealthy, is now inescapable for all. Who can really live outside of the market? Instead, most caring people look to consume with more social and environmental sustainability within the market.
Individualization tends as well to disperse societal energy for collective politics. People feel able to do their bit – alone. Why sit through a long and boring meeting? Or risk getting beaten or arrested at a political rally? Is it not easier, and more effective, to recycle or buy fair trade? Michael Maniates captures well the consequences of such thinking for politics: individualization, he writes, “insulates people from the empowering experiences and political lessons of collective struggle for social change and reinforces corrosive myths about the difficulties of public life.”37 Individualization is hollowing out more radical activism and is channeling civic life into market exchanges – thus depowering social movements and further weakening social capital and the infrastructure of dissent.
In 2012 Jim Yong Kim, president of the World Bank, offered advice on how to launch a social movement. “Find a cause,” he recommends, “with a connection to people’s deepest passions about right and wrong.” Then, be sure to “identify concrete actions,” “set concrete targets and an end date,” “enlist partners,” and “measure progress toward the goal and be relentless in using data to push the movement forward.”38
Gone for Kim is the painstaking work of developing consensus around strategy, or the time-consuming process of organizing people, or the often frustrating job of accommodating clashing interests. Progress is specific and measurable. Timelines and deadlines must be followed. Changing the world involves small steps and personal action, not transforming lifestyles. And for sure it does not require transforming the world order.
This vision is hardly surprising from the president of the World Bank. Yet today, many, if not most, NGO leaders make similar appeals. This is a far cry from the revolutionary social movements of history, of achieving women’s suffrage or abolishing the nineteenth-century slave trade. Could rhetoric of “partnerships” and “targets” and “end dates” ever have achieved such change?
Kim’s list illustrates a worldwide shift toward more pragmatic thinking and a narrowing of social and ecological objectives. Comparable lists exist for just about every cause. A glance at NGO websites and pamphlets will give you the following tips:
Every one of these lists emphasizes the power of individuals to achieve “important” change, gradually, through small, practical steps – a message, as we saw in chapter 2, which the popular media, transnational NGOs, and charitable organizations are trumpeting. Individuals need only be more responsible and change habits to achieve fair trade or sustain-ability or global equality.
States and firms are reinforcing this belief in the power of individualism by channeling activism into stakeholder meetings and certification partnerships to empower consumer “choice.” At the same time, corporate executives decry regulatory action as inefficient and ineffective; the best role for governments and citizens is to let the market reward and punish, providing incentives to encourage voluntary industry compliance and corporate social responsibility.
More and more governments are accepting this corporate line. “Educational” campaigns tell us to take personal steps to reduce poverty and prevent climate change; to buy clothes made with child-free labor; to donate cans of beans and boxes of macaroni and cheese; to idle our car engines less and shut off the tap-water when brushing our teeth. The Canadian government in 2006, for example, issued to each resident of the country a “One Tonne Challenge” to reduce their personal carbon emissions by one tonne; concurrently, however, the government was doing little else to address its striking failure to meet its international commitments to reduce greenhouse gas emissions under the 1997 Kyoto Protocol (from which Canada formally withdrew in 2012).
Similarly, in 2012 the US Agency for International Development launched a contest for university students “to develop creative technology solutions to combat modern day slavery” (“winners” of “Challenge Slavery” received a prize and free trip to Washington, DC).40 The US government, however, has long refused to commit to international agreements that might prevent for-profit prison labor at home. The crucial point here is that states are advocating for individual responsibility for societal and ecological inequalities and abuses, while simultaneously ignoring or weakening public policy measures to control the capacity of businesses to exploit people and ecosystems.
Corporations, too, are encouraging individuals to “do their part,” and in doing so deflect attention away from the need for tighter regulatory controls over companies. Curbside recycling is one example. Across North America and Europe the post-World War II economic boom in disposable consumer and household goods brought mountains of reeking and leaching (and poisonous) garbage. Better-off citizens began to demand action, and, understandably, few were eager to see a dump or landfill in their “backyard.” Environmental and community groups began to call for stricter regulations on resource access and inputs as well as on production. Corporations responded by lobbying against regulations and producer responsibility and lobbying for curbside recycling as the “solution.”41
A host of other corporate policies and programs also fortify the individualization of responsibility. Some are straightforward incentives: to encourage people to recycle, for example, some firms are charging for plastic bags or giving a rebate for returning plastic containers, tin cans, or glass bottles. Even more popular, as we saw in chapter 2, are corporate programs to “inform” consumers to allow for more ethical, compassionate, or sustainable purchases. Manufacturers and retailers advertise these programs as advancing “sustainable consumption” and “fair trade,” thus demonstrating the value of voluntary corporate responsibility over further government regulations. As we said in chapter 2, however, the ultimate goal of all of these programs is to sell more products. “[C]urrent social and environmental callenges,” as the Sustainable Apparel Coalition says, “are both a business imperative and an opportunity.”42
Programs such as the Sustainable Apparel Coalition (with more than eighty brand company members) do offer some useful tools for measuring and evaluating the social and environmental costs of consumer goods. Yet at the end of the day such programs are designed to profit from selling an easy morality – one that does not require any tough lifestyle changes. Such strategies propel a process that is slowly substituting consumer activism for more collective and social forms of political participation. This in turn is blunting opposition to corporate sourcing and manufacturing by further shifting responsibility toward individual consumption and away from the downsides of capitalism.
Individualization arises out of a multidimensional and historical evolution of institutions and ideas. There are without a doubt many differences across economies and cultures. Still, economic globalization – especially the Thatcher–Reagan strand since the beginning of the 1980s – has ingrained and deepened the belief both in the importance of economic self-sufficiency and in the need for personal moral responsibility to solve societal failings. Very few political discourses, and even fewer state policies, do not reflect these beliefs.43 World leaders and the mainstream media, for example, tended to blame the 2008 global financial crisis on greed and corrupt bankers: the “few bad apples” theory of why the benefits of capitalism do not always flow to the masses. In countries such as the UK and Greece, capitalism did come under fire during the ensuing financial instability from 2008 to 2013. Still, the refrain of world leaders did not skip a beat: “the world order can be equitable and sustainable, so long as people act sensibly and responsibly.”
Activists worldwide continue to resist the dogma of extreme individualism. Nevertheless, even grassroots activism, the source of much of the most powerful resistance, is increasingly accommodating (or accepting) the philosophy of individualism. The expanding power of the economy over social life partly explains this. As mentioned, activism and political action are now sidelines of, rather than central to, work and community life (decreasing the time and energy for dissent). Groups on the margins of the world economy also have less power to challenge the market rules of social life as states reinforce the power of business over labor and property. Such pressures against collective action working for long-term, system-wide change add further to making individual action seem an attractive way to try to change the world.
Concurrently, frustrated by a funneling of democratic participation and a decline in the influence of ordinary citizens, more and more activists are shifting campaigns toward consumers and away from states and political parties as the primary targets for political action. This is bolstering the individualization of responsibility, as NGO campaigns add to state and corporate messaging that a more equal and sustainable world is possible through a self-regulating market of “ethical” consumers.
Individualization is also part of the narrowing of what James Cairns and Alan Sears call the “democratic imagination,” or the “capacity to envision what democracy looks like and to work toward actually achieving it.”44 This narrowing is rooted in a globalizing market economy, especially where social movements are failing to rally against conservative economic policies. Geographer Neil Smith captures this well in the UK: “Margaret Thatcher’s much reviled yet brilliantly proscriptive assessment that there is no alternative (to free market capitalism) may have become the mantra of the political right, but it also became the unspoken defeatism of much of the left who, while we fought it, had no effective response to the dissolution of social choice into market necessity.”45 The contraction of what change seems possible tempers radicalism and idealism. It leaves activists more open to supporting quick fixes. And it helps to explain the growth of system-conforming and system-reinforcing activism.
Globalization has lengthened “the distance between consumption and consequences, making it harder and harder to sense and manage how our individual and collective actions spill into faraway lands and future generations.”46 In this context, big-brand companies are seeking to connect consumers to a feel-good “story” of the making of each product. Branding and advertising underline the message that consuming more can be good citizenship.
Consumerism has been gaining strength since the end of World War II. By the 1970s, with community and workplace associations continuing to decline, individuals began increasingly to shift toward what sociologist Wolfgang Streeck of the Max Planck Institute calls “sociation by consumption.” The idea of “consumer power” as a political tool of change took hold, and by the 1980s consumerism was becoming in industrial countries, in the words of sociologist Don Slater, “the obligatory pattern for all social relations and the template for civic dynamism and freedom.”47
Some theorists, as Streeck points out, have erroneously seen the upswing in consumer activism as “the beginning of a new age of autonomy and emancipation.” Individuals can certainly strive for some continuity between consumption and beliefs and even build networks through purchases or social media sites (e.g., by pressing Facebook’s “Like” button for a product or a company). Yet, as Streeck says, companies were quick to exploit the deepening of consumerism into social identities, putting “the individualization of both customers and products at the service of commercial expansion.”48
The roots of mass consumerism go back centuries. The middle classes across Western Europe and North America first got a taste for consuming novel and less expensive clothes during the industrialization of the textile industry in the early years of the Industrial Revolution. Already by the late 1800s in countries such as the US, middle-class consumers were buying for comfort and fun, wanting (even expecting) to buy goods to replace “outdated” products as well as to “try out” new stuff.49 Still, the power of markets and commodities to define social life has been intensifying at a much faster rate with the strengthening of economic globalization and individualism since the late 1970s. Consumerism is no longer a product of industrialization: now, it is central to notions of self-identity, morality, economic progress, and political freedom. It has become, as Slater says, “part of the very making of the modern world.”50
This consumerism is bolstering system-conforming activism, as well as the ever climbing power of corporations, and capitalism more generally, to commodify radicalism and social resistance. At the same time, the upswing in consumer activism has a paradoxical effect: it creates incentives for corporations to usurp social and environmental causes to increase sales and brand value. Doing so allows brand companies to portray themselves as responsible actors willing to accommodate rather than subvert social activism. In the process brands appropriate symbols and images of radicalism and naturalism – Che Guevara T-shirts and Polar Bear Coke cans. The irony of such symbols gets lost in rising sales, with even Beat poet Allen Ginsberg once appearing alongside the following ad for the Gap clothing company (in 1995):
Legendary
Howling in the ’50s.
Legendary poets, artists,
anarchists who changed
the way we think. All in
their cotton khakis. Casual.
Radical. Just like those we
make for you. Gap khakis.
Traditional, Plain-front,
Easy Fit, Classic Fit.
GAP
KHAKIS
“The relentless ability of contemporary capitalism to commodify dissent and sell it back to dissenters,” as Maniates says, “is surely one explanation for the elevation of consumer over citizen.”51
Like consumerism, the commodification of resistance is nothing new; what is new is the intensity with which it is altering movements and social revolt. Commodities have come to mediate self-identity and family life. And finding and sustaining nonmarket associations is getting harder, narrowing how activists relate, spend their time, and organize into civic associations.
Corporations are profiting from this constricting of the politics of activism, as well as from the desire of individuals to consume more equitably and sustainably. One example, among thousands we could choose from, is the partnership between Coca-Cola and WWF to “save” the polar bear from extinction. To raise funds and awareness, in 2011 Coca-Cola printed the image of a polar bear and two cubs on more than 1 billion “white” cans of Coke. “We’re turning our cans white because turning our backs wasn’t an option,” went the campaign tagline. “In 125 years we’ve never changed the color of the Coke can,” remarked Coca-Cola’s Katie Bayne. “We really see this as a bold gesture.”52 Coca-Cola urged consumers to donate a dollar to the campaign, pledging to match total donations up to US$1 million. The company also gave US$2 million to WWF. (In comparison, Coca-Cola posted a profit of US$9 billion in 2012.)
Did this campaign do anything to prevent the Arctic home of polar bears from melting as global temperatures climb? Positively not. Did it help at all? Perhaps, as WWF assists Arctic communities and wildlife to adapt to climate change. What we do know for sure is that “supporting” polar bears and “partnering” with WWF helped Coca-Cola to project an image of social and environmental responsibility – important for deflecting critics of a company that is already the world’s biggest buyer of aluminum and sugarcane, the second biggest buyer of glass, the third biggest buyer of citrus, and the fifth biggest buyer of coffee.53
The individualization of responsibility and consumer activism are transforming social activism from an experience of community into yet another market exchange. Ethical consumption can certainly create a temporary sense of collective identity – from, say, seeing others in the same Che Guevara T-shirt. But such bonds are fleeting and uneven compared to the ties and camaraderie of past protest movements. Streeck captures this point well: “Since communities of consumption are much easier to abandon than traditional ‘real’ communities, social identities become structured by weaker and looser ties, allowing individuals to surf from one identity to the next, free from any pressure to explain themselves.”54 In other words, it is far easier to discard a consumer identity than to leave a family, neighborhood, or nation. Consumer activism is always at risk of being forgotten or shelved as consumer activists become busy or lose interest. This fluidity of consumer activism both reflects and lends support to the individualization of responsibility.
Significantly, too, consumer activism tends to make people feel as if they are contributing to a cause even when their input is quite minor (say, adding a few premium-priced fair-trade products into the weekly shopping routine). Does this “contribution” leave them less likely to join in other forms of activism? It is difficult to know for sure. What we do know for sure, though, is that a growing number of people are participating in market-conforming and market-reinforcing activism.
Such activism is channeling dissent into institutions that are nonthreatening to the establishment. Obstacles to sustained collective action – from time constraints to government crackdowns to NGO bureaucracies – are further pushing activists to look to the market for justice and sustainability. This in turn is enhancing the legitimacy and power of corporations to secure resources and expand factories and stores, as well as to shape everyday living and personal relationships.
Individualization is also dulling opposition to the ever growing power of capitalism. It is shifting responsibility for social and ecological crises away from corporations. And it is redirecting insecurity innate to capitalism into personal feelings of inadequacy about one’s own moral consistency. Am I doing enough to end child labor? Or alleviate poverty? What is enough? Such questions are certainly worth thinking about. But they can also shift blame for the ecological and social damage of production and consumption onto individuals – and thus avoid questioning and challenging the systemic causes of problems.
Work, community, and religious associations remain part of the infrastructure of dissent. And, in much of the world, religious beliefs remain a powerful source of social unrest. Still, at least in the global North, although families and friendships and solidarity are still important, these are no longer defining characteristics of the infrastructure of dissent. And nor are social structures and networks that once gave rise to a politics of change. Activists of the past put more faith in collective-action institutions. Acting alone was not seen as a sensible strategy for the poor, the exploited, and the oppressed.
Now “we are all equal.”55 Public policies since the late 1970s reflect and construct this belief, which, for many people, is confirmed by rising consumer prosperity. The “private troubles” of C. Wright Mills are now personal failures requiring individual responsibility, not symptoms of socioeconomic forces and structures that necessitate communal resistance to change. The deepening ideology of consumerism is further privatizing social life. Corporations are capitalizing on the growth of consumer activism. And, as we saw in chapter 2, both marketers and activists now regularly tell people to purchase products to achieve justice or equality or sustainability. The historian James Livingston sees great potential here: “consumer culture,” he writes, “doesn’t siphon political energies and fragment social movements by ‘privatizing’ experience: instead it grounds a new politics by animating both new solidarities and new individualities.”56
But Livingston is way too optimistic. Solidarities and individualities forged within the market cannot contest the hegemony of capitalism and its accompanying politics and social life. Instead, these further isolate individuals, atomize societies, and limit radical forms of activism, as well as the demands that activists make. In this setting, confrontational and direct-action activism tends to languish, while, as the next chapter shows, moderate, highly bureaucratized advocacy organizations with compromise agendas tend to flourish.