12: The Myth of Consumer Sovereignty
[The market] rarely has anything to do with choice or freedom, since those are all determined for us in advance, whether we are talking about new model cars, toys, or television programs: we choose among those, no doubt, but we can scarcely be said to have a say in actually choosing any of them.
Whenever an environmental disaster occurs, someone blames it on consumers.
After the supertanker
Exxon Valdez spilled eleven million gallons of crude oil in 1989, Greenpeace produced ads that featured a picture of the captain and the headline “It wasn’t his driving that caused the Alaskan oil spill. It was yours.” The ad continued: “It would be easy to blame the
Valdez oil spill on one man. Or one company. Or even one industry. Too easy. Because the truth is, the spill was caused by a nation drunk on oil.”
2Similarly, during the BP oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010, the British Guardian published an article headlined “We’re all to blame for the oil spill.”
Moreover, and perhaps most important, we should not only consider responsibility for oil production but also for oil consumption. Business and finance are not isolated from our own choices. Companies such as BP can only do what they do because we want what they sell. We’re all too happy with cheap oil . . .
As consumers, we continue to depend on oil in various ways and therefore maintain the oil-hungry system that makes oil companies drill in deep water and undertake other risky activities.
3We could cite many more examples, all promoting the same simple lesson: If only “we” would kick our addiction to oil, then “they” would stop destroying the environment. If “we” would just use less oil, then “they” wouldn’t have to drill in environmentally sensitive areas like the Gulf of Mexico.
Such views rest on the implicit assumption that corporations—indeed the capitalist economy as a whole—are driven by consumers’ desires and choices, as displayed in the market. Economist Mark Perry of the right-wing American Enterprise Institute explains:
Consumers are the kings and queens of the market economy, and ultimately they reign supreme over corporations and their employees . . . In a market economy, it is consumers, not businesses, who ultimately make all of the decisions. When they vote in the marketplace with their dollars, consumers decide which products, businesses, and industries survive—and which ones fail.”
4This view, usually called consumer sovereignty, is widely held not just by conservative economists but by commentators of many political stripes. Indeed, it is the core concept of mainstream economic theory.
The concept of consumer sovereignty is of central importance to neo-classical economic theory: it is the cornerstone around which the whole edifice of consumer and production theory is constructed. It embodies the main principle of neo-classical economics, namely, that the satisfaction of consumers’ wants directs the purpose of all economic activity. Production is the means, consumption is the end . . .
To be sovereign means to have sole power and the view associated with consumer sovereignty sees the consumer as having sole power in the economy to decide what is produced, how much is produced and how the produced goods are allocated. Only those things are produced that consumers want, and the quantity produced is determined by how much consumers want them.
5Although it is seldom made explicit, the concept of consumer sovereignty is a cornerstone of all populationist accounts of the environmental crisis. As consumers, we get what we want through the responsive market. We are destroying the environment because we want too much of the wrong things. If forests are cut down, it’s because consumers want more wood products, or more of the products that will grow where forests used to be. If oil companies destroy ecosystems, it’s because more consumers want more gasoline.
That’s why corporations are rarely mentioned in populationist writing: the producers of ever-increasing quantities of goods are simply acting to fulfill consumer demand, which is growing because the number of consumers is increasing.
If that’s true, then the entire super-polluting system results from consumer decisions, and we have only three options: reduce the number of consumers, or persuade consumers to consume less, or both.
The manipulated market
The concept of consumer sovereignty rests on the absurd idea that manufacturers and others simply wait for us to declare our desires and then hasten to do as we demand. In mainstream economic theory, the essential business functions of marketing and advertising exist only to inform us about possible choices we might make to satisfy our independently determined wants.
Ecosocialist Michael Löwy writes:
Contrary to the claim of free-market ideology, supply is not a response to demand. Capitalist firms usually create the demand for their products by various marketing techniques, advertising tricks, and planned obsolescence. Advertising plays an essential role in the production of consumerist demand by inventing false “needs” and by stimulating the formation of compulsive consumption habits.
6As the liberal economist John Kenneth Galbraith wrote more than fifty years ago in his classic book The Affluent Society, the theory of consumer sovereignty ignores the “central function” of advertising and marketing, which is “to bring into being wants that did not previously exist.” Far from just responding to consumer desires, marketing “creates the wants it seeks to satisfy.”
This, Galbraith wrote, “would be regarded as elementary by the most retarded student in the nation’s most primitive school of business administration.” Only economists refuse to understand it: “they have closed their eyes (and ears) to the most intrusive of all economic phenomena, namely, modern want creation.”
7Later, in The New Industrial State, Galbraith elaborated on the vital importance of marketing—which he called the management of demand—to modern capitalism.
The control or management of demand is, in fact, a vast and rapidly growing industry in itself. It embraces a huge network of communications, a great array of merchandising and selling organizations, nearly the entire advertising industry, numerous ancillary research, training, and other related services and much more. In everyday parlance, this great machine and the demanding and varied talents that it employs are said to be engaged in selling goods. In less ambiguous language, it means that it is engaged in the management of those who buy goods.
8To suggest that this effort has no effect on buyers would mean, Galbraith wrote, that industry was knowingly wasting billions of dollars, increasing prices, and lowering profits, for no purpose at all. He called that idea nonsense.
Galbraith argued that even when advertising doesn’t persuade some individuals to buy specific products, it performs a more general function on behalf of the system as a whole:
Along with bringing demand under substantial control, it provides, in the aggregate, a relentless propaganda on behalf of goods in general. From early morning until late at night, people are informed of the services rendered by goods—of their profound indispensability . . .
The consequence is that while goods become ever more abundant, they do not seem to be any less important. On the contrary, it requires an act of will to imagine that anything else is so important. Morally we agree that the supply of goods is not a measure of human achievement; in fact, we take for granted that it will be so regarded.
9In The Consumer Trap, Michael Dawson argues that advertising has to be understood as part of a much larger marketing process that aims “to make commoners’ off-the-job habits better serve corporate bottom lines.”
Big businesses in the United States now spend well over a trillion dollars a year on marketing. This is double Americans’ combined annual spending on all public and private education, from kindergartens through graduate schools. It also works out to around four thousand dollars a year for each man, woman, and child in the country.
Dawson calls this process a form of “class struggle from above.”
On our side of such struggles, within broad limits—for example, we must eat, drink, and sleep—we have the power to choose what we do with our free time, and we fight to make that time as fulfilling as possible. Meanwhile, big businesses have the power to implant objects, images, messages, and material infrastructures in our off-the-job behavior settings, and, thereby, to influence the choices we make in our personal lives.
10This is not to suggest that we are just helpless victims of all-powerful marketing monsters. It is always possible for some individuals to refuse to be influenced by the marketing process or even opt out entirely from the system it serves. As Galbraith argues, such actions have little effect on the system as such, because demand management aims to influence not individual buyers but masses of people, the entire potential market.
Any individual of will and determination can contract out from its influence. This being so, no case for individual compulsion in the purchase of any product can be established. To all who object there is a natural answer: You are at liberty to leave! Yet there is slight danger that enough people will ever assert their individuality to impair the management of mass behavior.
11Buyers frequently resist being manipulated, and specific advertising campaigns do fail. But by spending a trillion dollars a year on marketing, corporations don’t just promote individual products: they set the terms under which the market operates, define the range of permissible choices, and promote the constant expansion of needs and purchases that their profits depend on. They wouldn’t spend the money if it wasn’t working.
Hiding the facts
The concept of consumer sovereignty also rests on the assumption that consumers know everything relevant about the products they might buy and so can make informed and rational buying decisions.
Of course, that’s nonsense. Every part of the capitalist market is characterized by “information asymmetry”—the sellers have far more information than the buyers. Indeed, although economists rarely admit this, sellers routinely conceal important information from buyers.
In the United States during World War II, for example, price controls created a strong incentive for corporations to reduce the quality of food products in order to keep their profits up. When consumer groups campaigned for a simple A-B-C quality labeling system to allow comparisons of canned foods, the National Canners Association accused them of waging a “war” against brand names “in which our system of private enterprise is at stake.” Congress obediently passed a law forbidding any such mandatory labeling system.
12More recently, North American agribusiness has successfully blocked demands for compulsory labeling of genetically modified foods. No matter what your opinion on GM foods is, it’s obvious that shoppers can’t vote with their wallets if they don’t have the information.
But even labeling can’t guarantee that people know what they are buying. Consider supposedly green products, the goods that consumers who wish to make ecologically responsible choices might buy. A study of the North American market, conducted in 2010 by the environmental consulting company Terrachoice, found 4,744 home and family products that claimed to be “green.” More than 95 percent of those products made misleading or totally false claims about their environmental friendliness. Over 30 percent of the packages featured fake “certified green” labels. The producers of these products were guilty of “greenwashing,” which Terrachoice defines as “the act of misleading consumers about the environmental practices of a company or the environmental benefits of a product or service.” The greenwashed products included 100 percent of the toys studied and over 99 percent of the baby products.
13These are not exceptional cases. The balance of information and persuasion in the consumer goods marketplace is overwhelmingly weighted in favor of sellers and against buyers, for corporations and against consumers.
The throwaway economy
Marketing isn’t just advertising and labeling; it comprises the entire ensemble of measures that corporations take to increase their sales, both absolutely and relative to their competitors. Two particularly destructive forms of marketing are planned obsolescence and throwaway products—the creation of products that are deliberately designed to have short lives and thus to force “overconsumption.”
Capitalist corporations have always tried to introduce products that would drive competitors’ products off the market, but planned obsolescence involves manufacturers’
deliberately making their own products obsolete. The technique was brought to perfection in the mid-twentieth century by the automobile industry, which introduced superficially changed models every year. A 1962 study by three prominent economists concluded that since 1949 the US automobile industry had spent at least $5 billion a year on model changes alone, adding 25 percent to the average price of a car.
14The automobile industry’s success was copied by almost every other corporation. Noted product designer Brooks Stevens explained why in a 1958 interview: “Our whole economy is based on planned obsolescence and everybody who can read without moving his lips should know it by now. We make good products, we induce people to buy them, and then next year we deliberately introduce something that will make those products old fashioned, out of date, obsolete. We do that for the soundest reason: to make money.”
15What Stevens didn’t say is that consumers don’t automatically gravitate to the “new and improved” models. Planned obsolescence works only if coupled with intensive advertising, so it’s no accident that in the United States five of the ten top spenders on advertising are car companies and that the automotive industry as a whole spends more than twice as much on ads as any other industry.
16The most extreme form of planned obsolescence is the throwaway product; it’s been estimated that 80 percent of all products sold in the United States are designed to be used once and then thrown away.
17 The most egregious example is packaging, which has been called “garbage waiting to happen.” In the United States, about 31 percent of all municipal solid waste is containers and packaging. A third of that by weight is paper or cardboard (made from trees) and 12 percent is plastic (made from petroleum). The production of packaging materials uses 3 percent of all US energy consumption.
18In recent decades electronics industries have become masters of planned obsolescence, designing and selling products that can’t be upgraded or repaired and that are replaced by new models within months of introduction. The US Environmental Protection Agency estimates that in 2006–2007, 20.6 million television sets, 157.3 million computers, and 126.3 million cell phones were thrown out.
19 As the Computer TakeBack Campaign argues, this waste allows the electronics industry to offload its costs onto society at large.
Discarded electronic equipment is one of the fastest growing waste streams in the industrialized world, due to the growing sales and rapid obsolescence of these products. Electronic equipment is also one of the largest known sources of heavy metals and organic pollutants in the waste stream. Without effective phase-outs of hazardous chemicals and the development of effective collection, reuse, and recycling systems, highly toxic chemicals found in electronics will continue to contaminate soil and groundwater as well as pollute the air, posing a threat to wildlife and people.
The Computer TakeBack Campaign supports the guiding principle called Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) for post-consumer electronics waste. The objective of EPR is to make brand name manufacturers and distributors financially responsible for their products when they become obsolete . . .
This creates a powerful incentive for manufacturers of electronics to reduce such costs by designing products that are clean, safe, durable, reusable, repairable, upgradable, and easy to disassemble and recycle.
20The corporations that make disposable products are responsible and should bear the cost: that concept is obviously just and could easily be applied to other products than electronics, but populationists don’t see it. All that garbage, they argue, just proves there are too many people. A college-level biology textbook puts it this way: “Humans are not only using up limited resources. We are also damaging air, water, and other renewable resources by polluting them with industrial waste, garbage, and sewage. The more of us there are, the more pollution we generate.”
21The underlying assumption is that industry is just responding efficiently to consumer demands: garbage is inevitable, so the only variable is how many people buy and discard it. The authors ignore the simple fact that between 1960 and 2000, US garbage grew more than three times as fast as the population.
22 Obviously something other than the birth rate is driving the throwaway economy.
The case of the car
In the North, the automobile is usually a family’s second most expensive and least environmentally friendly possession. In 2008, 17 percent of US greenhouse gas emissions came from passenger cars and light trucks,
23 which means that private cars are among the largest contributors to global warming. And that doesn’t include the environmental damage caused by massively subsidized roads, highways, bridges, and parking lots. As a former counsel to the US Senate wrote in a 1974 report: “In terms of high energy consumption, accident rates, contribution to pollution, and displacement of urban amenities . . . motor vehicle travel is possibly the most inefficient method of transportation devised by modern man.”
24It’s not hard to conclude that we should all give up our cars, and books with titles like Divorce Your Car encourage us to do just that. But for most people, living without a car just isn’t an option—not because they are addicted to automobiles but because there are no practical alternatives.
Journalists never tire of pointing to the love of the automobile in the United States. But such “love” is more often than not a kind of desperation in the face of extremely narrow options. The ways in which cars, roads, public transport systems (often notable by their absence), urban centers, suburbs, and malls have been constructed mean that people often have virtually no choice but to drive if they are to work and live.
25The hurricane that devastated New Orleans in 2005 provided a particularly appalling demonstration of how indispensable cars are in America today.
Among the many unpleasant realities exposed by Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath . . . [was] our nearly total dependence on automobiles. Nowhere was this clearer than in the exodus from New Orleans itself. The difference between those who escaped with their lives and loved ones, and those who did not, often came down to access to a car and enough money for gas. Now, in the recovery stage, many of those who were left behind have been evacuated to trailer-park camps, where they are likely to be worse off than they were before, in part because they cannot get to where the jobs are.
26North America’s automobile-intensive society is the product of a deliberate, decades-long campaign by the oil and automobile industries, aided by compliant politicians, to close down or restrict public transit systems, kill passenger trains, pour billions of public dollars into building roads and highways, enforce zoning restrictions, and promote home construction programs that encouraged urban sprawl—and at the same time market the car as the quintessential symbol of success, freedom, and modernity.
The very design of modern cities has imposed car dependency on most people.
While we can choose to buy hybrids or cut down on trips to the grocery store, the hard truth is that, in a suburbanized country, there is only so much Americans can do to reduce their car usage. To make a living, they have to work. And to get to work, the vast majority of Americans have to drive . . .
Two-thirds of residents in metropolitan areas live in the suburbs, and two-thirds of new jobs are located there as well. It’s no surprise that 88 percent of workers drive their cars to their jobs.
27Focusing on “consumer choice” as the cause of car dependency trivializes the issue and makes it harder to find real solutions. The few cities that have reduced automobile use have done so not by lecturing consumers but by investing in improved and affordable public transit and by abandoning the automobile-centric policies that dominate most city planning. Without such changes and more, the automobile will continue its environmentally destructive role.
More than advertising
“An immense amount of effort, including the formation of a vast advertising industry, has been put into influencing and manipulating the wants, needs and desires of human populations to ensure a potential market. But something more than just advertising is involved here. What is required is formation of conditions of daily life that necessitate the absorption of a certain bundle of commodities and services in order to sustain it. Consider, for example, the development of the wants, needs and desires associated with the rise of a suburban lifestyle in the United States after the Second World War. Not only are we talking about the need for cars, gasoline, highways, suburban tract houses and shopping malls, but also lawn mowers, refrigerators, air-conditioners, drapes, furniture (interior and exterior), interior entertainment equipment (the TV) and a whole mass of maintenance systems to keep this daily life going. Daily living in the suburbs required the consumption of at least all of that. The development of suburbia turned these commodities from wants and desires into absolute needs. The perpetual bringing-forth of new needs is a crucial precondition for the continuity of endlessly expanding capital accumulation.”
—David Harvey, The Enigma of Capital
The limits of choice
We are not saying that individual use of goods and services is not implicated in environmental problems. Of course it is—but those activities must be understood in their economic, social, and political context. Simply blaming “consumers” or “consumption” leads to wrong conclusions, and wrong prescriptions for action.
The case of the car illustrates the central problem with the idea that consumer sovereignty drives the economy. Individuals and families can decide which car to buy out of the hundreds of models on sale, but the choice of equally convenient public transit is rarely if ever available. Buyers face a “proffered world of micro-choices, where Ford versus Chevy is a live issue, but cars versus trains is most certainly not.”
28If persuasion and education were all it took to change behavior, the environmental crisis would be easily solved; we have never met anyone who
wants to pollute the earth or generate ever more greenhouse gases. But the hard fact is this:
most people have no real choice. As Kim Humphery writes in his critique of anticonsumerism politics:
More than a few contemporary commentators equate the need to deal with the realities of overconsumption by being overly censorious; diagnosing, chastising or simply lampooning the apparently woeful materialism of the conditioned masses . . .
There is a dire need to re-emphasize within current debates the degree to which, as consumers and workers living in capitalist economies, we are systemically impelled to live, earn, spend, and overspend in certain ways. In terms of economic and social action, our options as subjects of capitalism are limited—and these options differ significantly across the categories of class, gender, race, age, sexuality, and physical and mental ability. We are to varying degrees compelled to work at certain jobs and for given hours, to live in certain types of housing and use particular types of transport, to consume or overconsume various kinds of products and services, to shop in various places, and to map out our life-course in structured ways.
29“Ironically,” Murray Bookchin wrote, “most ordinary people and their families cannot afford to live simply.”
30 For hundreds of millions of people, doing without a car would mean doing without a job, without access to shopping and food, without the ability to take children to recreation and friends.
The areas in which most individuals can easily switch to ecologically responsible products or behavior have limited impact on their lives and on society. As Tim Jackson writes, the biggest problems require social solutions.
It’s clear that changing the social logic of consumption cannot simply be relegated to the realm of individual choice. In spite of a growing desire for change, it’s almost impossible for people to simply choose sustainable lifestyles, however much they’d like to. Even highly-motivated individuals experience conflict as they attempt to escape consumerism. And the chances of extending this behavior across society are negligible without changes in the social structure.
31“In the end,” writes environmental policy professor Thomas Princen, “the idea of consumer sovereignty doesn’t add up. It is a myth convenient for those who would locate responsibility for social and environmental problems on the backs of consumers, absolving those who truly have market power and who write the rules of the game and who benefit the most.”
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