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Social activism in an age of consumption: the organized consumer movement

What is the meaning of social activism in an age of consumption? The term ‘consumer society’ usually invokes that which is being reacted to – or rebelled against – than that which is being fought for. In a literature very much inspired by the political and cultural turmoil of the 1960s and, most particularly, by the events of May 1968, consumer society is more often regarded as the cause of, rather than the cure for, society’s ills. On the one hand, the 1960s inspired a range of new engagements with consumer society, many of which have become canonical texts in consumption studies. Works such as Debord’s Society of the Spectacle and Baudrillard’s exploration of the self-referential chains of signification have inspired a focus on ‘sign values’ as the main feature of modern consumer culture. In the society of the image, it seemed that the only means of demonstrating political agency was to play with these images – to throw back on consumer society its own projections and thus, hopefully, demonstrate the contradictions of capitalism. Here was an analysis that coalesced with many of the central concerns of an emerging discipline of cultural studies, not least that of the Birmingham School’s focus on ritual and the negotiation and appropriation of, as well as the resistance to, the meanings held by objects. Later, it wove seamlessly into the emphasis on bricolage and moments of poiësis (active re-creation) found in de Certeau’s analysis of people’s engagement with consumption. Rather than being exploited or manipulated in the world of goods and images, consumers, it