Having your anti-consumerist cake in a capitalist world

We’re in an era of growing awareness of the environmental impact of a global economy based on excessive consumption, which has recently led to something of a renaissance of an anti-consumption movement. With the global economy in such an uncertain state, it all reminds me of a quote variously attributed to GK Chesterton or the evangelist Fulton J Sheen: “There are two ways to get enough: one is to accumulate more, and the other is to desire less.”

I say the renaissance (rather than emergence) of anti-consumerism because anti-consumption has been around for millennia, with all major religious figures promoting it typically in the form of anti-materialism. As a philosophical movement it seems to come in peaks and troughs, gaining traction in times of recession (when large groups of people find solace in anti-consumption as a framework for living) until the economy picks up again and most people get swept up in ‘progress’.

As a movement, if you could call it that, it is now more relevant than ever given that climate change is a direct result of more than 200 years of mass consumption. Our consumption has been particularly excessive in the last 50 years, with much of the global economy dependent on it, with industries driven by their ‘need’ to prioritise their shareholders over the planet. Add to this the growing middle class in Asia and South America, and India and China wanting to consume like the west did since the 1950s.

But can we have our capitalist cake and eat it too? The long-term answer is probably not, but the short-term answer is that every generation tries to. It is a valid stance to be anti-consumption and a consumer at the same time.

You could, for instance, be ‘against’ Starbucks for some very specific reasons, but you could also be ‘pro’ consuming at your local café. A vegan may be against buying and eating meat, but for buying and eating tofu. Once people realise having anti-consumption sentiment does not preclude them from consumption, that they are not being hypocritical, the concept makes more sense.

People define themselves through the products they buy, the lifestyles they lead. It may seem paradoxical that people would want to define and consciously brand themselves as anti-consumerist. After studying anti-consumerism for several decades I have concluded that people are always looking for meaning and a sense of belonging.

Being anti-consumerist is one way to achieve these things, just as consumerism may provide meaning and a sense of belonging for another.

For some buying Nike products might be part of their ‘identity project’ and belonging to a ‘brand community’. But equally valid are people who find meaning or purpose and identity by rejecting Nike – sometimes very publicly. It’s a way of branding oneself. Just as the Holden vs Ford rivalry or the Man Utd vs Man City rivalry, people’s identities are formed as much from their opposition to the rival ‘brand’, as their loyalty to their own.

Yes, anti-consumption could and has been described as ‘virtue-signalling’, but normally it’s considerably easier to virtue signal through consuming than not consuming. However, ironically, some anti-consumerist movements can and have been co-opted for commercial reasons. If I know there are enough people who are against BP but probably not committed enough to protest on a petrol station forecourt, I might be able to persuade them to buy T-shirts that parody (‘culture jamming’) the BP brand. There is no shortage of such material. (Or, you could argue, anti-consumerist capitalism in action.)

At its core, anti-consumerism usually needs to be deliberate rather than because you’re not able to buy something for financial reasons. A person who claims they would never buy a Tesla because they are opposed to the politics of Elon Musk, but could not really afford one anyway, shouldn’t really be considered an anti-consumer of Tesla in the strictest sense.

Yet a person who can’t afford the Tesla, can still be against the Tesla brand, and make their feelings known. For instance, they might not be able to afford to buy the car, but they could probably buy an anti-Tesla sticker or T-shirt. This then creates a social milieu in which it becomes less fashionable to drive a Tesla.

That was a branding problem McDonald’s had to deal with a few decades ago. It wasn’t that its fans did not like McDonald’s, but people didn’t want to be seen buying its products in front of growing opposition to a company that had become emblematic of our ‘obesogenic environment’. So McDonald’s introduced salads, which no one really buys from McDonald’s, but does signal that the company offers ‘healthy’ options, which means the brand is not really that bad after all.

Can anti-consumerism be harnessed, for genuine good? At a corporate level, we already see this happening in response to boycotts, which are a form of anti-consumerism that promise a return to consumption once certain conditions (usually prosocial) are met.

At a country level, trade sanctions are governments’ approach to try to force other countries to do the ‘right’ thing. Whereas tariffs, such as those of the Trump administration, promote anti-consumption of imports in favour of domestic goods.

Whether they work or not varies. Some companies do it very well and arguably quite authentically, for example Patagonia. But yes, it is hard to separate the wheat from the chaff, particularly for most consumers, who don’t have the time to research every single purchase. This is where third-party certifications, such as B-corp, come in handy, but even they aren’t perfect. And in a final irony, even these ‘ethical certifiers’ need to market and promote the ‘consumption’ of their brands too.

This article was adapted from ‘Exploring the phenomenon of anti-consumption’, a chapter Professor Mike Lee wrote for The Routledge Companion to Marketing and Sustainability