The influence we can wield as consumers is ineffectual against the systemic a-morality of unrestrained capitalism, as it reframes ethical decision-making in terms of market exchange when it is precisely the opposite that should be occurring. That is not to say that consumers should not be aware of what they consume, that they should not research them, but all this extensive research for the minutiae of every small transaction becomes far too taxing on one’s time and energy and only further entrenches the capitalist frame.
Consider the case of meat consumption and the mega-industry of factory farming. A number of years ago now public awareness and outrage was raised against the deplorable and indefensible industry practices employed largely in the United States but also to lesser degrees in Canada and in Europe. The meat industry went to work trying to limit the damage and recover its image, while there were calls for consumers to buy from local producers whose practices they could verify or to start making the transition to Veganism. Notably there was no significant political action taken, just a shrug and vague hand waving about how the market would correct itself. In fact, all of the market corrections merely serve the interests of capital: the public needs further education (good business for documentary filmmakers and lifestyle bloggers), consumers need better labeling for their food (simply different brands owned by the same factory farms, with the benefit of engendering consumer brand loyalty via their association with ‘ethical’ practices), more people should look at alternative lifestyles (yielding to more imported exotic foods, premium pricing and food-adjacent products), while those who don’t have the mental energy to engage in such concerns can buy the same old ‘reasonable’ prices they have ‘come to love’ (business as usual). Everyone wins! Except the extent to which material change is effected as concerns the ethical treatment of animals is minimal at best, and over time declines to zero as the producers discover more ingenious ways to both hide their transgressions and keep the public disinterested beyond a superficial reassurance. Years on from the outcry and supposed corrective actions, factory farming practices have been quietly blossoming in the Western world, only the industry has become better at keeping things quiet for the time being. And the entire cycle of the revelation of gross mistreatment in the meat industry, of public outcry, of at best a temporary change and then a gradual slide back to business as usual has been repeated throughout the 20th century, dating back at least to the turn of the century when Upton Sinclair exposed the deplorable practices of the meatpacking industry in The Jungle (Edgerton, 2006).
Just as bad as the ineffectiveness of the exposure, outcry, shame cycle and its nature as performative spectacle is its reliance on capitalist values as the bedrock of its ethical praxis. Vote with your wallets the public is told, but dollars are not evenly distributed among the citizenry. Social hierarchy is reinforced, with each consumer choosing the level of ethics they are comfortable with. This is no way to end slavery, or to free Bangladeshis from their economic hole; it can only perpetuate the status quo.
Opting out of the system may absolve one’s conscience, but it does little to effect material change. Why is the reaction to the revelation of a sporting goods manufacturer’s exploitation of labour in the poor world met with calls for voluntary public boycotts of their products rather than government oversight and restriction on their practices? What if we demanded that our governments ban the sale of any goods produced unethically, with an ethics decided by a (gasp!) democratic process? If a company wanted in on our market, they would need to adhere to our values. Then we wouldn’t be relying on the perpetually distracted attentions of fickle consumers to individually discern a corporation’s falsehoods from its facts and hoping that enough of them made a good decision to effect a change and continued to make a good decision in the face of changing conditions (but we need this new product) and new (dis)information as corporations up their arsenal in the propaganda arms race. Then we might actually have a chance of effecting real material change. That such an option seems like a non-option speaks to the degree to which capitalism has been permitted to run amok, with multinational corporations evolving into a fearsome super-predator on the world stage that governments no longer dare to cross.
Appeals to more extreme lifestyles will not work because they cannot reach a sufficiently large sector of the populace and because they themselves will be subverted by capitalism. On promoting veganism as a solution to unethical treatment of animals: such a movement is unlikely to significantly penetrate the population except over multiple generations, and even if so would be at risk of backlash or relapse in the general culture. Further, even in a scenario where animals are not exploited for food, this says nothing of the devastation of rare and crucial ecosystems and of the exploitation of human labour to satisfy the animal-cruelty free consumer-public. Capitalism doesn’t care if precious water reserves are redirected from at-risk ecosystems to enable growing more almonds for demanding and affluent consumers who uncritically consume their products safe in the knowledge that no animals were harmed in the process (except of course the ones that were critically endangered but never mentioned from that redirected water). It doesn’t care if rainforests are abolished to make way for more coconut trees or if humans are exploited inhumanely so long as it serves the profit motive. Proponents of veganism and others concerned with ethics in agriculture do need to work on public perceptions, but the consumer is not the battleground, the voter is. There needs to be a push for real change at the level of governmental oversight.
There’s a troubling a-politicism to ethical concerns, an altogether unseemly ease with which ethical issues slot comfortably into identity politics which themselves are so easily packaged and sold as commodities. Being ethical becomes individuated, a set of floating signifiers that the more well-to-do can afford. Ethics is privatised, no collective decision is made on free-range chickens as opposed to those imprisoned in battery cages, or on the rights of farmers to receive fair wages for coffee beans. These are all just sets of "feel-good" decisions that one can add to one's shopping cart provided one can pay the price. Even as “evil” corporations are condemned, the framework that enables their actions and indeed in many cases ‘forces their hand’ is at best treated with kid gloves, but mostly not touched upon at all.
There’s an accusation that governmental oversight is clumsy, ineffective and prone to corruption. While this is informed in part by the bureaucratic failures of the past, it is also partly the result of a long and persistent slandering campaign to discredit public institutions of power so as to free economics from their auspices. It’s true that on their own governments are often unable to properly hold companies to account, but a system where both the government and the press are working to hold companies accountable and where the press is also on the government’s case is surely preferable to one where a beleaguered and belittled press is left to do all of the work and struggle to package and sell its findings to a distracted public. The legal system and the free press are not perfect, that’s not the point, they’re just better than unfettered free markets.
References
Edgerton, D. (2006) The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History Since 1900. London: Profile Books Ltd.
Streeck, W. (2016) How Will Capitalism End?: Essays on a Failing System. London: Verso.
Varoufakis, Y. (2018) Is Capitalism Devouring Democracy? [Lecture]. Cambridge Forum. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gGeevtdp1WQ (Accessed: 29 August 2018)
