Indulgences and The Consumer Imaginary

Heads you vote, tails you buy.

Capitalism is what is left when beliefs have collapsed at the level of ritual or symbolic elaboration, and all that is left is the consumer-spectator, trudging through the ruins and the relics. –Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism

We can learn resilience and resistance to colonial-capitalist modes of hyperextraction by entering into better relations with our own histories and our own responsibilities in the present. –Siobhan Angus, Camera Geologica: An Elemental History of Photography

In Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life, Karen E. Fields and Barbara J. Fields describe ideology as “the descriptive vocabulary of day-to-day existence through which people make rough sense of the social reality that they live and create from day to day.” Here, the Fields refer to what they describe as the “invisible ontology” of racecraft in America: While race does not exist, racism does; it is racial ideology that fills that gap to form a coherent, comprehensive system of understanding and belief. “As such,” they note, “ideologies are not delusions, but real”.

That definition of ideology provides a useful framework for considering another invisible ontology, the “consumer imaginary”, i.e. a set of lenses through which we, as subjects of and participants in consumer capitalism, make sense of and interact with the world around us. This ideology results from the near-complete commodification of our lives, which has reduced our interaction with the world to a figurative coin flip – heads, you vote, tails you buy – and helps explain why, in reaching for solutions, we are unable to see beyond the role of Fisher’s “consumer-spectator”.

As in the case of racial ideology, there is a gap between the social reality and reality, as-is: The consumer imaginary at once disempowers the individual, yet makes them feel empowered; it imbues them with the potential to bend their minds, their bodies and the world around them to their will – as long as they have sufficient cash or credit. 

The consumer imaginary manifests in many forms; in the context of climate and the environment, for example, it ranges from fever dreams about billionaires and batteries, to liberal solutionism based on “better choices”. The question remains, however: Do individual consumer actions play a role in solving large-scale, system problems? The short answer is no; the long answer is also no. 

To hedge a little, this being the Internet and all: It is a Good Thing to do Good Things. As noted in my previous essay, “we each determine the moral calculus behind our choices” because “we all have to sleep at night”. In this sense, if certain consumer or lifestyle decisions align with your values, that is a Good Thing, in my view.

To provide a personal example, for months now, I’ve been buying Palestinian olive oil; doing so does not help end the genocide, dismantle Israeli apartheid and occupation, or support Palestinian resistance; it does, however, provide me with some sense of moral relief, with the feeling of doing something material – in addition to writing, attending protests, supporting crowdfunding campaigns, and so on.  

All that to say, the things we do as individual consumers can matter – but not in the ways that the ideology of consumerism would have us believe. Take recycling, for instance; in Discard Studies: Wasting, Systems, and Power, Max Liboiron and Josh Lepawsky argue that consumer recycling maintains its “good and green reputation” to allow for the “production of disposables – that is, recycling as currently practiced enables waste and wasting”. Consumers do not produce this waste; rather, they are waypoints for products that have been designed to be wasted.¹

The writers make clear, however, that “this doesn’t mean recycling is a useless practice; but what recycling is for is not necessarily saving raw materials or conserving the environment”. Later, Liboiron and Lepawsky make a similar point about food waste, citing a study of on-farm food loss in California, which concludes that about one-third of yields are lost at the production stage. In this context, consumer composting or conservation efforts have no effect on upstream waste – although, as the authors again make clear, they “might matter in other ways”.

My concern, then, is not with atomized consumer action, per se, but with magical thinking – i.e. the idea that consuming or avoiding this or that product can “make a difference” in the big picture. The issue, in a word, is scale.

Consider plastics. A recent assessment of phthalates (PAEs) and bisphenol A (BPA) notes that these compounds, widely used in the production of plastic, are considered “endocrine-disruptive chemicals” and “cause substantial harm to humans”. According to the authors, the toxicological effects include cardiovascular disease, cancer, diabetes, early-onset puberty and menopause, infertility and birth defects.

This and other studies show that populations all over the world face harmful levels of exposure to these compounds: BPA, for instance, has been found in 91-98% of people in numerous “developed” nations,² and at comparable levels in the United States, Jamaica, and Ghana³. These findings speak to the ubiquitousness of chemicals like PAEs and BPA, (especially given that the latter, in particular, cycles out of the body quickly). 

Research on microplastics reveals similar circumstances: Plastic is collecting in our lungs, livers, kidneys, reproductive organs, bone marrow – and, as a recent study demonstrates, brains. As it turns out, microplastics are also omnipresent, found everywhere from freshly fallen snow in Antarctica to the ocean floor. In this way, plastic and its compounds have effectively become a form of ambient environmental pollution, an “added ingredient” in the water, air and soil, one that lasts forever and accumulates in plant and animal life.

The point, then: You can avoid plastic, but you can’t avoid plastic.⁴ Consumer action represents, in the words of Max Liboiron, a “scalar mismatch” – i.e. the problem and the solution do not occur at commensurate levels. “Avoidance, consumer choice, and technological fixes” the writer notes, “respond to scales that miss one crucial relationship in plastic pollution: production.”⁵

Speaking of: The manufacture of plastic shows no signs of slowing. Global production grew by 2.0% in 2023 compared to the previous year, and again by 2.8% in the first quarter of 2024. In its baseline scenario, an OECD report predicts that global plastics use will triple by 2060, with the majority of growth taking place in Sub-Saharan Africa and Asia. As is the case with meat, consumer choices in high-income countries will have little effect on global production or consumption. ⁶

At this point, there is no opting out – and not just for plastics. You may avoid shopping on Amazon, for instance; you may not know that Amazon Web Services provides the infrastructure for much of the Internet, everything from streaming platforms like Netflix, to Apple, to the CIA. You pay some form of taxes, which, depending on where you live, funds the weapons industry, the prison-industrial complex, the oil and gas sector, and so on. (Worth mentioning: US imperialism, via its military, is one of the largest polluters in the world.) In the Americas, even small-scale agriculture or the settler fantasy of “off-the-grid” living must, in an honest moral inventory, contend with the implications of land theft and displacement (i.e. colonization). 

Still reading?

By now, you might feel some frustration or overwhelm, maybe an urge to throw your up hands and shout, “Well, what the hell am I supposed to do, Writer Guy?!” Let me reiterate: Your choices do matter, if not in the ways you might believe. Again, it is a Good Thing to do Good Things.

And this essay is not is not a call to inaction – or to a kind of fatalistic, “smoke ‘em if you got ‘em” consumer hedonism; as Sarah Thankam Mathews writes, to “choose nihilism is to participate in the continued colonization of the future”.

What this is, I suppose, is a reality check. For, if we fail to set aside the magical thinking of the consumer imaginary, our efforts essentially amount to modern-day “indulgences”, i.e. a way for those of us with the means and ability to assuage our guilt (or, more accurately, the legitimate feelings that our culture pathologizes as “guilt”). Not to mention, an excuse to revel in what I call The Game of Most Righteous Consumer; that is, a sort of presumed innocence, elevated to high-horsery. And that’s just annoying as hell.

In the end, it turns out that Margaret Thatcher was wrong: There is such thing as society. Once we accept truly accept this, we can get down to work – or, better stated, join those already doing so.⁷

1. As the authors note, this took some doing: “consumerism and disposability […] had to be accompanied by massive efforts by producers and their allies to teach people how to waste, particularly given existing cultures where people valued frugality, making do, and reuse”, p. 51.

2. Canada, the US, Sweden, China, Belgium; cf. Pollution is Colonialism, p. 86.

3. “Bisphenol A (BPA) Found in Humans and Water in Three Geographic Regions with Distinctly Different Levels of Economic Development”; read the study here.

4. The interim results of an ongoing study by Plastics Europe, for example, challenge the assumption that consumer food packaging is the source of ingested microplastics.

5.  Pollution is Colonialism, p. 101.

6. The OECD-FAO predicts that the annual global production of meat will go up by 44 megatonnes by 2030, for a total of 373 megatonnes. The rise of vegan and vegetarian diets in high-income countries, the report notes, will “hardly affect meat consumption over the next decade”.

7. Choose your fighter, e.g. indigenous resistance, environmental and climate activists, labour organizers, anarchists, Marxists, socialists, people fighting for gay and queer and trans and non-binary liberation, migrant rights organizations, etc.