Against Libertarianism II: Consumption and Choice

Capitalism's ever-intensifying imposition of alienation at all levels makes it increasingly hard for workers to recognize and name their own impoverishment, and eventually puts them in the position of having either to reject it in its totality or to do nothing at all...

Guy Debord - La Société du Spectacle (Paris 1967)


Much ado is often made within libertarian circles, and generally among liberals in the capitalist nations, of how the choices of private citizens in their consumption patterns reflect not only an economical decision, but also a moral imprimatur. The reasoning is that when for example a given corporation uses unethical labor methods in Third World nations to make its products cheaper for consumers on the Western markets, people would stop buying those products if they really considered those methods evil. In this way, the ideologues of the laissez-faire argue, even issues such as morality can be left to market forces, with each choosing for themselves the transactions he or she feels are morally acceptable.

This reasoning, however, when confronted with the real functioning of capitalist systems in the Western nations, falls flat on its face. Primarily, the argument that the products of given corporations and the methods and identity of those corporations can be conflated is erroneous. We all know that people like to own things, and that in the modern society services and things are exchangeable among each other, so people also like to own services in that sense. And within the capitalist system the private corporations provide those products and services. But the generalization can go no further than that: when the people buy a given product, it is because they like that product and because that particular seller has that product on offer in a way that makes for a good economic transaction. This does not mean, logically, that the people involved need say anything about the way the product got there or what kind of corporation it is, or even why they bought the product. All that happens during such a transaction is that people indicate a liking of a particular good at a particular price. Anything else is illusion.

A different argument that is used is that people would use the market process in the capitalist system in a way analogous to voting in a liberal democracy, the so-called "voting with your wallet". Unfortunately this analogy is false. The core difference between the buying of a product and the voting for a candidate (or party) rests in the kind of statement it makes. During election times, the people vote on specific platforms, without this entailing anything else than an indication of which platform they like more than the other. In that sense, it is a quintessentially political decision. But when people buy goods, they do not make such a decision, since they are not giving a yes-or-no approval nor a choice between independent platforms, but instead they are making an exchange, a transaction. That is the essential difference: when you vote, you make an independent moral statement. When you buy, you give something and get something in return, and you decide whether or not you consider it a good deal. The one is a political choice, the other is an economic one.

What makes this analogy so dangerous is that it has all kinds of political implications. When people are inclined to believe that their political system is free (or at least free enough to their liking), and the capitalist market choice is associated with this freedom, they will be inclined to favor it despite the fact that they do not necessarily approve of the process or its results. After all, this is what one sees in indirect democracies as well: you vote, but that does not seem to have any substantial effect on the policies made. Since the citizens get used to this, they will develop a blasé tolerance for the system's disfunctionality and continue to participate in it, much like the citizens of the USSR in its last years. When this participatory apathy is extended to the market system of the capitalist country, and the market process is associated with that stance, the people's resistance to disfunctionality in that part of the experience of life and of the nation will be reduced, to the detriment of the citizens' influence on what happens to them and around them.

Even worse, those who would follow this reasoning with more enthousiasm will be even more misled. Believing that approval of a product at a certain price is equal to, or inherently means, approval of a particular mode of production or sales, will lead one to consider the consumers basically supporters of the current system due to their consumption. And since consumption is to a high degree manipulable (consider marketing, price competition, public relations and so on), this would entail assuming a popular support for whatever economic group or product is powerful or desired at any given moment within the market system. It is necessary to reason that if buying is approving, then a consumption is the equivalent of a vote (as we just saw); and when the demand can be manipulated, then effectively the people's voting patterns can be manipulated, in a similar way as with politicians campaigning; and when that has the desired effect and people indeed do buy a product more when they are pressured or enticed into doing so, they apparently approve also of that pressurizing and that enticement. And, finally, that means that the voting itself as a way of expressing approval is entirely subject to the manipulations process which determines what the people will approve of. As anyone can see, this is a vicious cycle of affecting the popular economic demand and then considering that effect an approval of the methods used to affect it and of its result, completely eradicating the normal meaning of "choice".

In this way do the libertarians seek to mislead themselves and the public. They claim that removing the chains on the corporations' methods and procedures in affecting demand would increase freedom, that is freedom as understood to mean "individual unfettered choice". But the very process that would create an increase of choice for the citizen, which the libertarian removal of regulation surely will, also makes that same choice meaningless, as we have seen above. Where the libertarians increase quantity of choice, they degrade its quality, and where they increase economic freedom, they make it evil: it is a disruptive process that is based on the false assumption that consumption is unfettered choice, and it relies on changes in product demand, the most volatile of all aggregates of individual decisions, to reflect the popular will on issues of ethics, the least volatile of aggregates of individual decisions. Such is a foolishness that would merit no more than an article like this to dismiss, were it not so pervasive.
Posted by Matthijs Krul @ 03:45