Rethinking Consumerism and Politics of Choice

In a very interesting lecture titled Consumerism Is the Perfection of Slavery by Prof. Jiang Xueqin offers a provocative critique of modern capitalist societies by questioning a widely accepted assumption: that consumer choice is synonymous with freedom. Rather than understanding freedom as the ability to choose between products, Jiang argues that consumerism has evolved into a subtle mechanism of control; one that operates not through coercion, but through the internalisation of responsibility, desire, and self-discipline.

This framing provides a useful lens for examining how contemporary systems of governance increasingly shift social and environmental responsibility onto individuals, often obscuring the role of powerful institutions and structural conditions. Across domains such as climate change communication, sustainability discourse, and corporate accountability, consumerist logics have reshaped how responsibility is imagined and distributed. Individuals are encouraged to see themselves as consumers whose moral and political agency is exercised primarily through lifestyle choices, rather than as citizens capable of demanding structural change.

Historically, industrial societies were organised around the figure of the worker, with labour rights, collective bargaining, and welfare forming the basis of social citizenship. However, from the late twentieth century onwards, particularly with the rise of neoliberal economic policies, the consumer replaced the worker as the central subject of economic life. In this shift, identity, responsibility, and even ethics became increasingly mediated through markets. What appears as freedom, the freedom to choose, often conceals deeper constraints shaped by advertising, corporate narratives, and unequal power relations.

This understanding of power resonates strongly with Michel Foucault’s conception of power as productive rather than merely repressive. In Society Must Be Defended, Foucault explains how power functions by shaping norms, behaviours, and subjectivities, making certain ways of living appear natural and inevitable. Consumerism, in this sense, does not force compliance; instead, it encourages individuals to regulate themselves, aligning personal behaviour with broader economic interests.

A striking illustration of this dynamic can be found in the history of the carbon footprint concept. Popularised through advertising campaigns by fossil fuel companies such as BP in the early 2000s, the idea encouraged individuals to calculate and reduce their personal contribution to climate change. While seemingly empowering, critics have argued that this narrative redirected attention away from the structural role of fossil fuel extraction and corporate emissions. Environmental legal organisation ClientEarth challenged BP’s campaign under the OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises, arguing that it misled the public by overstating individual responsibility while downplaying corporate accountability. BP subsequently withdrew the campaign following the complaint.

A similar pattern is visible in global responses to plastic pollution. Companies such as Coca-Cola, consistently ranked among the world’s largest plastic polluters, have long emphasised consumer responsibility through slogans encouraging recycling and “responsible disposal.” Campaigns like World Without Waste frame plastic pollution as a behavioural problem rather than a consequence of large-scale production and packaging choices. In response to growing criticism, policymakers in several jurisdictions have begun to push back against this narrative. The European Union’s Single-Use Plastics Directive and India’s Plastic Waste Management Rules (2022) introduced Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR), legally shifting waste accountability back onto producers rather than consumers.

These illustrative cases demonstrate how consumerism functions as a governing logic: structural problems are reframed as matters of personal responsibility, encouraging individuals to discipline their behaviour while leaving underlying power relations largely intact. As Zygmunt Bauman observes in Consuming Life, even critiques of consumer culture are often absorbed into the market, transformed into lifestyle identities rather than collective challenges to existing systems.

Seen through this lens, consumerism can be understood as what Jiang describes as the “perfection” of control. Unlike earlier forms of domination, it does not rely on force or visible oppression. Instead, it produces subjects who willingly assume responsibility for systemic failures, who experience guilt rather than resistance, and who exercise agency primarily through consumption. Freedom, in this framework, is not abolished,it is carefully redefined.

Taken together, these reflections invite a reconsideration of what freedom means in contemporary societies. This argument is not new, but its persistence suggests how deeply consumerism is embedded in contemporary forms of power. When freedom is exercised primarily through consumer choice, power becomes harder to see and harder to contest. The issue, then, is not simply excessive consumption, but the way responsibility itself is reshaped,quietly shifting from structures to individuals and making domination appear ordinary. Can freedom be imagined beyond the limits set by consumption?