The ethics of capitalist consumption have plagued us poor capitalist consumers for at least as long as that system has prevailed. In Capitalism and Slavery, Eric Williams detailed the moral appeals made by the original free-traders against the ghastly Caribbean sugar monopoly. Abolitionists in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century attempted to boycott goods produced by enslaved labor, agitating for “free produce.” In the twentieth century, the International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union urged buyers to “look for the union label” in what became an iconic jingle. But over the past 40 years, as world capitalism shook off its last rival, bosses appropriated the idea of ethical consumption, too. These days, ethical impact is first and foremost a branding tool. Unwilling to compete on prices or quality in an era of globalization and commodity gluts, producers rely on advertising instead, and conscious marketing has become standard operating procedure, especially for direct-to-consumer brands that cut out the retail middlemen.
The triumph of Margaret Thatcher’s neoliberal slogan that “There is no alternative” (as in, to market policies and government austerity) — commonly known by the acronym TINA — has yielded a corresponding left-wing truism: “there is no ethical consumption under capitalism” or “TINECUC.” As a retort, TINECUC works on capitalists whether they’re using morality to hawk shoes or alleging hypocrisy when they see a communist holding an iPhone. And it works among fellow anti-capitalists who demand collective adherence to rarified purchasing patterns. If TINECUC, then there’s no ethical reason to forego a pandemic Hawaiian vacation or to buy the optional carbon offsets. As a result, most anti-capitalists currently understand consumption to be strictly personal: politicizing consumption only serves to marginalize leftists as picky eaters within mainstream society and welcomes capitalism’s salespeople at the same time. Better to insulate consumption from accountability than to set ourselves up to be played by marketers and bad-faith fellow leftists who see litigating consumption choices as an easy way to jockey for power, prestige, attention, or even money itself.
Adherence to TINECUC allows organizers to focus on building solidarity between workers or community members rather than buyers, whose common interests may be superficial. It is also, in a world system of production based on exploitation, a factually true statement, insofar as no purchase of anything made with exploited labor has any business branding itself “ethical.” But the unexamined phrase isn’t worth using; before people start attributing TINECUC to Marx or Lenin, we should figure out how Sandinista beans turned into Starbucks — and how anti-consumerist politics fell out of fashion on the American left.