In recent years, an increasing number of publications have called into question the boundaries between economic and cultural history by looking at the political, moral, and social dimensions of market transactions and consumer practices. Partly triggered by the intellectual reverberations of the financial crisis of 2008, cultural historians have begun to treat economic questions with renewed interest in order to identify new approaches for a cultural history of modern capitalism. This partly explains the startling return of the term “moral economy” in many recent publications and among many research groups. E.P. Thompson’s concept, coined in his 1971 article analysing eighteenth-century food riots,Footnote 1 has been picked up by numerous scholars of modern and contemporary history who often apply it in a much broader sense than Thompson originally had in mind.
Matthew Anderson and Alexander Sedlmaier both use the term in their latest books, but they refer simultaneously to the obvious challenges of applying Thompson’s terminology to twentieth-century consumer societies. Nevertheless, both authors interpret modern consumerism as one of the key realms in which political and moral controversies are carried out in contemporary societies. It is, therefore, worthwhile to compare the two publications as two recent examples of interpretations of consumer societies as arenas of political, social, and moral dispute.
In the case of Matthew Anderson’s book, the fair trade movement is analysed as one of the most successful attempts to “moralize” consumer societies; in the case of Alexander Sedlmaier’s book, the focus is on more radical and often violent practices of politicizing consumption. Combined, the books provide an inspiring insight into the ways in which protest movements used consumer practices to articulate dissent or outline alternative models of economic interaction.
Anderson’s dissertation is the first comprehensive history of the British fair trade movement. The empirical part of the book consists of four case studies. The first chapter looks at Oxfam as the first institution to implement a “fair trade” concept in the UK (their programme terminated in 2002). The second chapter analyses the role of Christian agencies (such as Christian Aid, CAFOD, and Tearfund) that were crucial in the process of establishing and popularizing “fair trade”. The third chapter describes the ambivalent relationship between the cooperative movement and the “fair trade” movement, and chapter four focuses on the role of the trade unions. In a concluding chapter, Anderson also looks at the processes of market expansion since the early 1990s.
His choice of case studies is enlightening, especially because he does not restrict himself to the success stories of “fair trade”, but looks also at the roads not taken; those were often just as significant for the development of the movement. This is particularly true for the chapters on the cooperative movement and the trade unions. Anderson argues that both were far from being natural allies and often had an agenda of their own that could easily conflict with the main goals of the “fair trade” movement. For example, Anderson shows that the cooperative movement often referred to the expectations and demands of their UK customers, for whom cheaper prices generally trumped fairer wages and better working conditions in the “global south”. Quite similarly, trade unions found themselves torn between national and transnational solidarities. Furthermore, the unions pointed out that in their view “fair trade” often did not represent their idea of “global labour rights” – not only in the “global south”, but also in the case of many “fair trade” institutions in the UK.
While Anderson’s case studies are immensely rich and well argued, the general argument of the book appears a bit restrained. His key argument is that “fair trade” cannot be interpreted solely as a market-driven phenomenon that relied on the emergence of new consumer demands. Instead, Anderson rightly points to the important role of NGOs and other social movements, who “successfully began to integrate political consumerism within [their] international development campaigns” (p. 1) and thereby created these new consumer markets in the first place. This is undoubtedly true and an important argument against many of the studies in the field of economics and social studies which tend to exclusively interpret “fair trade” as a market phenomenon. This is only partly convincing for the present and certainly not convincing at all for the time before fair trade certificates were introduced in the early 1990s. Here, Anderson’s compelling introduction is a much welcome counterpoint.
But, especially if one agrees with Anderson on the predominant importance of NGOs and “alternative trade organizations”, one would have liked to learn more about the internal debates and controversies that accompanied this transformation of a social movement into a market-driven niche of modern mass consumption. For the German case, for example, scholarship has shown that the movement initially started out as a political project to “raise awareness” (rather than to “raise money”) and it was transformed into a market-oriented alternative business project only after fierce debates. Here, further research will need to explore whether the British “fair trade” movement went through similar processes of de-politicization and a readjustment of its campaign strategies.
While Anderson’s book can quite easily be read as the historical background to current developments, Sedlmaier’s book traces some of the more problematic historical lines of moral and/or political protest against consumption and consumer societies. By looking at West Germany from the late 1960s until the early 1990s, he poses the intriguing question of how left-wing criticism of mass consumption intertwined with practices of political violence. His argument is based on a well-known incident: the arson attacks on two department stores in Frankfurt in April 1968, which is today interpreted as a key incident in the pre-history of the Red Army Faction (RAF). Sedlmaier argues that the fact that the first assault of the later RAF activists Andreas Baader and Gudrun Ensslin and others was directed against a key symbol of modern consumer society was not coincidental and demonstrates how critiques of consumer society and practices of violence were often inextricably intertwined – either because consumer protests regularly spurred violent action, or because – as in the case of Ulrike Meinhof – the use of violence was legitimized as a means of resistance to a capitalist consumer society.
In chapters 1–3, Sedlmaier looks first at the Frankfurt arson attacks in close detail, then shifts his attention to Herbert Marcuse, whose work on mass consumption was the most important reference for left-wing criticism of the consumer society, and finally to Ulrike Meinhof’s preoccupation with consumption, especially in her text “The masses and consumption”, in which she attempted to legitimate the violence of the RAF by denouncing the consumer society as an intrinsically destructive system. Through these different angles, Sedlmaier shows that radical criticism of mass consumption was a key ingredient of 1960s left-wing thinking. This is outlined very persuasively even though one might add the obvious fact that such resentment towards consumption was by no means specific to the radical left: on the contrary, mass consumption was a topic that united moderate leftists, liberals, conservatives, and Christian authors alike. The question is therefore: Why and in what circumstances did such positions trigger such fierce sentiments that they would lead to open acts of violence?
The following three chapters try to answer this question by considering different case studies from the late 1960s to the late 1980s. Chapter four looks at the protests against increasing public transport fares in Hamburg, Hanover, Frankfurt, and other cities in the late 1960s, chapter five at the protests against a presumed media monopoly of the “Springer Publishing House”, and chapter 6 at the violent protests that ensued in the squatter movement of the 1980s. In a concluding chapter, the author argues that the connection between consumption and violence partly continued into the global solidarity campaigns and anti-globalization protests of the 1980s and 1990s.
The case studies offer strong evidence for Sedlmaier’s argument that the realm of consumption was a key area of violent protest in West Germany. At some points, this reviewer was not completely convinced that the connection between consumption and violence was as pivotal as the author suggests. The case of the public transport fare protests, for example, seems rather to show how a radical faction on the left tried to hijack an existing protest movement for their own agenda. And in the case of the “Springer” campaign, one could ask whether this was in essence really a consumer protest. Nevertheless, Sedlmaier reminds us that the realm of consumption was not only an object of theoretical discourse and peaceful attempts at market transformation, but also of radical protests and violent action, both from left-wing activists and from the state reacting to these challenges.
At first sight, both books follow very different scripts. But reading them as two case studies of how consumption became contested terrain in the decades following the 1960s proves extremely stimulating. While Anderson shows that today’s practices of “ethical consumerism” are the product of a long tradition of attaching moral meaning to everyday items, Sedlmaier reminds us that these developments of “moralizing consumption” were not always as peaceful as today’s “fair trade” iconography suggests.
It would be most useful therefore if future research could integrate both perspectives. On the one hand, this would indicate a more transnational approach to these topics. The fact that Anderson’s book looks at the UK and Sedlmaier’s at West Germany should not necessarily be taken as proof of the assumption that a more radical and violent approach towards consumer society was a genuine feature of West Germany. On the other hand, scholars should question the dichotomy of peaceful and pragmatic market approaches in the realm of “ethical consumerism” on the one hand and radical protest against capitalist “regimes of provision” on the other. This would mean relocating fair trade in its tradition of the more racial and politicized approaches of the 1970s and 1980s, and it would also point to the ways in which radical protests evolved into alternative business models, as in the case of the squatter movement, in which occupied spaces were gradually transformed into alternative cultural or accommodation projects. Combining both perspectives will be an important next step for analysing consumer patterns and their moral and political significance in the second half of the twentieth century.
