ABSTRACT
Demanding consumers need ways to assess political consumerism. We need to understand the importance of political consumerism as a force in global politics and evaluate its democratic potential. Scholarship on political consumerism has much to teach us. I use this research to compare the differences between political consumerism past and present and to evaluate boycotts and buycotts as political tools. (Micheletti, 2003, p. 17)
The analysis in this chapter carries on from previous chapter, moving to my third framing question of how participants learn to make change through their shopping. I continue to draw on the Gramscian concepts that I have already outlined as well as my conceptualizations of holistic learning, socially embedded consumer-citizenship, and the complications of resistance. In this analysis, I also return to the notion of radicalism and explore the meanings of “radical” and the potential for radicalism in the arena of shopping. Although, as Sparks (1997) establishes, all dissidence involves tension between creating change and maintaining the status quo, shopping-related resistance occupies an especially paradoxical place among social movements. Shopping ful ls the consumerist ideology, but critical shopping introduces protest into hegemonic discourse and practice. Shopping-based resistance is ironic, because it uses a tool of globalization to oppose globalization. In this way, such resistance is able to highlight some of the central dialectical tensions that infuse learning about the politics of globalization, consumption, citizenship, and societal transformation.
