ABSTRACT
Perhaps most importantly, we then draw out some of the ethical implications of consumerism and consumer culture, based on a revision of earlier chapters, and make it explicit here. Throughout each chapter there is a morally ambivalent tone, suggesting that our consumer practices are constant negotiations with our wants, desires or needs and the forces that coerce us. But equally, within these negotiations I assume that there is guilt, not just for selfish personal reasons of over-expenditure or
lack of restraint, but concerning our duties to others and to the environment. Is there such a thing as ‘ethical consumerism’, or is this an oxymoron, like ‘huge dwarf’ or ‘brave coward’? The counterculture has always protested against excessive consumerism, bemoaning the effects of excessive waste and greed on the environment. Riding on this discussion is the final, concluding and contentious observation: that the counterculture has now become consumer culture. Any alternative lifestyle or anticonsumerist ethic has become co-opted, been branded, marketed and sold back to us. This is the thesis of Heath and Potter (2005), and perhaps will leave a slightly nasty taste in the mouth in the last few pages. Although not a novel thesis, it is worth considering here since it revisits the contested ‘terrain of culture’ that Gramsci (1971) and Hall (1989) describe. Thus the idea of the counterculture itself becomes oxymoronic, for no real countering is being achieved, only more consumption.
