While the anti-globalists’ list of complaints about economic and political exploitation is a long one, the movement’s real venom is reserved for the consumer culture that accompanies it. The reasons for this are fairly clear: The trading policies of Exxon and General Motors may arouse the righteous rage of activists in Seattle and Genoa, but it is the high-profile brands like McDonald’s, MTV, and Coca-Cola that insert themselves into the daily lives of billions of people.⁶⁶ These brand names are the public face of global capitalism, and for many critics, the resistance to their allure lies at the very heart of the struggle for humanity’s soul.

The educated elites have long assumed a critical attitude towards consumer culture. With the rise of the New Left in the 1960s, this attitude was established on firm theoretical foundations: The intellectuals who led this movement against bourgeois society—a mission they undertook after efforts to foment proletarian revolution in the West came up empty—condemned consumer culture as a new and sophisticated form of psychological manipulation that lulls its victims into complaisance. The consumer’s fettered consciousness makes him passive and malleable, they argued, and therefore incapable of fighting oppression and injustice. “The spectacle is the nightmare of imprisoned modern society which ultimately expresses nothing more than its desire to sleep,” wrote Guy Debord, culture critic and French avant-gardist.⁶⁷ This claim was advanced by Herbert Marcuse, a leading figure in the neo-Marxist Frankfurt School:

The means of mass transportation and communication, the commodities of lodging, food, and clothing, the irresistible output of the entertainment and information industry carry with them prescribed attitudes and habits, certain intellectual and emotional reactions which bind the consumers more or less pleasantly to the producers and, through the latter, to the whole. The products indoctrinate and manipulate; they promote a false consciousness which is immune against its falsehood.… Thus emerges a pattern of one-dimensional thought and behavior in which ideas, aspirations, and objectives that, by their content, transcend the established universe of discourse and action are either repelled or reduced to terms of this universe.⁶⁸

The consumerist “false consciousness,” which in the 1960s was still a privilege only the West could afford, was later carried on the wings of globalization to the far reaches of the world. “The same consumer goods and fashions, the same films, television programs, and best-selling music and books spread across the globe,” laments the philosopher Jurgen Habermas. “The same fashions in pop, techno, or jeans seize and shape the mentalities of young people in even the most far-flung places.”⁶⁹ Everywhere, consumerism extends its outstretched arm, devouring everything in its path: Indigenous cultures, local identities, traditional customs, values, and symbols are all sucked into the production lines of global capitalism and repackaged as a product of pseudo-multiculturalism.⁷⁰ But the real result, according to the critics, is the establishment of a homogeneous world civilization under the patronage of behemoth corporations, a cultural hegemony that seeks to subject all of humanity to the same quiet, comfortable, velvety oppression that has had such remarkable success in the West.

The response of the anti-globalists to this imperialism ranges from reservation to violent protest. Some activists have adopted a strategy of “culture jamming,” with the declared aim of putting a spoke in the wheel of the mass-market machine. Much of the time this consists of harmless opposition, such as demonstrations outside McDonald’s restaurants, or putting posters on store windows. On other occasions, activists resort to illegal or destructive methods, from vandalizing billboards to endorsing file-sharing Internet sites that cause inestimable damage to the entertainment industry. The justification for these activists’ activities is their apocalyptic view of events. “We will reframe the battle in the grandest terms,” writes prominent Canadian activist Kalle Lasn. “The old political battles that have consumed humankind during most of the twentieth century—black versus white, Left versus Right, male versus female—will fade into the background. The only battle still worth fighting and winning, the only one that can set us free, is The People versus The Corporate Cool Machine.”⁷¹

This pious anger is not without cause. Critics of consumer society are correct to assail its superficiality, vulgarity, and cheap exhibitionism. Yet criticism of consumer culture is itself tainted by a one-dimensional view of both the nature of culture, in general, and the role consumer culture plays in shaping our political consciousness, in particular.

It is far too easy, for example, to embrace the widespread view of global brand culture as an unstoppable juggernaut, leveling civilizations and cultures that get in its way. Cultures are in fact amazingly resilient, and as attractive as the lure of the foreign may be, the homegrown often has an appeal of its own, which competes with the foreign in a creative fashion. As Indian philosopher and Nobel laureate in economics Amartya Sen remarked: “The culturally fearful often take a very fragile view of each culture and tend to underestimate our ability to learn from elsewhere without being overwhelmed by that experience.”⁷² Exposure to a foreign civilization does not always entail the loss of one’s own; it may even, at times, allow people to rediscover the unique aspects of their identity and deepen their personal and collective links to it.⁷³

Nor is cross-cultural influence a one-way street. The Far East, for example, imports the market economy and the designer-label culture from the West, but it exports to the U.S. and Europe Buddhism, meditation, and the martial arts—which entail values and cultural associations no less profound than those it has imported. Moreover, while one may argue about the value or authenticity of the cultural merchandise being exchanged, there is no doubt that it contributes to the wealth, complexity, and openness of both civilizations. Under the influence of globalization, the chart of human culture is more variegated than ever. The lines on the chart define the constant movement of people, ideas, technology, and capital; dynamic processes of unification and diversification are changing the face of humanity at an unprecedented pace.⁷⁴ The world, writes the well-known anthropologist Clifford Geertz, is “growing both more global and more divided, more thoroughly interconnected and more intricately partitioned at the same time.”⁷⁵

Consumer culture plays a vital role in moving these worldwide processes along. In spite of its tendency toward vulgarity, it shows a remarkable flexibility in adopting and remaking attitudes and fashions. This ability derives from the internal logic of capitalism: In order to avoid market saturation, it is constantly working to create new niches, and consequently to expand the domain in which it exists and flourishes. The free-market system cannot allow itself to stand still, but rather must promote creativity and initiate change.⁷⁶

There is therefore a major fallacy in the claim that consumer culture encourages passivity towards the world. In truth, the opposite is the case. Consumer culture dissolves mental shackles and discourages entrenchment; it strives to stimulate, foment, and energize into action. In many ways, it actually acts as a liberating force.

These effects have been described by philosopher Gilles Lipovetsky in a study devoted to the history of the fashion industry. There he claims that the popularization of fashion—its transformation from a privilege of the upper class to a means of self-expression for the common man—was a decisive contribution to the development of the autonomous individual, and as a result, to the establishment of modern democracy. Fashion, writes Lipovetsky, has “forced individuals to inform themselves, to embrace novelty, to assert subjective preferences: Each individual has become a permanent decision-making center, an open and mobile subject viewed through the kaleidoscope of merchandise.”⁷⁷ For this reason, he continues, “fashion distances us from totalitarianism; it opens up a space of existential choice through the multitude of standards and models it proposes. With generalized fashion, individual autonomy has become an important social phenomenon.”⁷⁸

As Lipovetsky notes, the consumer in a clothing store or supermarket is not a blind automaton, but an alert subject, forced to make decisions on a daily, if not hourly, basis. The need to choose from among various alternatives accustoms the consumer to thinking in a more critical and realistic way.⁷⁹ The possibility of choice is accompanied by a sense of freedom; the individual learns to see himself as an entity with free will, one who can shape his own future. The market mechanisms of the capitalist industry are clearly aware of this feeling, as they pander to and even nurture it. For example, Burger King’s popular slogan, “Have It Your Way,” sends a clear message that although the business is ultimately interested in winning over customers for its own profit, it is committed to achieving this by catering to the customer’s specific tastes—which has the effect of affirming the individual’s awareness of his own right to choose.