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| 1 Introduction Commodity Activism in Neoliberal Times Sarah Banet-Weiser and Roopali Mukherjee Buying Product RED items—ranging from Gap T-shirts to Apple iPods to Dell computers—means one supports the Global Fund to help eliminate AIDS in Africa. Consuming a “Caring Cup” of coffee at the Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf indicates a commitment to free trade and humane labor practices. Driving a Toyota Prius, likewise, points to the consumer’s vow to help resolve the global oil crisis as well as fight global warming. Purchasing Dove beauty products enables one to participate in the Dove Real Beauty campaign, which encourages consumers to “coproduce” nationwide workshops to help girls and young women tackle problems of low self-esteem, many of which are created by the beauty industry itself, within which Dove has been a significant player. Using their star capital and the force of their celebrity, public figures such as Angelina Jolie, Brad Pitt, and Kanye West launch social activist programs ranging from UN-sponsored humanitarian actions to protesting the global trade in blood diamonds to rebuilding lowincome neighborhoods in hurricane-ravaged New Orleans. All of which is to say that within contemporary culture it is utterly unsurprising to participate in social activism by buying something. This book explores the range of that participation and the contradictions inherent in grafting philanthropy and social action onto merchandising practices, market incentives, and corporate profits. Drawing upon a series of examples, the essays in this volume are dedicated to thinking through the proliferation of these modes of activism within contemporary culture in the US, and the emergence of what we term “commodity activism” in the neoliberal moment, a moment in which realms of culture and society once considered “outside” the official economy are harnessed, reshaped, and made legible in economic terms. Through these explorations, we attempt to understand current struggles over what social activism means, who takes shape as activists in contemporary society, and whom such activism is imagined to serve. 2 | Introduction These shifts indicate, among other things, a powerful turn in the modes and meanings of social activism so that within the contemporary cultural economy in the US, social action, we suggest, may itself be shifting shape into a marketable commodity. As is characteristic of the commodity form— produced through labor for purposes of trade and profit within markets and fetishized in culture—commodity activism, as we encounter it today, offers critical insights into both the promise and the perils of consumer-based modes of resistance as they take shape within the dynamics of neoliberal power. What, we ask, does it mean to “do activism” in a sociocultural context increasingly defined by neoliberal ideas about self-reliance, entrepreneurial individualism, and economic responsibility? In what ways do these discourses shape contemporary conceptions of citizenship and community, of marginality and resistance? What sociohistorical and institutional forces can we trace to historicize the emergence of commodity activism? And what account can we make of the political consequences of civic engagement and action being increasingly defined by the logics of the marketplace? It seems appropriate that a book on shifting forms of social activism should appear at this historical moment, in the midst of renewed laments over the marauding triumph of capital, the decline of heroic social movements , indeed, as some argue, the ethical futility of popular resistance itself. Marked by a new generation of “posts”—postfeminism, postrace, postpolitics —neoliberalism, we are warned, has hastened the “death of civil rights,” the “end of feminism,” the “collapse of the Left.”1 Certainly, social movements and their modes of organizing have witnessed dramatic shifts over the past half century. Thus, we find, for example, radical leaders of the past, iconic figures like Che Guevara and Malcolm X, deployed within mainstream culture as little more than fashion statements. Likewise, we find the resistance strategies of historic social movements co-opted into tactics of “brand aid” and “shopping for change” campaigns led, with little hint of irony, by corporations , corporate philanthropies, and media celebrities.2 As the tactics of social and political critique then, appear to survive as little more than diverting spectacles, neither mainstream nor leftist approaches to activism seem to escape the paradigmatic force of neoliberal capital. The proliferation of commodity activism, in other words, serves as a trenchant reminder that there is no “outside” to the logics of contemporary capitalism, that resistance, to indulge the popular cultural refrain, has, perhaps, become futile. We may, on the one hand, characterize these forms of commodity activism...

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