ILLUSTRATIVE OPPOSITION
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to the social sphere where they feel they can at least exercise some control
over their lives.1
Second, activists often neglect the political sphere because, estranged
from their political identities, they identify primarily as consumers. The
emergence of post-war consumer society gave rise to a generation of
Americans who identified themselves through their consumption patterns. For
instance, within the ecology movement, activists often identify more as
consumers and technology ‘users’ than they do as political citizens. As a result,
they tend to express resistance in the form of consumer activism by attempting
to select, produce, or boycott particular commodities to establish congruence
between their personal and political values. In this way, political power is
reduced to buying power’ as activists focus on questions of production and
consumption rather than on trying to regain the political agency to determine
what and how their community should produce.
For these two reasons—a politics reduced to statecraft and a political
identity reduced to
a
consumer identity—activists tend to
frame
their
opposition within social, rather than explicitly political terms. Within the social
sphere, they feel empowered to make qualitative personal and social changes
by improving the quality of their relationships with friends and family,
improving schools and churches, or by creating economic alternatives such as
coops or systems of community currency or barter.
What is more, activists
often unlmowingly conflate social action with political action. Working to
create social change within the domains of sexuality, spirituality, education,
economics, and health care, they refer to this work as ‘political’, rather than
social, as a way to emphasize the importance of the particular issue at hand or
the necessity of changing public policy related to the issue.
For instance, members of such social organizations as Earth First* or
Greenpeace are often referred to as ‘political’ organizations. Yet all members,
from financial supporters to grassroots activists who participate in local and
global campaigns,
exist within a distinctly social,
rather than political,
relationship to one another. Again, political activity is that which takes place
within the public sphere as citizens come together to discuss, debate, and
determine the public policy that shapes their lives as members of a town,
village, or city. Greenpeace, then, does not engage in politics in the literal
sense. Instead, they wield crucial social contestation to state and corporate
policy.
Social change is, indeed, crucial but without an actual transformation of
political practice, we will never .be in the position to actually determine the
very economic, social, and ecological policies for which we are fighting.
Instead, we will always be treated as children incapable of making our own
decisions, forever appealing to the authority of parental representatives to do