Popular, democratic control of the GND allows refashioning state policies to direct consumption in ecologically sustainable ways

(Dean Snyder is assistant professor of political economy at Antioch College. Matt Guardino is associate professor of political science at Providence College and author of Framing Inequality: News Media, Public Opinion, and the Neoliberal Turn in U.S. Public Policy (Oxford University Press 2019). )

Toward a New Politics of Consumption Building that future requires bringing consumption under public, democratic control. At the same time, a new vision of consumption is essential to making a post-carbon economy and society politically sustainable. Unless Big Tech, Big Telecom, Big Media, Big Retail, and the interlinked firms that control twenty-first-century advertising are confronted directly, many Green New Deal initiatives — from converting the energy grid and encouraging sustainable land use, to renewing ecosystems and nurturing small businesses and farms — will be under relentless political threat. Imagine a Sanders (or, someday, an Ocasio-Cortez) administration backed by a progressive-socialist-majority congressional bloc. What might the FTC and FCC look like? Here, we push left policy boundaries by sketching a strategy with two principle aims: raising product quality and sustainability standards, and breaking our information and communications systems’ commercial dependency to bolster democratic alternatives. A new politics of consumption might center on the creation of a robust product standards enforcement system with high thresholds for quality and durability, environmental impacts, and labor conditions. A revitalized FTC, FDA, and Consumer Product Safety Commission might collaborate to raise the quality of consumer goods and end destructive practices like planned obsolescence and the production of the cheap, plastic, throwaway products. Such aggressive regulatory measures draw from the 1930s consumer movement, which was able to push to the floor of Congress a bill directing the FDA to seize goods and potentially prosecute firms for violating new advertising standards that prohibited misleading consumers “by ambiguity or inference.” This product quality standards regime could be supported by a grading and labeling system that provides clear and accessible information about the origins, makeup, and impacts of consumer goods — another key demand of New Deal and World War II-era activists. The point isn’t strictly to help us make individually rational purchasing decisions, but to foster public momentum for a new consumption regime: by deflecting manipulative advertising and providing leverage for organized groups to demand high-quality goods, a grading and labeling system could bolster popular support for publicly enforceable product quality, packaging, and promotion standards. A new product standard regime could compel retailers like Walmart and Amazon to redirect supply chains to higher-wage manufacturers using cutting-edge sustainable production systems. Public subsidies could also be channeled to democratically structured small- and medium-sized retailers to encourage a more far-reaching shift in how we get basic consumer goods. This new system would require strong, comprehensive, accountable government action — mandating and enforcing corporate information disclosure along supply chains through legislative and executive action backed by popular pressure, re-staffing and reequipping regulatory agencies with independent expertise and enforcement capacity, and democratically empowering civil society groups and ordinary consumers to help build out and oversee the system. A product quality system could work in tandem with vigorous new data privacy protections and tough restrictions on commercial advertising and the digital surveillance practices that feed it. But a new consumption regime also requires broader efforts to democratize communications systems to open space for public discourse and strengthen grassroots control over Green New Deal initiatives. For example, the FCC could support democratically governed municipal media hubs, in a regionally federated structure, with significant authority to implement communications policy. Federal funding could be allocated to remake underused spaces in public schools, community colleges, libraries, and abandoned buildings into cutting-edge centers for popular media creativity and civic digital media education. These hubs might provide hardware, software, training, and technical support for citizens, civil society groups, and grassroots organizations. Hubs could also offer subsidized communication facilities for citizen-journalists and creative workers, and incubate noncommercial, worker-owned/-operated media co-ops, such as online news organizations and documentary collectives. Substantial, accountable, and responsive state support for democratic communication could provide concrete leverage against corporate media and Big Tech, challenging (and eventually displacing) their control of news and public information. This idea for media hubs advances existing reform proposals such as Sanders’s plan to use new advertising taxes to fund noncommercial media. Proposals like these also require an infusion of expertise into government to support and elaborate the visions of elected officials and popular groups with specialized analysis, motivated by a commitment to public interests. Rejecting the neoliberal reliance on insulated technocrats applying minor, corporate-friendly system adjustments, a new politics of consumption would put computer scientists, telecommunications specialists, supply-chain analysts, consumer attorneys, creative workers, and others in close contact with diverse publics through new democratic institutions. This kind of project presents opportunities to channel growing progressive activism among tech industry employees and gathering generational skepticism of Silicon Valley claims to improving the world. A politics of consumption for the Green New Deal would learn from the New Deal by again making public service attractive to talented and capable people who seek meaningful work tackling interesting and important problems.