The E-Commerce drives consumerism through normalizing the overconsumption of the rich.

There are many and complex reasons for both underconsumption and overconsumption. Underconsumption is caused by poverty, marginalisation and inequality, often intensified by environmental hazards and climate change. Overconsumption is intrinsically linked to underconsumption. The high consumption of the rich is in many ways built on the underpaid labour of the poor, an injustice further entrenched by overconsumption being a central cause of climate change and many of the environmental hazards that hit the poor hardest. In other words, modern consumption patterns depend fundamentally on the exploitation of people and nature (Brand and Wissen, 2021).

Although much popular attention tends to be on the extraordinary and conspicuous sides of consumption, most consumption is mundane and inconspicuous. Consumption levels are fundamentally shaped by what is considered normal, and by how and where people live their lives and how and where they acquire their stuff and access to services. It is, in short, shaped by how normality is organised (e.g Shove, 2003). One of the profound challenges the world is facing, is that normality keeps getting increasingly resource intensive. This process takes place constantly in rich countries, enabled by growth, increasing incomes, and global capitalist production networks that allow for a seemingly never-ending access to cheap goods and labour. But perhaps even more dramatically, higher levels of consumption are increasingly normalised in a wide range of emerging economies, particularly in Asia. This chapter has used the cases of two of the fastest growing economies in the world, China and Vietnam, to discuss the complexity of consumption and argue for the importance of political economy for understanding everyday practices. By studying consumption booms in these two ‘socialist market economies’, I have sought to illustrate how the growth imperative of capitalism translates to an imperative for increasing consumption, forcing even conservative communists to embrace capitalist consumer society (although they may not admit to doing so).

The impact of increased affluence on consumption patterns is at the same time predictable and unpredictable. Different countries have different versions of modernity, and novelties like whole societies built around motorbikes emerge. But it is predictable in the sense that there are certain blueprints of modernity that seemingly every country follows, although with significant local variation. In this chapter, I have used supermarketisation, fast food franchises and the system of automobility as examples. Many more could be added, within all spheres of consumption. These develop through the fundamental logics of capitalism and its systems of accumulation. In turn, they form the contextual configurations within which everyday practices take place. They are part of co-shaping all elements of social practices, and in many ways influence or even dictate the moments of consumption that take place within them. Any attempt to understand and ultimately confront unsustainable consumption, thus needs to factor in capitalism. Taking capitalism seriously involves asking uncomfortable questions about growth, profit, inequality and individual ownership (see Wilhite & Hansen, 2015). In this chapter, I have suggested that studying the political economy of practices may be the way forward as consumption research hopefully re-engages with these questions and fulfil Daniel Miller’s (1995: 16) call from the early years of the field: ‘the new study of consumption should lead inexorably to the direct study of capitalism’.