So, he says that in the early days of consumerism, you'd buy something -> feel bad -> donate to a charity -> feel good.
Now, with Starbucks, you pay more upfront and get to do both (buy coffee and donate to charity) at the same time.
But, like, how is this bad? Or, hell, how is it is even different from before? At Starbucks (to stick to his example) you get to do both things at once. I don't see any ideology here - just a more efficient process.
Like, the megathread advertises Zapatista Coffee because we get to do two things - buy coffee and support people we like. It's just convenient to do both things at once.
And, honestly, if there is an ideology here, it's certainly not about donating to charity. If you ask the average Starbucks coffee drinker (like me), we don't go to Starbucks to donate to charity. We go because it's convenient (usually on multiple places on campus), the store looks nice, the baristas are cute has free Wifi, places to sit etc. I pay extra for all that.
The fact that Starbucks donate like 1% to charity or whatever contributes to it, but it's not the "ideology". Like, if that actually becomes a bigger part of my motivation for buying coffee (and other products), I'll actively stop going to Starbucks and go to either local coffee-chains or to the Zapatista Coffee mentioned above.
Edit: Thanks for the explanations. I get it now. Starbucks keeps class consciousness down and prevents consumers from recognizing the exploitation that goes into making and distributing that coffee. Instead people get positive feelings about consumerism.
When you do the two things separately (buy>feelbad>donate>feelgood) you gain more consciousness of the process because you feel the constituent parts as separate things.
When you combine them into one complex process (the starbucks coffee) the end result is that you have to break down the process in order to become conscious of it, this approach reduces consciousness.
It separates the consumer from consciousness of the emotions they have about production. If you never have a bad feeling about the production, if you never have a bad feeling about consumerism, you never self reflect and you never become conscious of it.
The intent of doing this is to separate the consumers from their negative feelings about the consumerism in order to reduce consciousness of it as an issue at all.
You don't donate to charity because you buying meaningless expensive coffee is bad for the global south, you donate to charity because of GUILT about drinking meaningless expensive coffee when there are hundreds of millions of people suffering elsewhere. The process is to reduce consumer guilt. To make you, the consumer, never feel guilty about consumerism. To feel like it is fine and normal. The ideology involved is the reduction of care for people elsewhere in the world, that owning luxuries is perfectly fine and normal while others suffer.
We see the same thing in jobs and other places too. Ever wondered why it's so much harder to create class consciousness in officer workers compared to the industrial manufacturing proletariat? It's because emotions the office workers would experience are separated by several more degrees of complexity from the emotions created by more direct forms of capitalist exploitation. The industrial manufacturing proletariat had a very direct link between the emotions they would feel about labour exploitation, the manufacture of goods, and the owners that they work for. Same sort of thing involved.
As communists it is our job to deconstruct these processes in order for others to reach the emotions they need to for them to properly reach the realisation that they must do self reflection on it. Only self reflection creates true consciousness.
I should probably add -- this is also the same reason you get no satisfaction from your work. You are separated from the emotional product of your labour by several degrees of intentionally introduced complexity.
You buy a commodity 50 years ago —-> there’s a chance you realize how many people had to suffer to bring you this thing —-> maybe you do something about it, maybe you buy less or donate to a cause or join a movement
You buy a commodity today —> you notice that the brand donates 1% to starving children —> you don’t become aware of the immense suffering necessary to bring you this commodity, or the fact that those kids are starving directly because of capitalist commodity production—> you come to think of buying shit as a way to do politics—-> “I will save the world by buying the right brands!”
You see the direct result of this kind of thinking when people blame consumers for climate change by saying we could fix climate change if people would just buy more green products. We can fix misogyny if people buy more pro-women products! We can fix world hunger if people buy brands that donate to the poor! and so on. Not realizing that what these brands do is the equivalent of murdering someone and then dropping a dollar on the dead body.
I think the ideology in Starbucks is the idea that you can have your cake and eat it too. By donating 1% to charity or whatever, Starbucks convinces their customers that the problems caused by consumerism (ecological destruction, maintaining exploitative structures for cheap labor, etc.) can be solved by consuming the right products.
Good answers already, I'll quickly add that Ideology isn't about truth content, as you say, like maybe we really are helping out who we are buying from, e.g the Zapatistas. There is no escape from it whether it is true or false or something else entirely. The point is, in this case, that we are nearly guilt tripped into feeling good about 'saving the world' by simply buying coffee, when of course this covers the true reality that Starbucks is exploiting many workers in the global south. Also the Zapatistas, they may not exploit their workers in the same way but it's mostly something we tell ourselves to feel good about buying this one commodity out of many others that do exploit people. The truth value of the claim is another layer of ideology
I think because it's tying consumption together with like feelings of charity and do-gooding. This is basically how people feel about purchasing physical media and subscribing to podcasts, YouTubers, etc. now. It's like the material exchange logic is gone "you need a shirt, they need compensation" and replaced with "I'm supporting a small business" "I'm donating to a wildlife fund" "I'm supporting a political podcast" "I'm helping the video game company and encouraging them to make more in the series I love".
That Zizek talking point except its the Bo Burnham bit about working as a marketing consultant to Fritos in their FiGhT aGaiNsT RaCisM
I don’t see any ideology here - just a more efficient process.
"Mussolini makes the trains run on time...no he's not a soulless totalitarian, it's mere efficiency to cut out the human subject!"
