At the turn of the twenty-first century, consumers and politics stand in a paradoxical relationship. Never before have consumers in advanced economies had it so good. According to the proponents of more open and competitive global markets, consumers have been the principal beneficiaries of deregulation and trade liberalization in the 1980s and 1990s. At the same time, there has been a wave of consumer protests at international summits and in local politics against the democratic, economic and ethical costs of globalization. How should we explain this paradox?

One school of thought views the recent consumer protests as a reaction to the global processes of capitalist branding and production – processes that created the very communicative and cultural openings for the development of a critical global consumer movement. This account is a good social movement story, popular with the critics of trade liberalization, but it is marred by a number of conceptual and empirical problems. First, by treating the recent wave of consumer activism in isolation from the network of national and international consumer movements and their ideological evolution in the twentieth century, the globalization narrative ignores the persistence of different traditions of consumer politics. Just as deregulatory processes have diverged across countries, so, too, have the ideological definitions and political uses of ‘the consumer’. Second, the narrative helps explain how consumer movements arise in response to changes in the political economy, yet fails to explore how the movements themselves have contributed to the structure and dynamics of political economies.