The Neoliberal Ties that Bind? Prefigurativism and the New Politics of Consumption

Despite their apparent opposition to the dominant capitalist system, many forms of political consumerism may unwittingly produce central features of neoliberalism. Indeed, many scholars have questioned whether political consumers or environmental social movements that orient themselves around everyday concerns are able to present an effective challenge the dominant capitalist system, given their particular choice of market-based prefigurative strategies. There is no doubt that there are theoretical tensions between market-based collective action and the possibility of radical transformation, but this paper seeks to understand how political actors understand, navigate and account for these tensions as they go about ‘politics’. Drawing on empirical data collected through interviews with localist advocates in the US, UK an Australia, I argue that many political actors in localist movements embrace these tensions as a prefigurative strategy in and of themselves. I conclude by considering how and whether our theories of the political need to account for the realities of ‘prefigurativism in practice’.