Consumerism as Pacification: Circulation, Security, and the Commodity Form

• In Event: Crime, Law and Deviance Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): 10: Politics & Capitalism

Abstract

This article reconceptualizes mass consumption as a mode of pacification: a political-economic process through which capitalist power stabilizes commodity circulation, reorganizes social reproduction, and reproduces inequality while displacing coercion from view. Against approaches that treat consumer society primarily as a sphere of culture, identity, or voluntary choice, I argue that “consumer freedom” is institutionally produced—by legal subjectivity, the monetary validation of value through sale, and a dense security infrastructure that enforces the boundary between legitimate exchange and illegitimate access. Bringing together legal form theory, value-form analysis, and anti-security, the article shows how market dependence operates as an impersonal compulsion unevenly distributed through histories of dispossession and racialized governance, sorting populations into differential positions of vulnerability, suspicion, and mobility within consumer space. Retail environments emerge as concentrated sites where this pacified order is both administered and made to appear natural, through the coupled fetishisms of commodity, law, and security that render property as right and enforcement as protection. Retail theft—and the moral panic around “organized retail crime”—is treated as a diagnostic flashpoint that reveals what normal shopping conceals: the coercive stabilization of circulation, the policing of alternative circuits and informal access, and the racialized production of the “legitimate consumer” and the “suspect body.” The result is a framework that integrates policing and security into the sociology of consumption and reframes consumerism as a central terrain on which capitalist power and inequality are continuously secured.

Author

• Brendan Innis McQuade, University of Southern Maine