Neoliberalism(as leftists use the word) is used quite appropriately here. See Zizek:
> Let’s turn to the high point of our consumerism. Let me take a drink.
> Starbucks coffee. I’m regularly drinking it, I must admit it. But are we aware, that when we buy a cappuccino from Starbucks, we also buy quite a lot of ideology? Which ideology?
> You know, when you enter a Starbucks store, it’s usually always displayed in some posters, their message, which is: “Yes, our cappuccino is more expensive than others,” but, then comes the story.
> “We give 1% all our income to some Guatemalan children to keep them healthy, for the water supply for some Saharan farmer, or to save the forest, to enable organic growing for coffee, or whatever or whatever.”
> Now, I admire the ingenuity of this solution. In the old days of pure, simple consumerism, you bough a product, and then you felt bad. “My God, I’m just a consumerist, while people are starving in Africa . . .”
> So the idea is that you had to do something to counteract your pure, destructive consumerism. For example, I don’t know, you contribute to charity and so on.
> What Starbucks enables you, is to be a consumerist, without any bad conscience, because the price for the countermeasure, for fighting consumerism, is already included into the price of a commodity. Like, you pay a little bit more, and you’re not just a consumerist, but you do also your duty towards the environment, the poor, starving people in Africa, and so on and so on.
> It’s, I think, the ultimate form of consumerism.
I was unaware that zizek called this form of consumerism neoliberalism. I was only aware of the economic definition of the term relating to Keynesian economics and deregulation and the like. The reason I piped up is because that definition is really more in line with American right-wing policies (although Democrats seem to have little issue getting on board...)
In America, "Liberals" are "The Left", while in other countries, "Liberals" are "The Right". Many internet discussions on economic policy fall into misunderstanding due to these types of terminology differences
Yeah the word "Liberal" is vague enough that it has a wikipedia disambiguation page with 12 different political idealogies. I refuse to use it and usually avoid conversations involving it because of how many things it can mean.
> Let’s turn to the high point of our consumerism. Let me take a drink.
> Starbucks coffee. I’m regularly drinking it, I must admit it. But are we aware, that when we buy a cappuccino from Starbucks, we also buy quite a lot of ideology? Which ideology?
> You know, when you enter a Starbucks store, it’s usually always displayed in some posters, their message, which is: “Yes, our cappuccino is more expensive than others,” but, then comes the story.
> “We give 1% all our income to some Guatemalan children to keep them healthy, for the water supply for some Saharan farmer, or to save the forest, to enable organic growing for coffee, or whatever or whatever.”
> Now, I admire the ingenuity of this solution. In the old days of pure, simple consumerism, you bough a product, and then you felt bad. “My God, I’m just a consumerist, while people are starving in Africa . . .”
> So the idea is that you had to do something to counteract your pure, destructive consumerism. For example, I don’t know, you contribute to charity and so on.
> What Starbucks enables you, is to be a consumerist, without any bad conscience, because the price for the countermeasure, for fighting consumerism, is already included into the price of a commodity. Like, you pay a little bit more, and you’re not just a consumerist, but you do also your duty towards the environment, the poor, starving people in Africa, and so on and so on.
> It’s, I think, the ultimate form of consumerism.