The Paradox of Political Consumerism: Neoliberal Natives and the Crisis of Political Imagination

Abstract

Political consumerism is frequently celebrated as an expansion of youth political participation or critiqued for its structural ineffectiveness to advance young people’s political contestations. Moving beyond this evaluative binary, this article investigates its underexplored cultural and affective implications. It defines the paradox of political consumerism as a condition in which young people’s political intent is channelled through consumer choice, only to be pre-emptively neutralised by the very neoliberal ‘business ontology’ it seeks to resist. This article interrogates this paradox through a series of focus groups in the United Kingdom and Greece among ‘neoliberal natives’; a unique generational unit whose entire civic socialisation has occurred within a totalised market logic, anchored by the historic, unfulfilled promises of the Brexit and Grexit moments. Informed by Critical and Cultural theory, the analysis explores how political consumption functions simultaneously as a meaningful political gesture and an ideological constraint. Rather than dismissing youth commitments as superficial, the article situates them within a broader political economy that individualises responsibility, commodifies dissent, and constrains their political imagination. What emerges is an ambivalent subjectivity: a generation that knows very well the limits of their market-based engagement—yet continues to participate in it.

1. Introduction: The Paradox of Marketised Dissent

Since the turn of the century, political consumerism has emerged at the forefront of the available repertoires of political engagement among young people. From fair trade coffee (Lekakis, 2013), vegan fashion (Lamarche-Beauchesne, 2023) and solidarity economy initiatives (Forno & Signori, 2014), all the way to boycotting Israeli products in response to the Palestinian genocide (Putra et al., 2024) and assisted by the advent of digital media (Boulianne et al., 2020), young people in particular are increasingly turning to the marketplace to express their ethical, environmental and political commitments (Stolle et al., 2010). This is especially so in contexts where traditional political channels are viewed as ineffective, corrupt, or ideologically bankrupt (Kyroglou & Henn, 2022a). This development has been heralded as an indication of a progressive, reflexive, and value-driven political subjectivity among young people (Stolle et al., 2005). However, political consumerism is marked by a fundamental contradiction: while it collectively mobilises individual market powers in the name of political change (Kyroglou & Henn, 2022b), it simultaneously reproduces the individualism, consumer logic, and depoliticisation of the neoliberal ideological terrain within which it operates (Kyroglou & Henn, 2017). I refer to this as the paradox of political consumerism.

This article illuminates the paradox of political consumerism through a qualitative analysis of a series of focus groups among young political consumers in the United Kingdom and in Greece, two countries which are marked by distinct yet converging trajectories of neoliberalisation (Harvey, 2007). Political consumerism in the UK was often framed by young participants primarily as a lifestyle choice: personalised, expressive, and morally gratifying. In this context, consumerism appears fully embedded into everyday life, with ethical consumption functioning as a soft, unthreatening form of civic engagement; one that fits comfortably within the hegemonic neoliberal discourse of individual responsibility and market-based governance (Peters, 2017). Conversely, in Greece, youth engagement with political consumerism was primarily framed in terms of its inherent contradictions. While still present, it was frequently infused with irony, scepticism or outright disillusionment, influenced by the harsh material realities of austerity, youth unemployment, and a broader post-crisis political fatigue (Sotiris, 2014). Nevertheless, this critical distance does not necessarily translate into more imaginative modes of collective political action (Kioupkiolis & Pechtelidis, 2018). Instead, it reveals the extent to which the political imagination itself has become constrained.

The paradox thus lies not only in the ideological function of political consumerism, whereby it transforms dissent into market participation, but also in its affective and experiential dimension. For many young people in late capitalist democracies, political consumerism constitutes one of the few remaining avenues for expressing their political identity, however partial or ineffective that expression may be. In this way, it becomes, in effect, a political gesture that simultaneously registers and contains dissent. Consequently, this article frames this generational cohort structurally as neoliberal natives: young individuals whose entire civic socialisation has occurred within the parameters of a totalised market logic. By investigating their lived experiences, we can observe how the marketplace becomes the primary, if highly compromised, site where contemporary political subjectivities are forged.

To further unpack these contradictions, this study is guided by three primary research questions:

• How do young people in distinct neoliberal macroeconomic contexts (the UK and Greece) experience and negotiate the tension between their ethical commitments and market constraints?
• In what ways do these ‘neoliberal natives’ employ cynical distance or reflexive irony to navigate the perceived ineffectiveness of market-based political action?
• How does the totalisation of a ‘business ontology’ shape, and potentially constrain, the contemporary youth political imagination?

To investigate this paradox, the article brings the findings from the focus group discussions into dialogue with classical and contemporary cultural theorists. This is necessary since cultural theory provides a conceptual vocabulary for understanding how resistance becomes commodified, how ideology operates through cynical complicity, and how neoliberalism constrains the horizon of political imaginaries. By synthesising the empirical observations from the UK and Greece with this theoretical framework, the article does not seek to celebrate political consumerism as a progressive evolution of political agency among young people, nor does it intend to dismiss it as mere commodification of political engagement. Instead, it seeks to problematise political consumerism as a deeply contradictory form of engagement; one that is simultaneously symptomatic of and complicit in the ideological apparatus of late neoliberal capitalism.

2. Literature Review: Youth Participation Between Celebration and Withdrawal

Over the past two decades, the study of political consumerism has evolved from a peripheral subfield of political engagement studies to assuming a central position in contemporary analyses of political culture in late modern societies. Within the existing literature, political consumerism is often defined as the deliberate use of market choices, such as boycotts, buycotts, and ethical consumption, as expressions of political and ethical concerns (Micheletti, 2003; Micheletti & Stolle, 2007). While early accounts presented political consumerism as a form of reflexive modernisation (Aiken, 2000; Beck et al., 1994) in response to the emergence of the novel risks of late modernity1 (Beck, 1992), emphasising its potential for democratising the marketplace and empowering individual actors, more recent research has raised questions about its ideological and structural limitations, including its susceptibility to appropriation (e.g., Lekakis, 2017).

My earlier research has contributed to this critical turn by foregrounding the ambivalent positionality of young political consumers in late neoliberal societies. In Lost in the Supermarket (Kyroglou, 2024), I argue that political consumerism among young people is shaped not only by values or ethical commitments at the individual level (Zorell, 2019b), but also by the structural conditions of hegemonic neoliberalism (Kyroglou & Henn, 2017) at the country level (Zorell, 2019a), which frame political agency in market-compatible terms. Across both the UK and Greek contexts, we found that while young people often articulated their consumption practices as political, these acts were simultaneously constrained by discourses of individual responsibility, consumer sovereignty, and the depoliticisation of public life (Kyroglou & Henn, 2022a).

With specific reference to either Greece or the UK, other scholars have also identified similar tensions. For example, Lekakis (2012) explored how the Fair Trade branding in Greece acts as a “marketised” morality often reinforcing neoliberal governance through the very logic of ethical consumption, or how “ethnocentric consumption” (Lekakis, 2015) can propagate nationalistic narratives under conditions of neoliberal austerity. In turn, Pickard (2018) highlights how young people in the UK are re-generating politics in times of poly-crises, moving away from partisan politics and increasingly towards more reflexive, non-institutionalised, lifestyle forms of political participation, such as political consumerism. However, she remains cautious against idealising these practices as inherently emancipatory.

In general, scholarly work in the field of youth political participation can be understood as being divided between two main evaluative standpoints: it either laments young people’s political participation in late modernity, particularly under conditions of political disenfranchisement or post-crisis austerity, as symptomatic of a “melancholic withdrawal” (Hesselberth & de Bloois, 2020, p. 69), a retreat of the ‘political’ from collective struggle, or it tends to celebrate it as reflexive, innovative and emancipatory from the rigidities of more traditional forms of political participation, which are perceived as hierarchical (Hart & Henn, 2017), elitist (Henn & Oldfield, 2016), adultist (Huttunen & Albrecht, 2021) or largely outdated.

Blühdorn (2003, 2017), in turn, offers a third epistemological approach. He argues that contemporary forms of environmental activism and political engagement, including political consumerism, increasingly navigate the prevalent post-capitalist and post-consumerist ideological narratives of late modernity. He diagnoses a move away from democratic deliberation to what he calls “simulative politics”, which take the form of post-political rituals, that is, gestures which simulate political meaning without being able or ultimately willing to disrupt the systemic logic of neoliberal capitalism:

Whilst there is no serious confidence—nor actually ambition—that the modernist project and promise of ecological thought will ever be completed, late modern society keeps reproducing the illusion that the ecologist ideals are still valid and on the agenda.

(Blühdorn, 2003, p. 1)

Importantly, however, he succinctly diagnoses such an epistemological binary in the literature:

Academics and intellectuals can hardly avoid contributing to this collective strategy of simulation, or they expose themselves to charges of having abandoned humanist values, and fatalistically taking refuge in apologias of an unacceptable status quo.

(Blühdorn, 2003, p. 1)

In the field of youth political engagement, Bowman (2019) urges us, in a similar vein, to abstain from ”binary approaches to young people’s political subjectivities” (such as political and non-political), and instead to base our understanding of a young person “as a political agent in hybrid, shifting and complex ways” (p. 296).

It can be argued therefore that young citizen-consumers (Kyroglou & Henn, 2017) encapsulate the inherent contradictions of a political agency in flux, characteristic of the sociopolitical landscape of late modernity they are being called to navigate. On the one hand political consumerism may offer young people a platform for moral expression and identity construction (Kyroglou & Henn, 2022b), but it often lacks the capacity to produce collective, redistributive, or systemic change. In an earlier article (Kyroglou & Henn, 2017, p. 10), we argue that “Although the ability to resist commodification should be salient within the various forms of activism and political action, political consumerism is particularly susceptible to it since, by definition, it adheres to the [neoliberal] doctrines of the marketopoly”. This leads to a condition I describe as the paradox of political consumerism, wherein political intent is channelled through consumer action, only to be neutralised by the very logics of commodification and individualisation that underpin it.

Building upon this foundational backdrop, this article brings empirical findings into dialogue with cultural theory. In particular, it interrogates how political consumerism serves as an ideological apparatus of late capitalism, not merely at the level of individual behaviour, but in its capacity to structure subjectivity, resistance, and political imagination. The section that follows outlines the theoretical framework through which these dynamics will be explored, drawing on the corpus of classical critical and contemporary cultural theory.

3. Theoretical Framework: Culture Industry, Interpassivity, and Capitalist Realism

Navigating the paradox of political consumerism requires us to first engage with a tradition of critical theory that interrogates the subtle workings of ideology, the commodification of dissent, and the limits of political imagination under late modernity. Drawing on the Frankfurt School’s critique of the culture industries (Adorno & Horkheimer, 1944/2002), Baudrillard’s (1981) postmodern critique, Žižek’s (1989/2009) psychoanalytic theory of ideology, and Fisher’s (2009) concept of capitalist realism, this article proposes that political consumerism functions as both a symptom and mechanism of late capitalist ideological reproduction.

In direct juxtaposition to the neoliberal celebration of individualism and the promise of (economic) freedom (Hayek, 1944/2014), postmodern cultural theory interrogates the extent and scope of this freedom within an ideological context of bourgeoning consumerism. The reluctant ‘High Priest of Postmodernism’ (Gane, 2015, p. 5), Jean Baudrillard, argues in For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, that consumption has become “a kind of labour, an active manipulation of signs, a sort of bricolage in which the individual desperately attempts to organise his privatized existence and invest it with meaning (…). What is consumed is not the object itself, but the system of objects, ‘the idea of a relation’ that is actually ‘no longer lived’ but abolished abstracted and consumed by the signifying system itself (…). As we consume the code, in effect we reproduce the system” (Baudrillard, 1981, p. viii). Commodities are therefore no longer priced merely in terms of their use and exchange values, but also increasingly in terms of their sign-value. Commodities in late capitalism may thus become signifiers of style, prestige, luxury, but as this article illustrates, they may also become signifiers of resistance against the economic forces that brought them into existence in the first place (Jeffries, 2021, p. 115).

Through the concept of the culture industry as it is presented in the chapter with the same title in the Dialectic of Enlightenment, Adorno and Horkheimer (1944/2002) offer an earlier but equally incisive lens through which to view this commodification of resistance. Their critical analysis of mass culture reveals how capitalism neutralises dissent by absorbing it into commodity form:

Since, with the end of free exchange, commodities lost all their economic qualities except for fetishism, the latter has extended its arthritic influence over all aspects of social life. Through the countless agencies of mass production and its culture the conventionalized modes of behaviour are impressed on the individual as the only natural, respectable, and rational ones.

(Adorno & Horkheimer, 1944/2002, p. 204)

Arguably, no other ideological standpoint has exemplified this better: “With its emphasis on rationality, competition, and striving for burgeoning economic expansion, neoliberalism ceases to be yet another position on the ideological spectrum” (Kyroglou & Henn, 2017, p. 10). Indeed, Duggan (2012) describes neoliberalism as a form of ‘non-politics’, the only rational and viable way forward. But despite its promise for effective change, this road ahead is circular. As Adorno and Horkheimer (1944/2002) famously put it, “the culture industry perpetually cheats its consumers of what it perpetually promises (…) all it actually confirms is that the real point will never be reached, that the diner must be satisfied with the menu” (p. 139). Young people’s political consumption becomes precisely such a promise, a gestural form of political engagement that, despite its occasional victories, never quite translates into systemic change. Ethical consumption thus bears the garments of a personal rebellion that ultimately reverberates the very market logics it seeks to resist2. It proudly flaunts the ‘Save the Planet’ logo on a T-shirt manufactured in a dodgy sweatshop, “permanently linking horror to holiness” (Adorno & Horkheimer, 1944/2002, p. 10).

Political consumerism perfectly exemplifies this circular logic: even if young consumers often acknowledge the contradictions and inefficacy of ethical consumption, they continue to engage in it nevertheless. Žižek’s (1989/2009, 2008) psychoanalytic reading of ideology offers a plausible explanation by complicating our traditional understandings of political awareness. In The Sublime Object of Ideology, Žižek notes that the most effective ideologies are not those which obscure reality but those which allow people to see clearly but continue anyway: “they know very well how things really are, but still, they are doing it as if they did not know” (Žižek, 1989/2009, p. 30). This inadvertently leads to cynical distance:

The prevailing ideology is that of cynicism (…). Cynical distance is just one way—one of many ways—to blind ourselves to the structuring power of ideological fantasy: even if we do not take things seriously, even if we keep an ironical distance, we are still doing them.

(Žižek, 1989/2009, p. 30)

However, it would be unfair to attribute this cynical distance exclusively to political consumerism. Instead, it permeates all facets of young people’s political agency in late modernity. Political consumerism can therefore be understood as an ‘escape’ of young people from electoral political participation, perceived as the playground of self-serving, elitist and inherently untrustworthy politicians, which fails to address their political concerns (Hart & Henn, 2017; Henn & Oldfield, 2016). Young people may thus seek to distance themselves from their electoral political obligations by delegating their political agency to the act of consumption. Indeed, in an earlier article (Kyroglou & Henn, 2022a) we describe a simultaneous “push” effect away from the public and towards the commercial sphere, all along with a simultaneous “pull” effect into the marketopoly, which promises a new form of individualised political agency through consumption, one that aligns with the individualised concerns of the neoliberal subject.

Nevertheless, Žižek would describe this delegation of one’s political engagement to the act of consumption as an act of interpassivity; a displacement of action rather than its fulfilment (Žižek, 2008). The political subject, in this sense, is not empowered but disarmed, having “outsourced” resistance to the commodity, all the while reinforcing the neoliberal ideological structures it seeks to rebel against. In a counterintuitive conclusion, Žižek forewarns us of this development, with what he calls “the paradox of action”: sometimes the most radical action is inaction. He warns against the compulsion to “do something” in response to violence (whether subjective, systemic or symbolic) without fully understanding its underlying causes. By rushing to action, we may inadvertently reinforce the very systems we aim to challenge.

Fisher’s (2009) concept of capitalist realism, that is the pervasive sense that “not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it” (p. 2), is perhaps the most generative for this analysis. Fisher argues that capitalist realism, understood here as an instituted social imaginary (Castoriadis, 1987) that naturalises market logic and forecloses alternatives, has stifled young people’s post-capitalist desire itself, making it challenging to even imagine alternatives that do not genuflect to and perpetuate the neoliberal doctrines of individualism and economic agency. Capitalist realism thus enforces a “business ontology” on all domains of social life; in other words, the idea that education, healthcare, or, in this case political participation itself, must operate in accordance with the prevailing market logic.

Fisher’s notion of “reflexive impotence”, the state of knowing things are bad but feeling powerless to change them, is particularly fitting here: “It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism” (Fisher, 2009, p. 1)3. As previous research has shown (Kyroglou & Henn, 2022a), young people often articulate deep dissatisfaction with the political status quo yet find themselves turning to political consumption as the only available outlet to express their individualised ethical, environmental and political contestations. Political consumerism, in this light, becomes both an expression of discontent and a concession to it, a form of what Fisher would call “depressive hedonia”, in which pleasure is compulsively sought not for enjoyment, but as a defence against despair.

Together, these theoretical perspectives—commodification of resistance, cynical distancing and interpassivity, and reflexive impotence—illustrate the different ways through which political consumerism functions as a simulacrum of agency under late modernity4, and they will help us explain the empirical paradox observed in both British and Greek contexts. Political consumerism among young people initially emerges as a mode of political participation exactly because more traditional forms of political participation are perceived as ineffective (Kyroglou & Henn, 2022a). Nevertheless, its characteristics and underlying logic remain deeply embedded in the market logic that circumscribes it (Kyroglou & Henn, 2017). The empirical evidence provided below demonstrates that young people are well aware of these tensions. However, political consumerism offers a degree of moral and affective satisfaction that serves to circumvent their perceived reflexive impotence under conditions of hegemonic neoliberalism. This theoretical framework allows us thus to conceptualise political consumerism not simply as an expression of political intent, but simultaneously as a cause and a symptom of a pervasive neoliberal governmentality (Kyroglou, 2024); an expression of resistance that is emotionally resonant, structurally safe, but ultimately, system-sustaining.

Importantly, young people in both Greece and the UK (specifically Generation Z and younger Millennials born between 1990 and 2001) operate as “neoliberal natives” whose early civic socialisation has been bounded by these very structural and ideological parameters. Rather than attributing an essentialist set of intrinsic traits to this cohort, this “generational unit” (Mannheim, 1928/1998), comprising the almost contemporaneous Brexit and Grexit generations, is defined by a set of common socioeconomic conditions imposed externally upon them. These include austerity, structural inequality, and chronic employment precariousness (Kyroglou, 2024). Crucially, while older cohorts retain either lived experiences or generational memory of alternative socio-political imaginaries, such as welfare-state social democracy (Srnicek & Williams, 2015), these neoliberal natives are probably among the first generations in both countries who have been socialized entirely within a fully realised business ontology (Fisher, 2009). As a result, their collective political imagination has been forged amidst an intensified “dynamics of division” (Galbraith, 2017, p. 381), catalysed by the 2015 Grexit referendum and the 2016 Brexit referendum respectively, alongside the concurrent rise in polarizing populist and extreme-right configurations (Boukala & Dimitrakopoulou, 2017; Ford & Goodwin, 2017). For both cohorts, the subsequent structural fallout and unfulfilled promises of these historic watershed moments have since left a distinct generational legacy of institutional betrayal and systemic exhaustion. Consequently, this specific manifestation of reflexive impotence is not a life-cycle defensive posture adopted later in life out of political disillusionment; rather, it constitutes the foundational civic infrastructure through which their political identities and consumerist practices were originally constructed (Kyroglou, 2024). By framing youth as the vanguard generation of a totalised capitalist realism, this article shifts the analytical lens from political consumerism as a personalised lifestyle choice to a sociopolitical site where the structural constraints and latent contradictions of the contemporary political imagination are actively negotiated. To unpack how these generationally specific dynamics manifest empirically, a theoretically anchored, context-driven qualitative approach is required.

4. Methodology: Dialectical Inquiry Through Focus Groups

Research into youth political participation has consistently highlighted a disjuncture between how researchers and young people themselves define ‘politics’ (Henn & Foard, 2014). Quantitative approaches, especially those reliant on closed-ended survey instruments measuring institutional trust, voter turnout, or interest in party politics, often underestimate or misrepresent the forms and intensities of youth engagement. Conversely, qualitative methods that approach politics in more open, relational, and contextualised terms tend to surface more nuanced understandings of how young people express political agency in everyday life.

In line with this methodological critique, this study adopts a qualitative focus group approach to explore young people’s motivations for and experiences of political consumerism. This decision was shaped by earlier work, such as Henn et al. (2002), whose mixed-methods research in Britain revealed that while survey data suggested a widespread youth political disillusionment, focus group discussions brought to light strong political opinions and critical reflexivity, especially when politics was linked to everyday concerns.

Focus groups were therefore selected for their capacity to provide participants with space to articulate their experiences in their own terms. They have proven especially suitable for studying both consumer behaviour (Bray et al., 2011) and youth political participation (Pontes et al., 2018). Their interactive, dialogic format can stimulate reflection, reveal contradictions, and surface shared vocabularies or ambivalences. As Henn et al. (2009) argue, small focus groups are particularly effective in reducing social desirability bias, especially when dealing with value-laden topics such as ethical consumption or political identity.

I conducted four focus groups in total—two in Greece and two in the UK—with group sizes ranging from four to six participants, aged 18–26, yielding a total sample of N = 21 participants (see Table 1 below for their detailed profiles). Participants were initially recruited using a purposive strategy via digital flyers distributed across local community boards, university student union groups, and youth-focused social media channels. Following initial purposive recruitment, a snowball sampling technique was deployed to expand the cohorts, leveraging participants’ existing social networks to access peer groups that might otherwise remain hard to reach (Berg & Lune, 2017).

Table 1. Sample Composition and Demographic Profile of Focus Group Participants (N = 21).

Focus Group	Participant ID	Gender	Age	Employment Status	Study Site & Context
Focus Group A (Greece)	Participant A	Female	20	Student	Athens (Urban)
	Participant B	Male	24	Student	Athens (Urban)
	Participant C	Male	25	Student	Athens (Urban)
	Participant D	Male	19	Student	Athens (Urban)
	Participant E	Male	24	NGO worker	Athens (Urban)
	Participant F	Female	24	Freelancer	Athens (Urban)
Focus Group B (Greece)	Participant G	Male	19	Private sector	Epidavros (Rural)
	Participant H	Female	25	Housewife	Epidavros (Rural)
	Participant I	Female	24	NEET *	Epidavros (Rural)
	Participant J	Female	20	NEET *	Epidavros (Rural)
Focus Group C (United Kingdom)	Participant K	Female	25	Student	Inner city (Nottingham)
	Participant L	Female	25	Student	Inner city (Nottingham)
	Participant M	Male	25	Student	Inner city (Nottingham)
	Participant N	Female	18	NEET *	Inner city (Nottingham)
	Participant O	Male	19	NEET *	Inner city (Nottingham)
	Participant P	Male	18	Student	Inner city (Nottingham)
Focus Group D (United Kingdom)	Participant Q	Male	23	Student	Outer city (Nottingham)
	Participant R	Female	20	Student	Outer city (Nottingham)
	Participant S	Male	25	Journalist	Outer city (Nottingham)
	Participant T	Female	26	Student	Outer city (Nottingham)
	Participant U	Female	20	Student	Outer city (Nottingham)

* NEET denotes young people Not in Employment, Education, or Training. Data originally collected across four cross-national focus groups (Greece: n = 10; UK: n = 11).

To ensure participants engaged with political consumerism in meaningful ways but were not already steeped in academic discourse, I excluded students of political and social sciences. Most participants had no formal knowledge of ‘neoliberalism’ as a concept. This epistemic distancing was intentional, enabling me to access how political consumerism is lived and rationalised at a pre-theoretical level. Nevertheless, their lived material conditions (e.g., austerity in Greece or budget constraints in the UK) naturally compelled them to articulate structural anxieties. The interactive focus group dynamic allowed them to organically bridge private grievances into systemic reflections without requiring formal theoretical training.

To mitigate geographical bias, I selected participants from diverse urban and rural locations: Athens and Epidavros in Greece, and inner- and outer-city Nottingham in the UK. While no direct comparison was made along strict demographic variables such as urban/rural divide, class or gender, the design aimed to ensure broad representation and capture varied social realities. It should be acknowledged, however, that while this is an exploratory, qualitative study rather than a strict comparative variable analysis, the distinct socio-political realities of post-crisis Greece and late-capitalist UK have been deliberately juxtaposed to highlight how neoliberal hegemony manifests across different macroeconomic contexts. Similarly, while feminist researchers (Kitzinger, 2007) have highlighted the value of gender-specific focus groups, I conducted mixed-gender sessions to explore how political consumerist motivations emerge and are negotiated in plural, socially embedded contexts.

Care was taken to manage group dynamics. As a moderator of the focus groups, I followed Henn et al.’s (2009) guidance to counterbalance ‘dominant talkers’ and deliberately draw in more reticent voices, attending to verbal cues as well as non-verbal signals (e.g., tone, facial expressions, silences). This emphasis on interaction—as opposed to just content—was central to understanding how participants framed, questioned, and negotiated their political consumerist behaviours in real time.

Data collection and analysis followed a theoretically informed thematic analysis framework, which allows for an iterative dialogue between empirical data and existing critical theory (Braun & Clarke, 2006). While the analysis remained open to inductive, emergent insights from the participants’ lived experiences, it was simultaneously informed by a conceptual vocabulary drawn from critical and cultural theory. This dialectical approach avoids the epistemological pitfalls of a pure grounded theory approach—specifically the “inductivist illusion” of a theoretical blank slate and descriptive coding drift—while maintaining analytical transparency.

The coding process was conducted in three distinct phases by the primary researcher. First, transcripts were subjected to open, line-by-line coding to capture raw participant sentiments (e.g., “feeling cheated by brands,” “budget guilt”). Second, these initial codes were clustered into broader interpretive categories. Third, these categories were mapped onto our key theoretical concepts (such as reflexive impotence or interpassivity). To ensure the trustworthiness and credibility of the analysis, peer-debriefing sessions were conducted with an external qualitative scholar to check thematic consistency and minimize subjective coding bias (Stahl & King, 2020).

It should be highlighted, however, that the primary aim of this qualitative inquiry was not statistical generalisability, but interpretive depth. In line with Hay (2007), the goal was to understand the ideational and emotional logics underpinning political consumerism as expressed by young people in specific socio-political contexts. Their lived experiences and reflective narratives offer insights that are difficult—if not impossible—to capture through survey-based methods.

Consequently, while the findings are not intended to be universally representative (Lincoln & Guba, 1985), this research prioritizes transferability—the extent to which qualitative insights can meaningfully ‘travel’ to other settings (Stahl & King, 2020). By providing a ‘thick description’ of the structural, economic, and cultural realities of these ‘neoliberal natives,’ we offer a conceptual framework that readers can evaluate for its relevance to other late-capitalist, post-austerity, or Southern and Western European youth cohorts experiencing similar systemic pressures. Ultimately, this allows scholars to examine how this compromised subject-position manifests across comparable socio-political terrains, contributing to a growing body of literature that seeks to re-politicise youth participation by attending to its post-institutional, affective, and often contradictory forms (Blühdorn, 2003; Kyroglou & Henn, 2017; Pickard, 2019).

The methodological decision to privilege participant-led focus group discussion was crucial in revealing the paradox of political consumerism. The section that follows thus explores three interrelated themes: (a) Between Ethical Intent and the Limits of Market Agency, (b) Cynical Distance and Reflexive Irony, and (c) Simulation, Subversion, and the Commodification of Resistance.

5. Empirical Findings: Neoliberal Natives Navigating Contradiction

This section delivers the thematic analysis of the four focus groups with young people in Greece and the UK. It will demonstrate how these participants engage with political consumerism as a means of expressing their ethical, environmental and political intent, while simultaneously acknowledging the inherent ideological contradictions and structural limits of such actions. In doing so, this section brings to light their engagement with political consumerism as a paradox: both as an aspirational practice and a source of discomfort, ambivalence, and cognitive burden.

5.1. Between Ethical Intent and the Limits of Market Agency

Across both national contexts, many participants articulated political consumerism as a morally motivated act, as a means of aligning private choices with public values. These acts were deeply personal yet clearly intended to carry symbolic social and political meaning:

Boycotting is one of those little ways you can bring about change. I will never consciously buy stuff from Israeli settlements or Israel in general. Or stuff that might have ethical problems like palm oil for example, decimating habitats in Southeast Asia. Or Latin American soya. If I knew there was an ethical or political problem involved in any product, I would definitely boycott them.

(Participant S, UK)

For others, ethical consumption emerged through the rejection of animal-tested products or preference for vegan alternatives, driven by both care and critique:

For moral considerations my main concern is when I buy cosmetics to check if it has been tested on animals.

(Participant A, GR)

Buying meat is no longer in my consumer options. And I believe that in not doing so I play my part in the whole. It is, therefore, a decision which may indeed have political implications.

(Participant F, GR)

Yet, almost immediately, these ethical imperatives were tempered by economic reality. As participants attempted to enact their ethical, environmental and political intent, they encountered structural limits related to cost, availability, and information access:

If I were to buy exclusively organic, I would have to spend three or four times more… given my budget as a student, that would be practically impossible.

(Participant B, GR)

Participants from both countries, almost unanimously, conveyed an understanding of ethical responsibility being contingent on economic freedom:

It is very difficult for a 25-year-old right now in Greece to be able to afford what we want. At the end of the day, I do not make so much money that would give me the freedom to maintain a consistency between what I believe is right and what I actually do.

(Participant C, GR)

Participants from the UK echoed similar limits to their ethical responsibility:

The thing is, if you’re broke, you can’t afford to be ethical. You just get what’s cheapest—end of story.

(Participant N, UK)

The young people were not only aware of their limited purchasing power, but they also consistently pointed to the cognitive burden of making informed ethical decisions. As a participant from the UK explained:

The limit [of boycotting] is you never really know where everything is coming from. So, your ability to influence things in a meaningful way through boycotting is rather limited. It is hard to verify the production process of each and every product you buy […]. You cannot really make an informed decision about it when we are confronted with thousands of different products each and every time we go shopping.

(Participant L, UK)

Participants in Greece demonstrated a similar cognitive overload:

I have recently tried to slowly replace certain products with their eco-friendly alternatives. For example, you can easily find online a list of products that are being tested on animals. And of course, I would like to buy the ones not tested on animals. It is just that…I am not sure this information is actually trustworthy.

(Participant C, GR)

Building on this, Participant D noted:

There are many rumours about every major corporation, so if I were to double check every little rumour, I would literally have no time for anything else.

(Participant D, GR)

Participant B intervened to highlight:

This is the heart of the problem though, isn’t it? There is such an abundance of [product] information that makes it impossible to choose the ‘right’ one. It is a deeply political process, that!

(Participant B, GR)

This interaction among participants reinforces an understanding of the act of ethical consumption as a form of active labour (Baudrillard, 1981, p. viii), one that is accompanied by severe cognitive burden. Together, these accounts align with Fisher’s (2009) diagnosis of capitalist realism: the belief that while the current system is flawed, there is no viable alternative, leading to what he calls reflexive impotence. Participants are not naïve or unaware of their entrapment; they are painfully aware. This awareness, however, does not liberate them, but adds to the burden of ethical decision-making in a marketplace where every choice is overcoded with ideology. The following section analyses how young people navigate this ideological overload through defensive psychological and behavioural adjustments.

5.2. Cynical Distance and Reflexive Irony

Participants from both countries seemed to be acutely aware of the contradictions embedded in their political consumerism. Several of them expressed a sense of doing the right thing with full awareness that it was symbolically satisfying but structurally ineffective:

We are just trying to fill in the ‘holes’ of the system, instead of restructuring the system from the start. That’s why all this ethical buying feels… temporary. Like a band-aid.

(Participant D, GR)

Acts of political consumption thus become a form of depressive hedonia (Fisher, 2009), not an aspirational practice but a defence against despair. Several other participants also recognised the symbolic appeal of political consumerism while expressing doubt about its systemic impact. This reflexive irony stemming from their own attitude-behaviour gap (Ajzen & Fishbein, 1977) was poignantly captured by Participant D from Greece:

For example, a few years ago, there was that case of ATTIKI FOURNOI bakeries which were involved in a major trafficking scandal. Ten days or so after the scandal broke out, I found myself late at night right in front of one of their bakeries. I still went in and bought a cheese pie and a coffee. I just thought that my contribution would be minimal and so it would not really make a difference.

(Participant D, GR)

Such sentiments align closely with Žižek’s (1989/2009) notion of cynical distance—where belief persists not in spite of, but because of disbelief. Participants knew their consumption choices were compromised yet felt compelled to act within those constraints. As one participant from the UK admitted:

It is easy to assume that you can’t make a difference. Accepting that you never tried is a lot harder…

(Participant M, UK)

Here, the participant disavows the very act they continue to perform. Nevertheless, they are perfectly aware that their acts are essentially performative. As a participant from Greece conceded:

Eventually, I know I will just buy the offer (buy one/get 2 for free) than the product I believe I should ethically support.

(Participant H, GR)

This self-aware compromise is not evidence of apathy but a marker of an ideological field in which all resistance is already anticipated and contained by the industry. Once again, the participants are not unaware; rather, they are ideologically over-aware, and yet unable to act differently, exemplifying Žižek’s (1989/2009) notion of cynical ideology: “they know very well what they are doing, but still, they are doing it” (p. 30).

This contradiction is also famously captured in Fisher’s (2009) reading of Disney’s Wall-E, where audiences consume a dystopian critique of capitalism while sitting comfortably within a multiplex cinema, probably in a mall—the very symbolic structures the movie condemns. In doing so, they reproduce what Fisher calls reflexive impotence, i.e., the condition of knowing the system is broken, but continuing to act within it, unable to imagine or access a viable alternative. In an act of interpassivity (Žižek, 2008), they displace their structural dissatisfaction onto the culture industry (Adorno & Horkheimer, 1944/2002), the commercial consumption of cultural commodities. After all, who can tell a story better than Disney? A similar dynamic was echoed in participants’ reflections on ethical consumption. As one participant remarked:

I know switching from Coke to Green Cola probably won’t save the planet, but at least it makes me feel like I’m not part of the problem, you know?

(Participant E, GR)

Here, the participant expresses both cynical distance and continued participation. Participants are aware of the futility of their ethical action, yet they still engage in it. As with Wall-E, the critique is not repressed but re-absorbed in consumer choice, leaving participants caught in a loop of simulative politics of consumption devoid of any effective transformative potential (Blühdorn, 2017).

If the accounts in the previous section demonstrated the participants’ acute awareness of the structural limitations of political consumerism, these narratives vividly capture the ideological tensions underpinning the core of the paradox: political consumerism functions simultaneously as protest and as pacification. It allows individuals to feel politically engaged while ensuring that this engagement remains entirely compatible with—and often reinforces—the prevailing market logic. Blühdorn (2017) would identify this as a form of simulative politics, a ritualised dissent that sustains rather than disrupts the neoliberal order. The section that follows deepens this critique by examining the systematic manifestation of this paradox through the simulation, subversion, and commodification of resistance.

5.3. Simulation, Subversion, and the Commodification of Resistance

Many participants were also aware of how corporations appropriate the language of ethics to increase their market share. Perhaps most strikingly, several participants articulated a growing scepticism toward branding and the commodification of ethical messages. One participant presented a particularly bitter critique:

Yeah, we really supported MAMOS beer when it first came out, just to realise it was yet another Heineken product (…). Heineken just came up with a new Greek-sounding brand trying to get the alternative, buying-local market share5. The big companies will always be one step ahead…Here is a bio version for the same product. Here is an organic one. Unless you have a pretty good bullshit detector, the big companies will always try to fuck you around.

(Participant B, GR)

Another participant recounted the confusion of trying to distinguish between genuine ethical practices and performative branding:

I started buying EΨA because I thought it was Greek and ethical… then someone told me it’s just another brand owned by Coca Cola6. You feel cheated, but it’s everywhere.

(Participant H, GR)

Interestingly, while Participant H’s assumption that EΨA is owned by Coca-Cola is factually incorrect—EΨA is an independent Greek enterprise that has historically challenged multinational dominance—the objective corporate ledger matters less than the consumer’s symbolic reality. This empirical misattribution points back to Baudrillard’s (1981) thesis according to which contemporary consumption is about decoding and performing social meaning through a system of objects, and not solely engaging with the object’s material properties. Political consumerism becomes a semiotic performance, a way to express identity through brand affiliation. Arguably, however, such practices risk reinforcing the signifying structures of global capital itself. In this respect, commodities bearing labels such as ‘green’, ‘fair-trade’, ‘organic’, ‘zero’, ‘local’, and ‘ethical’ become signifiers of resistance that are nonetheless embedded in systems of mass production and corporate control. This renders political consumerism a form of simulation: it appears political, but what is being consumed is not dissent, but its simulacrum. Participants were fully aware of this contradiction. Yet, this simulacrum feels emotionally resonant and remains probably among the few tangible ways young people can express their ethical, political, and environmental contestations. Participants repeatedly highlighted this process through their references to misleading branding, vague certifications, and superficial environmental claims. Polanyi (1944/2002) had partially anticipated such a development through his concept of a double movement. In The Great Transformation (interestingly published in the same year as its ideological counterpart, Hayek’s (1944/2014) The Road to Serfdom) Polanyi describes a dynamic where the expansion of free markets is met with a counter-movement from civil society seeking protection against the adverse effects of this marketisation. However, the configuration illustrated in the focus groups reveals a third step in this dialectic: the ideological capture of civil society’s counter-movement by the market, with neoliberal capitalism in effect, selling an ideological critique of itself.

This commodification of resistance was a recurring theme across all four focus groups and both national contexts. As Adorno and Horkheimer (1944/2002) argue, in the culture industry, critique is commodified, and resistance becomes yet another aesthetic option. As Fisher (2009, p. 10) argues, “Capitalism is what is left when beliefs have collapsed at the level of ritual or symbolic elaboration, and all that is left is the consumer-spectator, trudging through the ruins and the relics”. This insight is particularly relevant to the participants who experienced profound cynicism regarding their shifting consumption patterns; whether discovering that an ostensibly alternative local option like MAMOS was anchored to global capital or suspecting an independent local brand, like EΨA, being a corporate multinational front. Notwithstanding the objective accuracy of these brand genealogies, these narratives demonstrate not only the total conflation of the political and the commercial spheres under neoliberal capitalism, but also the pervasiveness of a capitalist realism that systematically renders every act of consumer subversion into a commodified simulation.

6. Discussion: Political Consumerism and the Crisis of Political Imagination

Far from depicting youth as apathetic, these accounts reveal an ethically engaged and politically alert generational cohort; one that is acutely conscious of the limits of their market agency. Their political consumerism is riddled with ambivalence and contradictions of which young people are fully aware. Young people face these contradictions equipped with reflexive irony and cynical distance. Nevertheless, their political consumption persists. As Henn and Foard (2014) and Pickard (2019) have repeatedly found, young people are not disengaged. They are merely re-routing their engagement through modalities that reflect their economic, social and political realities.

Rather than interpreting political consumerism as naïve, apolitical, or superficial, this analysis foregrounds its paradoxical character: it is both an expression of dissent and a mechanism through which neoliberal capitalism absorbs, channels, and ultimately disarms that dissent. Young people do not simply buy into the system blindly; they are painfully aware of its paradoxical character, and yet they still engage in it. Their actions are shaped not by ignorance, but by over-awareness: of contradictions, of co-optation, of the limitations that define political life in the age of capitalist realism. Throughout the focus groups, political consumption was rarely celebrated; it was endured, as young people struggled to remain consistent with their values and politically relevant in a world that reduces politics to branding.

The limitation of political consumerism is not that it lacks sincerity or intensity on the individual level, but that it succeeds too well in simulating politics on the collective level (Kyroglou & Henn, 2022b). It allows young people to feel political, to perform resistance, without, however, demanding systemic rupture. It is a form of politics that can be neatly accommodated within the market; a rebellion without conflict. It is, in essence, the ideal form of post-democratic engagement for late capitalist, neoliberal societies. And yet, this simulation is not devoid of meaning. Instead, it offers an insight into how young people experience politics today: fragmented, ironic, mediated through brands and products, and yet still deeply invested with environmental, ethical, and political considerations.

The paradox of political consumerism, as evidenced through these focus groups, is not a flaw in young people’s political participation but a broader pathology of post-democratic society. In this respect, political consumerism is not a depoliticised act, but rather a politicised symptom. Blühdorn (2017) argues that we are living through a moment of sustainability without change, where political practices serve to reproduce rather than transform prevailing structures. Young people actively attempt to navigate this sociopolitical context. They resort to political consumerism as a means of staying true to their values in a world which renders political transformation increasingly unimaginable. What these accounts disclose, therefore, is not an apathetic generational cohort, but a broader crisis of political imagination under hegemonic neoliberalism:

My fear is there is lack of imagination or organisation among young people to challenge those illegitimate power structures and to overcome the limits of electoral democracy. If enough people got their shit together and wanted something, it should not really matter how flawed the system is…that alone should create enough leverage to see a significant change. But there is always that thing…that people are constantly busy making money to survive…that they cannot get their shit together…and so things are never going to change (…). Under the current economic system, when each generation reaches at the age of 30 or 40, they do not have any energy left to commit to politics. If your generation has not changed much by that point, it is pretty much over.

(Participant S, UK)

Ultimately, the analysis of the focus groups speaks of an affective subjugation of young people’s political imagination to what Fisher calls a business ontology. While the French slogan ‘L’imagination au pouvoir’ (‘Power to the imagination’) of May 1968 called young people to collectively explore their creative potential to transform society, Fisher highlights how contemporary capitalism stifles such imagination, making the envisioning of effective alternatives beyond the marketplace almost impossible. While ‘L’ imagination au pouvoir’ epitomised a revolutionary optimism, the analysis of the focus groups here allows for a diagnosis of capitalist realism as the contemporary malaise of a young generation that has instead internalised the ‘There is no alternative’ (TINA) slogan of Thatcherism.

This reading does not deny the intensity of young people’s ethical commitments. Instead, it perceives those commitments as a form of interpassivity; that is, situated within a political economy that displaces systemic change onto individual consumer action, essentially commodifying political participation itself. What emerges in this context, is a political subject who acts not out of naïve optimism but in full awareness of the ideological contours of neoliberalism; a subject who knows, and still buys.

Ultimately, this paradox is not only a feature of youth political engagement, but rather a reflection of a broader crisis of political imagination under neoliberalism. What counts as political, what feels actionable, and what appears meaningful are all increasingly framed both by and within market rationality. To understand youth political subjectivity today, we must therefore look not just at what young people do, but at the structures that make those actions possible and intelligible, in the first place.

Crucially, not all participants viewed these market-based choices purely through a lens of cynical defeat. Several explicitly defended their micro-actions as necessary, pragmatic stepping-stones that prefigure a capacity for broader collective action (Kyroglou & Henn, 2022b). This perceived ambivalence echoes previous research according to which youth political agency is best understood not through rigid binaries, but as a fluid, shifting practice grounded in an ethics of care, radical community, and everyday solidarity (Bowman, 2023; Bowman et al., 2023).

Indeed, it is precisely through these contradictions that something else might begin to stir. If political consumerism embodies simultaneously both agency and its constraints, it may also mark the limits of its own intelligibility—the point at which the neoliberal imaginary no longer fully pacifies. The frustrations, ambivalences, and ironies expressed in the empirical section above do not simply affirm the existing order; they signal an agonising aspiration that exceeds it.

Participant S from the UK exemplifies such glimpses of hope, ironically, when asked about his fears and expectations for the future. He expresses a post-capitalist desire (Fisher, 2020) towards the collective development of more autonomous, creative, radical imaginaries amidst the shambles of the existing instituted society:

My expectations and hopes are the flipside of my fears really. I hope that this radicalising experience that my generation has endured, this coming-of-age that we have all had trying to go through Uni or the job market right in the middle of the crisis, that experience of having to work really hard to survive while coming to the realisation that the system is broken, and was never intended to work for young people in the first place […] that it all translates into collectively amassing the energy to create systemic change. But although I try to be optimistic, I genuinely do not know whether it will happen or not…not in our generation in any case.

(Participant S, UK)

As Castoriadis (1987) reminds us, no imaginary is eternal. The closure of possibility is never absolute. Traces of refusal, moments of incoherence, and everyday disidentifications may prefigure the re-opening of the political, no matter how fragmentary or fleeting this might have previously seemed. The task for youth studies is not only to critique the existing conditions of heteronomy, but to remain attuned to the forms of youth autonomy that might still flicker within its cracks. To that extent, political consumerism may not be the horizon of transformation it promises. However, by exposing the limits of the existing neoliberal imaginary, young people also gesture toward the conditions under which a new radical imaginary could emerge.

7. Conclusions: Reconstituting the Collective Political Imagination

This article has examined the complex terrain of political consumerism among young people in Greece and the UK, not as an emergent form of resistance to neoliberal capitalism, but as a symptom of neoliberalism’s ideological and affective hold. Drawing on empirical data from focus groups and grounded in critical and cultural theory, it has mapped the everyday tensions, compromises, and contradictions that define political consumption as a mode of youth political engagement. The findings from both national contexts illustrate a cohort of young neoliberal natives who are reflexive, ethically motivated, and politically aware, yet operating within a system that displaces structural transformation onto individualised acts of consumption.

At the heart of this research lies the paradox of political consumerism: the idea that consumption-based acts of resistance both express and reproduce the conditions they oppose. Political consumerism promises agency but delivers constraint; it enables individuals to perform their political contestations while absorbing their dissent into a business ontology. It is a practice through which young people may align their actions with their values, but in doing so, they also reaffirm the neoliberal framing of politics as a matter of personal responsibility and ethical lifestyle. The paradox, then, is not simply behavioural or structural; it is primarily ideological. Political consumerism enacts a critique that is inherently and pre-emptively neutralised.

Throughout this article, this analysis has synthesised the perspectives of Adorno and Horkheimer, Baudrillard, Žižek, Fisher, and Blühdorn to frame this condition not as a failure of youth political engagement, but as a form of participation that is simultaneously politically charged and ideologically captured. From Fisher’s (2009) notion of reflexive impotence to Žižek’s (1989/2009) reading of cynical ideology and Blühdorn’s (2017) simulative politics, the theoretical lens has illustrated how political consumerism sustains the illusion of choice, while foreclosing political alternatives. This is not because these neoliberal natives lack ethical, environmental or political values, nor the commitment to enact them, but because they are being called to act within a political economy that systematically reduces engagement to performative rituals and stifles political imagination.

The crisis, then, is not merely one of participation, but one of political imagination. Political consumerism emerges as a rational response to a deeply irrational system, one in which political agency is displaced by market signalling, and ideological critique is repackaged as brand differentiation. The supermarket becomes both a stage and a prison: a site where ethical and political identities are performed, but where political meaning and potential are continually deferred.

Future research, therefore, must seek not only to explore how young people engage politically, but also how they imagine political possibility under the prevailing ideological conditions of late modernity, while actively working to theorise the reconstitution of the ‘political’ as a collective and imaginative endeavour.