Neoliberals co-opt left critiques to discredit even market-based ethical consumption.

Evidence

However, now that fair trade coffee has achieved a substantial presence in the marketplace, along comes a concerned member of the Neoliberal Thought Collective just in time to insist that you only hurt yourself by purchasing fair trade coffee. Primarily, the critique rests upon a standard neoclassical economic argument about misaligned “incentives”: it is asserted that whenever prices rise, co-ops sell their inferior beans to the FLOI system and reserve their quality stock for the utterly free market in specialty coffees—in other words, the fair trade brand dupes clueless café liberals into paying more for a crappier cup of coffee. Unabashedly taking a page from the left, this critique also suggests that the FLOI funds don’t really trickle down to a substantial degree to the peasant level, and that free trade has proven little more than a marketing ploy that channels much of the profits back into advertising. It is not that these questions have been settled by concerted empiricism—they have not—but the payoff comes in the moral of the story: if you had capitulated to the wisdom of the totally free market in the first place, everything would have worked out just fine. — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 411

Categorization

• SEED: Essay angle: how the thought collective weaponizes its opponents’ own tools — adopting left rhetoric against fair trade — as a mechanism for neoliberal ideological resilience.
• XREF: Exemplifies the ‘thought collective’ phenomenon the reader is tracking; connects to Mirowski’s larger argument about critique absorption. — connects to: The left’s reliance on orthodox economics enabled its co-optation by neoliberalism — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 901; Capitalism absorbed its critics’ language to legitimize neoliberal privatization — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 439; Neoliberals weaponized the household critique to discredit all politics — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights…, 158 (+2 more)

Broader Connections

• Capitalism absorbed its critics’ language to legitimize neoliberal privatization #exemplifies (0.88) — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 439
• Neoliberals weaponized the household critique to discredit all politics #corroborates (0.75) — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 158
• The left’s reliance on orthodox economics enabled its co-optation by neoliberalism #expands (0.72) — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 901