Workers and their alter egos as consumers

While socialists hardly need reminding that employers often mistreat their workers, we tend to overlook situations in which workers mistreat other workers. This tendency is exacerbated by discourses that urge us to act as consumers, and to treat cheap commodities as ‘bargains' rather than, for example, as the result of someone else's poor working conditions. This paper uses arguments from political and moral economy to illustrate some of the ways in which workers, in their alter egos as consumers, are causally implicated in the poor pay and conditions of other workers, and uses Marx's notion of commodity fetishism to explain why we tend to overlook this. © 2008, SAGE Publications. All rights reserved