Between Self-Change and Social Change: On the Present of the 1970s Alternative Consumption Discourse

Starting from the currency of ecological attitudes and protest phenomena in the course of the so-called climate debate, the essay asks about their cultural and historical specificity. Three peculiarities of ecological criticism can be identified: firstly, the focus on action alternatives in the immediately available everyday life, secondly, a turn towards the self and its potential for change as a precondition for societal change, and thirdly, a temporal determination of social action as pointing towards the future. Consumer behavior and consumer ideas repeatedly move into the center of the ecological search for solutions, also in the West German alternative milieu of the 1970s, where critical consumption began, so the assumption. Using contemporary magazine material from the historical discourse, the historicity of the three peculiarities will be made clear, but also how the culture and attitude of the alternatives of the 1970s differ from today’s consumer criticisms.