Shopping for a Sustainable Future: The Promises of a Collectively Planned Consumption

Overconsumption, with associated processes of consumerism and commodification, has gained centrality and it is today at the heart of several contemporary social movement organizations which stress the contradiction between capitalist growth versus living conditions in the community. Drawing on the case study of GAS (Solidarity Purchase Groups) in Italy, this chapter looks at how people self-organize to achieve socially and environmentally sustainable transitions. Key issues addressed in this chapter are how political consumerism and collective practices of sustainable procuring and provisioning can challenge commodification and constitute the bases for original “assemblages” that not only may offer concrete alternatives to the current unsustainable system, but indeed embody a novel style of doing politics.