Commodity Fetishism and Consumer Senses: Turn-of-the-Twentieth-Century Consumer Activism in the United States and England TAD SKOTNICKI * Abstract At the turn of the twentieth century, the National Consumers’ League, the Co-operative Wholesale Society, and the Women’s Co-operative Guild encouraged people to become ethical consumers. I argue that we can explain their common strat- egies by invoking commodity fetishism. By casting their consumer activism as a prac- tical response to the fetish of commodities, we explain: 1) activists’ use of sensory techniques – both figurative and literal – to connect producers, commodities, and consumers and 2) their commitment to the ethical power of the senses. This account reveals the virtues of commodity fetishism as a tool for understanding the dynamics of consumer activism. ***** In Lawrence Glickman’s landmark history of consumer activism in America, he identifies a “denigration of the importance of the senses” that accompanied the emergence of “modern consumer activism.” 1 “The force of one’s actions as a consumer,” he writes, “typically extended far beyond the local, making it necessary to relegate the senses to a lesser order power, in favor of an understanding of the causal impact of consumption along the axis of distant markets.” 2 As a consumer, one could not trust one’s senses to ferret out the provenance of anonymous commodities, nor could one see the effects of one’s actions on distant workers. Thus, to understand the consumer as responsible for workers’ distant suffering entailed the degradation of the senses as a tool for consumer activists. Yet, I show how pioneering turn-of-the-twentieth century consumer activists in England and the United States appealed to consumers’ senses in spite of such degradation. Such appeals sought to render the social relations of labor behind the commodity perceptible to consumers. Activists’ encouraged consumers to perceive the working conditions of physically and culturally distant laborers through both figurative and literal means – from elaborate written descriptions of workplaces to travelling exhibits of goods made in sweatshops. I call these tactics for generating collective action by connecting the labor process, commodities, and consumers, “sensory techniques.” These sensory techniques were premised on an assumption of the “ethical power * Tad Skotnicki is a lecturer in Sociology at the University of California, San Diego. E-mail: tskotnic@ucsd.edu; t.skotnicki@gmail.com © 2015 John Wiley & Sons Ltd Journal of Historical Sociology Vol. •• No. •• •• 2015 DOI: 10.1111/johs.12114