Alexander Sedlmaier's Consumption and Violence explores the conundrum faced by West German radical leftists after 1968: how to reject capitalist consumer society while continuing to live in a capitalist consumer society? It is the same dilemma examined in recent books by Timothy S. Brown (West Germany and the Global Sixties: The Anti-Authoritarian Revolt, 1962–1978 [2013]) and Sven Reichardt (Authentizität und Gemeinschaft. Linksalternatives Leben in den siebziger und frühen achtziger Jahren [2014]). Yet, whereas those authors explore the creation of counter-publics and the institutions of an alternative milieu, Sedlmaier focuses on the critique of consumerism itself and on the frequently violent acts of protest against it. His paradigmatic object is not the underground rock concert or the organic food coop but rather the ticking bomb in the department store—often West Berlin's Kaufhaus des Westens, the temple of plenty that “remained a powerful political symbol” for the left (285).

Sedlmaier dedicates the first three chapters to the writings of a triumvirate of the ’68 pantheon: the group Subversive Aktion, which grew out of the German wing of the Situationist International and was led by master provocateur Dieter Kunzelmann; Frankfurt School émigré theorist Herbert Marcuse; and the first generation of the Red Army Faction. All three subscribed to loose economic theories of zero-sum imperialism whereby Western prosperity depended on, and deepened, Third World immiseration, as well as to “manipulationist theories” (111), which held that consumerism produced false needs and an appearance of satisfaction that concealed an inner, existential poverty. Sedlmaier usefully borrows the Norwegian sociologist Johan Galtung's term “structural violence” (76) to summarize these critics’ definitions of how Gewalt was always either nascent or explicit in what Marcuse called the “cruel affluence” (80) of the postwar standard of living, and its linked products of “guns and butter, napalm and color TV” (80).

Sedlmaier himself notes that his protagonists’ theories were out of sync with current academic approaches to the question of consumption. The radicals were often, by turns, self-aggrandizing and unhelpfully absolute, offering ineffective organizing strategies and soggy modes of analysis. This is not to criticize Sedlmaier's treatment of the subject: his pool of sources is deep and vast, and he is expert at fishing out gems from the archives of the alternative student movement and at teasing out the tangled theses of the social scientists. The decisive question for radicals was whether it was possible to reform existing modes of consumption while developing alternative ones, or if an outright rejection of consumption as such was necessary. Scurrilous attacks on critical students by the organs of cultural consumption, including the tabloid press, fueled the rejectionist position, but this proved unproductive in expanding the base of the movement. One sees time and again in Sedlmaier's narrative how popular sympathy evaporated when the radicals turned to violence against either things or people. In the end, the notions of “structural” or “societal violence” failed to convince average Germans of their own complicity in broader systems of exploitation, even if they were disgruntled over the rising cost of living. This left the charge of “false consciousness” and manipulation as the last weapon of critique—a stance difficult to distinguish from educated middle-class condescension toward the hard-working masses.

In rhetoric and occasionally in action, the three groups discussed in the book's early chapters all prescribed an all-or-nothing model of politics, tolerating no compromise of any kind with the capitalist way of life. It is ironic that the Red Army Faction's position of moral purity and absolute abstinence was partially tenable only because their daily needs were being provided for by the state's prison system. Those critics not in prison had to wrangle more with their own collusion in what Sedlmaier calls—in place of “consumption”—“regimes of provision” (11). In exploring fields of such frequently agonizing compromise, the second half of Sedlmaier's book breaks fresher ground than the first.

As it turns out, radicals seldom “détourned” consumption so directly as the man in a balaclava—seen in the cover photo of the book—pushing a shopping cart full of cobblestones, presumably destined for local windows. Sedlmaier shows that it was in more modest actions—protesting against transit fare increases or protecting squatted buildings—that the critics of consumption had their greatest efficacy. His finely-reconstructed case studies of ride-sharing, rent strikes, and squatting all explore the right to the city, a critical aspect of German leftist politics that had been severely understudied until the publication of the studies mentioned earlier, as well as of Alexander Vasudevan's Metropolitan Preoccupations: The Spatial Politics of Squatting in Berlin (2015).

The superb final chapter offers a prehistory of the antiglobalization movement of the 1990s and 2000s, beginning with the activism of the 1970s. Far from retreating into parochialism in the neighborhood, activists took up positions of opposition on questions of international trade and finance, apartheid, as well as sex tourism and trafficking. On this last point, Sedlmaier's contributions on the women's movement—above all the focus on sex work in the protest of the 1980s—are especially welcome. That said, one might have expected earlier treatment of feminism, which was obviously critical in politicizing the matters of everyday life.

In an equally strong conclusion, Siedlmaier draws out the political difficulties faced by activists as they reckoned with their unavoidable contribution to the very socio-economic dynamic they abhorred. Gentrification offers the most marked instance of this. Efforts to drop out of consumer society have ended up leading to a process that revalorizes formerly downtrodden areas—especially since the shift of middle-class taste in favor of refurbished older buildings that, in an earlier era, would have been demolished to make way for modern flats. What to do when alternative consumerism begets its own gravediggers? Sedlmaier's book offers a fascinating guide to a half-century of this dilemma, while leaving questions that remain necessarily unanswered.