Consumer Protest: Anticapitalism

People often deploy their consumer choices to make their voices heard for a number of global political, humanitarian, or ecological issues. Against traditional critical views of consumption as an alternative to political rebellion, the sphere of consumption can constitute itself as a space for forms of political action. For example, as early as the late-eighteenth century, English women used their consumer power to support abolitionism, notes Kate Davies. Later, at the turn of the twentieth century, the National Consumer Leagues appeared in the United States and were mostly concerned with using manifestations and boycotts on the part of consumers to exert indirect pressure on specific enterprises denounced as both producers and employers. Founded by Florence Kelley and inspired by the Progressive movement, social justice was their utmost purpose, that is, they published “white lists” of manufacturers who treated their workers fairly. They anticipated the sequence of mobilizations against the rising cost of living that sprang up around World War I in many Western countries often led by housewives organizations. The French Ligue Sociale d'Acheteurs, for example, was influenced by its American counterpart and was likewise created for the ethical education of consumers, with the aim of bringing about changes in working conditions by developing a sense of responsibility in buyers for the treatment of workers, portraying consumers as citizens who had the “right to intervene in capitalism” (Chessel 2006). Broadly speaking, those movements were successful in inspiring changes in legislation regarding work or price control, and they effectively offered women a possibility to speak out and act in the public sphere; in their capacity as consumers, women claimed the responsibility and right to intervene in masculine territories such as work, trade unionism, and local and national politics.

Early examples of consumer protest were consolidated in the postwar period with the adoption by various international bodies of consumer rights. Such a blend of consumerism is largely internal to existing market relations and concerned with value-for-money and information transparency. However, still today this is clearly not the only way for consumers to associate. Especially after the World Trade Organization (WTO) 1999 protests in Seattle, the political investment of the consumer has become more explicitly geared against capitalism as we know it.

Global capitalism has tended to raise local hackles, provoking resistance in many different forms, including fundamentalist ones. As globalization proceeds, it is especially large multinationals that have become the targets of growing critical attention, within environmentalist organizations and the alter-global movement. Economic globalization has highlighted a number of external diseconomies that derive from market expansion as currently managed (such as pollution, the inequality between consumers, the widening gap between North and South, food scares, etc.). In introducing innovations that alter the routines of consumption and expand the geographical range of social group interaction, globalization creates a space to bring into question the naturalized boundaries of the market, giving way to a number of grassroots movements that have organized not only boycotts of particular products, but also powerful symbolic protests.

The spread of McDonald's on the world scale, for example, has stimulated numerous hotbeds of resistance that have often taken on global dimensions but press for local control of resources. In particular, since 1985, the London-based group of the international environmental movement Greenpeace has promoted an anti-McDonald's campaign, a boycott day that is held every autumn in a growing number of countries. The growing success of this initiative is also due to the massive public resonance of the libel case that McDonald's brought against two Greenpeace activists for their distribution of protest leaflets. The leaflet maintained that the American giant exploited children with its advertising and its employees with low pay, promoted unhealthy eating, damaged the environment through encouraging the deforestation of Amazonian lands to produce low-cost forage, and treated animals in inhumane fashion. The so-called McLibel case, still the longest running case in English legal history (from 1994 to 1997) was a public relations disaster for McDonald's, which, despite its skilful lawyers, was unable to win on all items (Vidal 1997).

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