To buy or not to buy

Amanda McLeod

This article was published in Living Ethics: issue 77 spring 2009

If you’re seriously into sustainability, writes Amanda McLeod, you should be buying nothing as much as you can, firstly rejecting the mass consumption ethic.

Since the end of the Second World War, Australians have become increasingly willing and able to buy an ever expanding array of consumer products. Prosperity and security for both individuals and nation states has been based on the dual pursuits of mass production and mass consumption.

The concept of marketing that emerged in the post-war period to ensure continued consumption was established on the premise that the ‘consumer is king’; that is, that the consumer interest be at the centre of all marketing decisions. Consistent with laissez-faire ideology, this view held that no external intervention in the market was needed because if marketers acted against the consumer interest consumers would simply go elsewhere. Healthy competition would give consumers what they wanted by giving them power to choose. For others, of course, the mere idea of consumer sovereignty was illusory.

Against the power and persuasion of marketing and advertising, and the allure of easily available credit, the consumer had little, if any, power. Despite acknowledgment of the consumer interest, the consumer was, as one writer commented, ‘a part-time and often incompetent sovereign’. Governments intervened in the market to forge a middle path between these opposing views; consumer policy has been focused on making the market work more efficiently and to ensure that consumers felt confident enough to continue to consume. The consumer movement, too, was built upon the desire to enable consumers to participate efficiently and equitably.

the message of spend, spend, spend as if the prosperity of the country depends upon it is as problematic as it is compelling

Without question, consumerism became the most dominant ideology of the second half of the twentieth century. But the message of spend, spend, spend as if the prosperity of the country depends upon it is as problematic as it is compelling. If consumption is a democratic duty, whose responsibility is it to deal with the problems of over-consumption such as climate change? Over-consumption is a serious issue, but one not taken up by the agencies, advocates and business interests that have been geared at increasing consumption, making the market work more efficiently, providing access to consumption and protecting the consumer interest.

According to free-market theory, consumers have the greatest power in the marketplace; they have the power to choose to buy one product over another. But the power of consumer choice in the marketplace cannot be limited to increasing the number and types of products available at a range of prices from a variety of sources. Sustainable consumption cannot be limited to finding alternatives for existing products. It is over-consumption – not just the methods of production – that is at the heart of the problem.

Consumer commentators have paid little more than lip-service in their acknowledgement of the four consumer rights as proposed by President John F Kennedy in 1962. The right to safety, to be informed, to choose and to be heard are the central tenets of the consumer movement. Few seek to clarify or question what the rights mean and how they might be extended. When the United Nations added an additional four guidelines in 1985: the right to the satisfaction of basic needs, to redress, to education, and to a healthy environment, there was little, if any, debate about how competing consumer rights were to be balanced.

The final right – the right to a healthy environment – was aimed at improving the environmental impact of production; to protect local communities, particularly in the developing world, from factory emissions and other pollutants. More recently advocates have promoted the idea of ‘sustainable consumption’: switching to ‘green power’, recycling and reducing packaging in an effort to reduce harm to the environment.

However, there has not been a sustained effort to question the overall ideology of consumption and to rein in the excesses of unlimited choice. How is the ‘right to the satisfaction of basic needs’ to be balanced with the ‘right to a healthy environment’? The pursuit of prosperity dependent on mass consumption is not based on ‘the satisfaction of basic needs’, rather consumer capitalism is dependent on exponentially increasing consumer needs and wants and converting luxuries into necessities. Mass consumption has delivered benefits to a privileged few but has left much of the world’s population in poverty. The ‘race to the bottom’, in an effort to serve consumer choice, benefits very few – and it certainly does not serve the long-term interests of consumers and the planet.

Since the 1970s, consumers have been told to ‘reduce, reuse, recycle’, yet these alternatives are often based on ways to reduce specific harms rather than presenting a serious challenge to consumer capitalism by reducing consumption per se. Most consumer information has been focused on encouraging consumption and alternatives are limited to reducing packaging, food miles etc. While sustained attention has been directed at boycotting particular brands in an effort to force companies to change their unethical practices, little attention has been given to the rejection of entire groups of consumer products and the mass consumption ethic more generally.

Instead of trying to ascertain the merits of particular brands – whether products are actually organic, free-range, fair trade, the ethics of the company producing it (or its parent-company), how and where it was produced – it is perhaps more ethical and simpler not to buy at all. Until governments get serious about labelling products to provide real information and until marketers stop co-opting ‘informative’ terms such as ‘eco’, ‘green’, ‘sustainable’ and ‘free-range’ in an effort to prey on consumer insecurities, the real power lies in not buying.

When in doubt about motives or origins, advertised claims or informative labelling – don’t buy. It might be that simple.