Buy nothing: improve everything

Humanist, Nov-Dec, 2003 by Ilana Boivie

For the 2003 Buy Nothing Day celebration, organizers are encouraging participation that is more expansive than the simple act of not making a purchase. Local activists can host a swap meet or barter fair; plan a free concert, lecture, teach-in, or all-night party; organize a march through a mall where members of the group each wear a tee-shirt reading "The More You Consume the Less You Live;" set up a credit card cutup table in front of the mall; make a classroom presentation; meet with media; protest sweatshop labor, urban sprawl, and sport utility vehicles; or go "fanclubbing"--buying and returning items all day long.

The day has also inspired participation beyond the western hemisphere. In Europe and elsewhere it will be celebrated on November 29, 2003 (the principal shopping day for countries which don't celebrate the U.S. Thanksgiving). There are now websites promoting International Buy Nothing Day in dozens of nations and activities similar to those in the United States and Canada are being planned in over fifty nations worldwide, including France, Germany, Iceland, Israel, Japan, New Zealand, Sweden, and the United Kingdom.

With increasing support comes ambition; the Buy Nothing Day mission is now being expanded into an even larger mass protest. A group of Canadian Mennonites, for example, have extended the initiative into a Buy Nothing Christmas, a "whimsical social experiment with a hidden agenda" encouraging sympathetic people to spend time with friends and family rather than spend money on unnecessary material gifts. On its website organizer Aiden Schlichting Enns, managing editor of Adbusters, describes it as "an excellent way to generate some good dinner-table discussions on the topic of economics, politics, religion, and what we're not getting each other for Christmas."

In addition, Adbusters is seeking to take the initiative beyond a day and a season and into Buy Nothing All Year. Enns explains, "In this new century of unprecedented corporate power and weak-kneed government, the mood is turning to a global mindshift. A new economics is no longer an academic solution--it's the people's choice, the Buy Nothing Day spirit carried into the whole of the year."

For consumers to consider the necessity of each purchase seems reasonable--yet this is hardly promoted in Western corporate culture. So a permanent, pervasive "buy nothing" mentality, originating at the grassroots, may be the means to instigate a major economic change. In her best-selling book, No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies, Naomi Klein maintains that, though the mass media tends to slight any anti-corporate demonstration, consumer boycotts are more accurately "political campaigns that use consumer goods as readily accessible targets, as public relations levers and as popular-education tools." An individual-based, grassroots movement to revolutionize global economics can be inspiring. As Enns puts it,

   I see society dominated by big businesses--the
   media is owned by fewer and fewer big corporations,
   entertainment industries own media outlets,
   internet sites and even phone lines, our retail
   stores are dominated by international companies....
   In some respects, citizens as consumers
   have been reduced to the role of subjects in a feudal
   society, where corporate interests are king.
   It's empowering for me to shed this self-concept
   and take an anti-consumerist stance.