The S&P 500 jumped more than 1.5% yesterday. The Dow rose about 1.4%, and the Nasdaq went up around 1.6%. After a rough month it was a pretty good Friday for Wall Street.
In other words, yesterday’s Economic Blackout — a national consumer boycott organized by online liberals — failed. The so-called People’s Union USA, which took the lead in promoting the boycott, declared that “If we disrupt the economy for just ONE day, it sends a powerful message.” Unfortunately, they could not even disrupt the economy for a single day.
Exactly what message were we supposed to be sending? Here’s how Robert Reich put it:
The purpose is to send a clear message: We have the power. We don’t have to accept corporate monopolies. We don’t have to live with corporate money corrupting our politics. We don’t have to accept more tax cuts for billionaires. We don’t have to pay more of our hard-earned cash to Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos or Mark Zuckerberg or the other billionaire oligarchs. We don’t have to reward corporations that have abandoned their DEI policies to align themselves with Trump’s racist, homophobic, misogynistic agenda. We have choices.
As it turns out, we don’t have the power. At least, not as consumers.
***
Boycotts fail for all kinds of reasons so it is hard to say what happened with this one. The most likely explanation is that no one outside of extremely online liberal circles even knew that anything was going on. There was some sporadic coverage of the Economic Blackout in national outlets like NPR and in the New York Times, but it was hardly trending — coverage of Luka Doncic’s 31 point game drowned it out last night. The People’s Union USA has itself only earned a little more than 2,000 donations. As usually happens with this sort of initiative, Americans are so atomized and pacified that it is nearly impossible to spur them to collective action on any kind of significant scale.
Another likely explanation is that the boycott wasn’t even consistently observed by its participants. Some instructions for the boycott called on people not to make any purchases on Friday. Others, like those given by Reich, simply asked people to avoid buying things from “big corporations.” Most versions of the call-to-action also left too much counterproductive wiggle room for the boycott to possibly be effective: for example, by encouraging participants to just do their shopping the night before.
Either way, the Economic Blackout plainly fell afoul of a the basic collective action problem that always plagues consumer activism.
The basic premise behind most consumer activism is that individuals can, by acting together, bend the markets to their will. This has proven demonstrably possible on a small scale, and there seems to be no logical reason for it to be impossible on a large scale. But in practice, the national — and increasingly global — marketplace has simply proven too large for enough individuals to coordinate their consumption. Even the internet has proven incapable of overcoming this problem since the information space online is too fragmented and dominated by business interests to facilitate any kind of large-scale consumer coordination.
This problem creates a serious objection to free market doctrine. In response to calls for regulation, capitalists often insist that consumers are capable of regulating the market themselves: through coordinated action, they can do things like deny their business to polluters or racists or bosses who pay miserly wages. This mechanism, we are told, is much more direct and nimble than onerous government regulation, which is always heavy-handed and ripe for abuse.
But if individuals can’t coordinate their consumption at a scale large enough to impact markets then capitalism cannot self-regulate — at least, not in any kind of deliberate, intentional way. In that case, we have to either resign ourselves to letting market logic rule our society or be willing to wield state power and regulate markets in line with our priorities, values, and so on.
One can see, then, how the logic of boycotts is inextricably bound with the logic of capitalism. Liberals like Reich love boycotts not only because they feel empowering, but because they empower us without any need to rely on sinister state intervention.1
On that note I am extremely confused about Reich’s reference to monopolies. If these corporate monopolies are still responsive to consumer action expressed through the market in what sense are they actually monopolies? Isn’t the whole problem with monopolies that they won’t even respond to things like boycotts because they’ve completely captured the market? How do we “have choices” and have monopolies at the same time? This may seem pedantic but it point us towards some real conceptual confusion that lies at the heart of liberalism.