Americans who couldn’t defeat President Donald Trump in the voting booth are planning on Friday to fight back — with their pocketbooks.
The People’s Union USA, a movement led by a former drum instructor John Schwarz, organized a 24-hour “economic blackout” that calls on American consumers to make no purchases, especially from major retail, gas, or fast food companies. If people need to buy essentials, they are urged to shop at local, small businesses.
Schwarz said the boycott is meant to send a message to “the elite” that everyday people hold the economic power and to “expose” the corruption of corporations, industries, and politicians. Future weeklong boycotts targeting Amazon, Nestlé, Target, and Walmart are planned from March until July.
“Corporations profit off of our labor while keeping wages low, banks steal billions through inflation and predatory policies, politicians accept bribes disguised as donations while ignoring the people,” Schwarz said in a viral video posted on Instagram. “They have taken everything from us while convincing us we should be grateful of the scraps. And that ends now.”
Consumer-led boycotts aren’t a new phenomena. In fact, they span decades and have grown alongside an increasingly popular theory and social movement similarly aiming to wrest control away from corporations and put it in the hands of the people.
Rooted in the work of American and European political theorists of the 1970s, the “degrowth” movement criticizes a capitalist system that seeks unending growth and profit, which has led to ecological and environmental ruin such as the impacts of climate change. Instead, it advocates for a system that prioritizes the needs of the planet and its people, such as housing, education, and health care. According to Jason Hickel, a leading advocate of degrowth and author of “Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World,” the movement calls for reducing consumption and production of things that harm the planet such fossil fuels, SUVs, private jets, mansions, fast fashion, industrial beef, cruise ships, and the military–industrial complex.
While the term may be unfamiliar to many Americans, its core ideas have cropped up in the Green New Deal’s goals of a post-fossil fuel economy; the pandemic-era phenomenon of white-collar workers voluntarily quitting their jobs and working less; and the recent social media trend of “no buy,” which encouraged people to purchase less and repurpose more.
“People are getting a sense that they’re ripped off, that they’re being taken advantage of and exploited as consumers,” said Aaron Vansintjan, co-author of “The Future Is Degrowth: A Guide to a World Beyond Capitalism.” “It is promising that people are responding to the current moment by showing their distrust of these corporations.”
The boycott has drawn wide–ranging media coverage, along with the attention of some celebrities. It also caught the attention of Linda Sarsour, a progressive activist best known for organizing the 2017 Women’s March after Trump’s first election.
“It is an easy risk-free way to invite masses of people to act in reaction to the outrageousness of this Administration,” Sarsour told The Intercept in an email. She said her group, Until Freedom, is also backing the Black-led boycott of Target, which rolled back its diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives in lockstep with the Trump administration’s attacks on DEI in the federal government. A separate pro-DEI boycott by Rev. Al Sharpton’s National Action Network is being planned after committing to “do the Dr. King-Rosa Parks on” companies that have eliminated diversity efforts.
Along with executive actions targeting diversity efforts, the Trump administration has spent its first weeks cozying up to corporate interests. House Republicans on Wednesday narrowly passed a budget, which calls for $4.5 trillion in tax cuts and increases in military and border security spending. Such a plan would benefit ultra-rich corporate owners and will likely lead to cuts in social programs such as Medicaid.
Last week, billionaire Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency called for the laying off Social Security Administration workers, which may limit the access of vulnerable Americans to Social Security payments. Musk previously attacked the program, falsely alleging that tens of millions of dead people are still getting government benefits.
The Trump administration has also halted work at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a watchdog governmental agency that defends consumers from predatory companies and banks. This week, the bureau dropped its lawsuits against major companies, such as Capitol One, which allegedly cheated millions of customers out of $8 billion in interest payments.
Schwarz, who did not respond to The Intercept’s request for comment, does not mention the Trump administration or specific policies in his messaging, and instead takes aim at “politicians ‘both left and right’” who have “passed laws that serve billionaires.”
While it’s unclear what movements and ideas Schwarz is drawing from for the February 28 boycott, Hickel sees overlap between Friday’s economic blackout and the broader degrowth movement.
“Degrowth calls for greater democratic control over production, and calls for production to be organized around human well-being and social progress rather than around profit maximization,” Hickel, who teaches at the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology in Spain, told The Intercept.
“Going after companies like Amazon and Nestlé and others, which are characterized by corporate greed and mistreatment of workers, is certainly in line with that,” he said. “Degrowth is also strongly anti-colonial, and many of the targeted companies, such as Nestlé, benefit from brutal exploitation of people in the global South.”
He also pointed to the campaign’s encouragement of spending toward local businesses, which further aligns with degrowth, since such small businesses “tend to be more democratic and more ethically oriented.”
For Matthias Schmelzer, another leading expert in degrowth and co-author with Vansintjan on “The Future Is Degrowth,” the boycotts recall other recent consumer-led movements:
- The anti-capitalist No Logo movement of the early 2000s, borrowing its name from Naomi Klein’s book, published shortly after the 1999 Seattle World Trade Organization protests.
- No-buy Black Friday boycotts, which sprung up amid demonstrations by labor unions fighting for better pay, climate activists opposing the environmental effects of excessive consumption, as well as Black Lives Matter protesters after a grand jury decision not to indict the police officer who killed Michael Brown.
- The Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement which opposes Israel’s occupation and apartheid in Palestine and is modeled after the boycott movement against apartheid South Africa. The BDS movement has put a sizable dent in the sales and profits of McDonald’s and Starbucks, primarily in Muslim-majority countries, over the companies’ ties to Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza.
While such actions put public and political pressure on companies, there is a ceiling to consumer-led boycotts, Schmelzer cautioned.
“As consumers, we have only a very limited amount of power,” Schmelzer said. “That’s why I’m very skeptical about the effectiveness of these boycott actions to actually shift markets.”
Vansintjan is also skeptical about the long-term impact of the February 28 boycott, especially without the backing of organized labor. A resident of Montreal, Vansintjan pointed to a consumer-led boycott last year of Canadian grocery chain Loblaw over rising prices of goods. Despite the boycott, which was organized primarily through Reddit and was widely popular among Canadians, the chain reported increased profits. There was an eventual dip to their earnings, but that was likely due to a lawsuit over price-gouging.
Even so, Vansintjan was encouraged by the excitement around the February 28 boycott. He hopes it will translate into further action aiming to impact not just corporate sales, but also corporate shareholders, who are typically unaffected by single-day dips in revenue.
He mentioned a nationwide boycott in Canada against Amazon, which closed all of its Quebec warehouses after workers there recently formed a union. Labor unions are leading the boycott, but local governments have also joined the action with the city of Montreal ceasing to buy from Amazon and pledging to instead buy local.
Though the power of consumers may be limited, Vansintjan said, the power of workers and tenants is more vast. Employees can call on their employers to divest their pension funds from target companies. Tenant organizing can oppose landlords on rent increases or evictions, which would be felt by large companies that tend to invest their profits in real estate. Such movements can not only hurt the value of a company’s assets, but can also affect its perceived value in the eyes of shareholders.
“It’s hard to have an impact where you shop, because most of us don’t actually have much of a choice in that,” he said, acknowledging the monopolies some companies have on essential goods. But “as a worker or as a tenant, you actually can have an impact because you live somewhere, you work somewhere — it’s a place where you are able to resist your own exploitation.”
