Social activism in an age of consumption: the organized consumer movement

This article explores the impact of consumer activism upon understandings of social activism more generally. Consumer organizing, especially in the form associated with comparative testing magazines in western Europe and North America, has been largely overlooked, yet in the period from the 1960s it has constituted a global movement, influenced in particular by developing world consumer groups. This article offers a case-study of the Malaysian consumer movement and its impact upon transnational consumer politics in order to explore more generally the meaning of consumer politics and consumer society. It argues that for all the problems and contradictions within the notion of consumerism as a social movement, its existence nevertheless expands the concepts of activism and protest which have so far dominated the concerns of the contemporary historian. Consumer protest has taken a non-ideological and pragmatic approach which explodes distinctions between Right and Left, radical and reformist. This is perhaps typical of the experience of so many other nongovernmental organizations operating over the last few decades, a fact of which social historians ought to be aware if they are to understand better the dynamics and diversity of socio-political action after 1968.