You could say that the point is that whether or not my actions will undo Coca-Cola corporation’s control, I at least should not be contributing to Coca-Cola’s profits. And perhaps you are right; but if so, then it sounds like the point of the exercise is to change me, not to change Coca-Cola corporation. And I will point out that, whether I should change or not (no doubt I should in any number of ways), this seems to leave the bigger social problem unresolved.
And also that if the point is to make a change in individual people’s mindsets, the mental tactics you use to do the persuading matters a lot, and this approach of trying to shame and ridicule, not capitalists, but ordinary consumers who disagree with your particular consumption priorities, by ridiculing them as fat, flabby, engorged, mindless, brainwashed, vain, greedy, etc., comparing them to zombies, cattle, sheep, pigs, etc., is probably not the right way to go about that. That kind of approach is more or less always pointlessly mean-spirited; and like many kinds of mean-spiritedness, it is very often most easily directed against the most marginalized and the most socially vulnerable people, using jokes and references that are themselves drawn from the ready library of nasty put-downs drawing on stereotypes of gender, social class, etc. Now instead of taking that kind of approach to the problem, you might start instead by trying to *understand* why people shop the way they shop and why they buy the things they buy — what genuine goods they get out of the decisions that they make, even though those goods may be limited or poisoned or attached to many strings. And then you might try to organize with those folks to develop alternatives that provide other ways to get the things that we need outside the corporate-capitalist nexus — countereconomic networks, fighting unions, community events, local gift economies, neighborhood co-ops and mutual aid networks, whatever is most appropriate to the need you are trying to address. Admittedly a serious attempt to provide alternatives rather than simply to mock and shame is a lot of work. And admittedly it gives you far less of an opportunity to have some laffs at your neighbors’ expense, or to feel cheaply righteous by comparison with people whose choices and whose motives you’ve made no real attempt to understand. But it does offer some remote possibility of addressing the social problems you claim to care about. Cheap ridicule and one-day consumption boycotts, not so much.
]]>Her analysis reeks of “but MY pet peeve is the lynchpin!” type of narrow-mindedness best exemplified by vulgar libertarians. We live in a system with interlocking systems of oppression, each of which plays its role in maintaining the whole. Singling out one bar as the sole support of all other bars is, IMO, dangerously misguided and has the proven record of historical failure/co-option by the ruling class. Pushing on only one bar can result in minimal increases of freedom along that one axis, but if pushed to the point of breaking, the rest of the cage will react with more oppression to secure the overall integrity of the system.
I’m not into anti-consumerism for many of the reasons Charles mentions, but to deny that it is an independent problem that serves the ruling class just as much, if not more so, than sexism is to make a serious ideological mistake of intentional ignorance.
]]>I do not feel “guilty” about being a member of the “ruling” class. I was just stating a fact.
]]>I wonder if Marx had a word for members of the ruling class who feel guilty and agonize about being in the ruling class. :)
]]>I just had a chance to read this post. It struck me that you might find some of the analysis in this book resonant:
http://www.amazon.com/Nation-Rebels-Counterculture-Consumer-Culture/dp/006074586X
]]>