september 06
what's the point?_____________________________________
. . . of boycotting corporations, of turning your back on Christmas, or of saying to anyone who will listen: 'we are the enemy.' Why bother depriving yourself of the entire range of Cadbury's chocolate, the latest episode of Star Trek or a week in Cyprus? Why alienate yourself from polite company? What's the point?
Personal anti-consumerism doesn't change corporate policy, it doesn't rid the planet of corporations, it doesn't influence global politics, it doesn't change the amount of daily calories a child gets to consume in a far off impoverished place and it doesn't stop imperial bombs dropping on civilian populations. So, what is the point?
The point is this.
Britain and America, the forward economic and military wing of planet earth's corporate government, are kicking the shit out of nations large and small to build total global consumer empire. They are succeeding. The Soviet Union is down, China is on board, India is a client state; only small populations, mainly in the still pious Middle East, resist.
All this much is obvious. But is it a bad thing? Stalinism is dead, China has thousands of millionaires, tens of millions of home owners and tribal societies with barbaric practices are being brought out of the middle ages and shown how to vote. Incredible wealth plumes around the world while rich nations stand as shining examples of the life that could be, their populations plump and leisured. Everyone everywhere wants more.
But while war, oppression and misery might pre-date consumer capitalism, consumer capitalism has done nothing to alleviate misery, oppression and war.
Firstly, people are dying in pieces for and from free enterprise, usually off the western media map, in their tens of thousands every day. Most of the world is living in debt, enslaved by poverty wages in death-trap mines or in fire-trap factories, just as others live in fear, terrorised by their own get-rich-quick, gangster gun-law societies. Then there are the people who are just plain starving.
Meantime, in the war-zone underbelly of the rich nations, people are plagued by prostitution, murder, rape, graft, street violence, work slavery, addiction and a seething conformity, bred from wilful and educated ignorance, which finds all dialogue originating in a brutalising cultural imbecility. Everywhere grotesque inequalities in the quality of life are made possible through the aspirant celebration of greed. The now, in absolute global numbers, is not good.
While it has been fighting its crusader battles against communism and latterly, Islam, imperial capitalism has engineered war and starvation in many parts of the world to wrest control of land and resources and to impose control mechanisms. Economic strangulation imposed by the free market kills more people more systematically than jingoistic bullets and bombs. Mass death is, in fact, the only way that capitalism has managed to succeed and is its ongoing method of providing luxury lifestyles for many of its domestic citizens.This kind of conquesting force didn't arise from recent peace time industry - it comes straight to the world from four hundred years of British piracy and the white man's murderous pillage of 4 continents. The methods have changed, though not much - the ethos is the same: exploit. As well as exploiting people, capitalism ruthlessly exploits the planet's resources, wiping out country-sized landscapes, eradicating animal and plant life, making it gone.
Given that exploitation is the present and future promise of capitalism and that corporations have the world as their objective, what is there to look forward to in the advancement of capitalism? It is well documented that capitalism actively engineers war and deprivation in order to prosper. If it succeeds in creating one world order, the big question is, can it exist without requiring the massive profitability of war (build arms to sell for profit to destroy infrastructure to rebuild for profit and to seize assets to sell for profit), or something like the urban war of American disenfranchisement? The long-term outlook is not good - at best you can hope to be a well fed, tranquillised citizen in a police state - while the short-term outlook for most of the world is far worse. Fundamentally and also, capitalism lies to its populations and the outside world about what it is. A future based on lies offers no real hope for improvement. Capitalism is at best a lesser evil - a choice of two you should refuse to accept.
Opposing capitalism because so many people suffer from it, because the planet is being destroyed through it, would seem to be a requirement. Of course it's not in affluent capitalist societies where only the anarcho anti-capitalist few or an ever decreasing bloc of socialists try at all. Without any popular support, anti-capitalist collective action has proved ineffective.
So what's the choice? Carry on with ineffective collective action or give up resistance altogether and get on the next flight to Larnaca for a week in the sun with thoughts of a Christmas pressie binge? Or instead, make the resistance personal and try to disassociate yourself as much as possible from the damage which capitalism does?
Progressively exiting yourself from the capitalist consumer process in which you find yourself immersed is an effective resistance strategy to capitalism's assault on yourself. Consumerism's very lifeblood is the contagion of greed. There is no difference in the greed potential of the poor, the billionaire rich or people in between except and insofar as one has been more successful in realising its ambitions than the other. Combatting personal greed, relative only to the basic requirements of a healthy existence, is one way to not join in with the dividing of the world's resources into obscene wealth and abject misery. Combat greed and reject consumerism. Rein in your own over-consumption, cap the surfeit of luxury.
One way to do this is to boycott the worst war-mongering corporations. It's a fairly arbitary, indeed, personal thing insofar as every penny spent everywhere goes towards the capitalist war machine. On the other hand, some multi-national corporations are far more ruthless in their business than others... Coca-Cola, WalMart, Sky TV... Boycotting American corporations in particular, though not exclusively, is also a subsidiary possibility because, as well as using the might of the American military, global capitalism uses Washington's international law making to effectively dictate to the rest of the world.Exiting self from process, in however small a way, may not change the way the world works but you'll sleep a little better knowing you are supporting the evil empire as little as you can. It's about not participating in the mess yourself - as much as you are able. It should hardly need saying that if you see something going on which is harming others you don't join in. If you do, you're an accessory. Of course, where society is the accessory, no one is held to account and everyone gets to go to Larnaca.
at the gates of armageddon