I don't think anyone who knows me would accuse me of green consumerism.
Sure, I haven't owned a car for 12 years, I don't smoke, I don't do a lot of
drugs* (*except caffeine, alcohol & saturated fat). But then I've never worn
a pair of Birkenstocks in my life and I never will. I browse frequently in
Chapters but don't buy because the library is cheaper. I have no objection
to Starbuck's coffee. I eat meat. I am an individual and I consider my
actions to be guided by morality, which I might otherwise refer to as
"social awareness". I do not believe in "mechanisms" or manifestos of trust,
morality or justice. I believe in struggle -- both social and individual --
to realize a more just world. I've never yet mistaken a bus token for the
red banner of revolution -- not even the red two-zone fare.
As ineffectual as green consumerism may be, I can't rouse myself to
indignation on that score. There are bigger fish to fry. I was in a workshop
recently with a goodly representation of young, employment-marginalized gay
men and lesbian women. Their bete noire was the "gayeoisie" and all that
commercialized gay pride hoopla encrusted with corporate logos and
endorsements from economic conservative/social liberal politicians. A few
months ago, I participated in a think-tank with a research organization that
also does studies on women in the corporate boardroom. Perhaps someone can
explain to me how "upward mobility" will usher in universal social
emancipation? I thought the quintessence of bourgeois ideology was the
inalienable abstract right of the dominated to themselves become dominators.
Imagine for a moment a political agitation focused on denouncing green
consumerism, gay pride and women in business. Progressive? Reactionary?
Irrelevant? Contradictory? Yoshie seems to be caught up in a dilemma between
affirming individual assertiveness and decrying individualism. The
contradiction is not Yoshie's fault. It is inherent in the status of the
bourgeois individual. It doesn't resolve the contradiction, though, to say
it's o.k. to assert yourself if you're a woman, a worker or a member of a
designated oppressed group struggling to free yourself from oppression; it's
not o.k. to assert yourself if you're a white, male, heterosexual
middle-class liberal jerk trying to assuage your guilt. That's the kind of
stance, a double standard, that lends authority to the parodic or
sermonizing scribblings of a Tom Wolfe, P.J. O'Rourke or David Horowitz.
Personally, I would hold up second-thoughts guru David Horowitz as the most
repellant of the repellant -- more repellant even than vegetarians on the
fringe of the workers' movement or people who refuse to buy books from
corporate bookstores. And that's why I want to be sure to take seriously his
appeal. For all of Horowitz's right-wing libertarian bluster, I see his
stance as basically an exercise in out-Stalinisting his Stalinist daddy
(that is, specializing in apologetics for modern-day American free
enterprise 'Hitler-Stalin pacts', 'Gulags' and 'Moscow trials'). You can
take the baby out of the red diaper, but you can't take the red diaper out
of the baby.
I mentioned "stance" twice in the last two paragraphs. The temptation is to
want to take a stance outside and therefore innocent of the structures of
domination. The way that people try to do that is by affirming one of the
positions inside the structure as "outside". Somehow, then, women are
outside and innocent of patriarchy and workers are outside and innocent of
capitalism, gays are outside and innocent of heterosexism, blacks are
outside and innocent of racism, jews are outside and innocent of
anti-semitism. Etc. etc. etc. It is not "blaming the victim" to say that
people who *live with* domination also *find a way* to live with that
domination, such that the domination itself comes to consist in part of the
way that the dominated have found to live with it (more or less the point
[pun] of the subject line, if I may be forgiven for milking the
cow/cattle/Capital connection).
Two can play the outsider's game. Rabid anti-communist thugs are outside and
innocent of totalitarianism and drooling proto-fascist adolescent slobs are
outside and innocent of political correctness. Mein Kampf was a sustained
wail of wounded outsider innocence.
So what? The self can't secede from society, that's what. There are seven
million cul-de-sacs in the naked city and only one immanent critique. If you
don't think you're part of the problem, you can't be part of the solution.
People with two left feet can't dance.
Don't be selfish? Of course I know what that means as exortation. I just
can't grasp it as critique or program. In the latter context, the word
selfish even seems to slip away from its connotation as a rebuke. Given the
alienation at the core of the capitalist labour process, isn't the desire
for the abolition of capitalism the most *selfish* thing one could possibly
want under capitalism? And what's wrong with that?
In the preface to the first edition of Vol. I of Capital (dated London, 25
July 1867), Marx commented on the "palpable evidence" in England of a
"process of transformation" and of the eventual certainty of upheaval on the
European continent. "There it will take a form more brutal or more humane,
according to the degree of development of the working class itself. Apart
from any higher motives, then, the most basic interests of the present
ruling classes dictate to them that they clear out of the way all the
legally removable obstacles to the development of the working class."
What was Marx doing in the above passage except *appealing to the most basic
interests* of the ruling classes? Marx to bourgeoisie: "Be selfish!"
Yoshie wrote,
>Moralism = Individualism.
>
>I think of Green consumerism as an expression of self-satisfaction of
>middle-strata folks in rich nations (those whom Michael Hoover would
>call "granola lunch bunch"). Most of the Green consumerists don't
>want to abolish capitalism at all, but their consumption of organic
>produce & "cruelty-free" products; eschewal of "bad" products (e.g.,
>fur, meat, tobacco, recreational drugs, etc.); exercise & meditation;
>etc. make them feel that they are morally superior to poor sods who
>"don't know any better" (e.g., factory workers who smoke in front of
>their children).
& Carrol wrote,
>
>The context for this I suppose is the claim, sometimes quite explict, that the
>moderation
>is a political act. Engels complained well over a century ago about the rabble
>of
>(among other things) vegetarians at the margins of the workers' movement. I
>doubt
>he would have complained about personal vegetarianism for strictly personal
>reasons.
>On the recent John Bellamy Foster cyberseminar someone explained that
she/he did
>not have the book yet because [an "of course!" implicit here] s(he) would not
>buy
>from any of the corporate stores and the friendly corner bookstore didn't have
>it in stock. Repellant!
Tom Walker
Sandwichman and Deconsultant
Bowen Island, BC
