Anti-Consumerism

[IbelieveInanarchy]

I'm trying to make up my mind if anti-consumerism should be an inherent part of communist "behavior". Do you think that anti-consumerism is inherently bound to the struggle for communism, or is it actually counter-productive? Maybe you think it does not matter either way. Looking forward to your thoughts

[willowtooth]

Of course anticonsumerism in the "keeping up with joneses window-shopping" colloquial sense is pretty much universally derided by leftists but the term consumerism can also reference economic theory basically meaning one dollar, one voice as oppose to one man, one voice. Basing production on what people are buying rather than producers deciding what people want or need.

It can also refer to the term "buy or beware" consumerism here meaning an advocate for warning labels on packaging, arguing over what level does the consumer bear responsibility for the faultiness of the product they are buying, boycotting products like what ceasar chavez did with california wine, or how starbucks uses "fair trade" beans. We can see consumerism being used to end slave labor in thailand fishing industry recently, there has been another movement just since yesterday regarding child slave labor in the palm oil industry and some talk of boycotting kellog and nestle and a few others.

Anti consumerism isn't necessarily a left wing belief Buddhist monks, the Amish, the pope are all anti consumerists. So moving to the woods and living some kind of all natural life "in tune with the earth, at one with nature" where we sew our own clothes and make our own all natural medicine. Is obviously a religious fantasy

So your question is kind of vague, are you asking if you should boycott kellog and nestle, buy a fancy hat, or do you want to move to the woods?

Maybe you want to know which section of Das Kapital covers commodity fetishism? If so its chapter 1 section 4 https://www.marxists.org/archive/mar...c1/ch01.htm#S4

[IbelieveInanarchy]

Of course anticonsumerism in the "keeping up with joneses window-shopping" colloquial sense is pretty much universally derided by leftists but the term consumerism can also reference economic theory basically meaning one dollar, one voice as oppose to one man, one voice. Basing production on what people are buying rather than producers deciding what people want or need.

It can also refer to the term "buy or beware" consumerism here meaning an advocate for warning labels on packaging, arguing over what level does the consumer bear responsibility for the faultiness of the product they are buying, boycotting products like what ceasar chavez did with california wine, or how starbucks uses "fair trade" beans. We can see consumerism being used to end slave labor in thailand fishing industry recently, there has been another movement just since yesterday regarding child slave labor in the palm oil industry and some talk of boycotting kellog and nestle and a few others.

Anti consumerism isn't necessarily a left wing belief Buddhist monks, the Amish, the pope are all anti consumerists. So moving to the woods and living some kind of all natural life "in tune with the earth, at one with nature" where we sew our own clothes and make our own all natural medicine. Is obviously a religious fantasy

So your question is kind of vague, are you asking if you should boycott kellog and nestle, buy a fancy hat, or do you want to move to the woods?

Maybe you want to know which section of Das Kapital covers commodity fetishism? If so its chapter 1 section 4 https://www.marxists.org/archive/mar...c1/ch01.htm#S4

Thanks for your response, i'm going to read that part of das kapital( i did not get far into it yet because i am reading other literature). With anti-consumerism i mean to spend as little money and buy as little as possible to sustain your own life. I personally do this to a great extent, not for any theoretical reason but just because it feels comfortable to me. I did not realise that other people have very different concepts of what it could mean. What i mainly mean with is to not buy from big internationals who exploit workers in other countries. However i think that all products in stores today are made by exploitation, it is impossible for me not to buy anything because i would die, i wonder what everyones view is on buying the "least exploitative" products. Is it helpfull in any way to buy fair trade and stuff like that?

[ckaihatsu]

Thanks for your response, i'm going to read that part of das kapital( i did not get far into it yet because i am reading other literature). With anti-consumerism i mean to spend as little money and buy as little as possible to sustain your own life. I personally do this to a great extent, not for any theoretical reason but just because it feels comfortable to me. I did not realise that other people have very different concepts of what it could mean.

What i mainly mean with is to not buy from big internationals who exploit workers in other countries. However i think that all products in stores today are made by exploitation, it is impossible for me not to buy anything because i would die, i wonder what everyones view is on buying the "least exploitative" products. Is it helpfull in any way to buy fair trade and stuff like that?

The problem with a *consumerist*-sided perspective on societal production is that the consumer doesn't have much power -- basically *buying* power, only, for their individual needs -- relative to production. Juxtapose this to the *producing* power that all workers have, especially with workers in close proximity nearly every day producing *thousands* of pieces of whatever per week or month, and it's easy to see that workers have far more potential control over the conditions of production if they collectively *exercise* that power, as in withholding their combined labor power in a strike to achieve certain proletarian demands.

If anyone decides not to buy this-or-that product for whatever reason, that's just individualistic *moralism* / lifestylism, since there's almost no consumer *organizing* around such decision-making. (The exception would be *boycotts*, like the BDS campaign, which are certainly the exception-to-the-rule.) (Otherwise the consumer relation is to the *market* for whatever, along with all other consumers, as usual.)

What would be far more politically 'productive' would be grassroots campaigns of popular support for any given mass worker *strike*, so that the economistic action by the workers is shown to have wide shared concern from the public. These days it's usually the institutionalized 'business unions' that put an organized 'brake' on organic worker enthusiasm for solidarity and labor actions in their own collective interest. (Conventional unions play a 'middleman' role -- and have a privileged middleman *interest* -- of negotiating between the interests of capital / employers, and the interests of the workers they purport to represent.)

Under capitalism we don't really have *control* of the economy since we're so atomized as consumers and so alienated as workers -- *everyone* is basically in a coerced position as consumers and workers, so one shouldn't be too hung-up on the given supply of whatever is put out there, as for everyday necessities. Only collective, coordinated rank-and-file labor actions towards the implementation of socialism worldwide would begin to make a qualitative difference overall -- until then one can pretty-much consume whatever they want, as long as they can afford it.

My understanding is that 'fair trade' has to do with *exchange values*, so 'fair trade' is basically easing-up on the typical hegemonic-colonialist economic relationship a bit, at best. The workers who do the actual labor, as for coffee, are still performing the same labor activities regardless, to make a certain amount of product available to the end consumers -- the workers are still not the *owners* of the product who are in the 'fair trade' economic relationship itself.

[willowtooth]

Thanks for your response, i'm going to read that part of das kapital( i did not get far into it yet because i am reading other literature).

No dont read it. Nobody should read Das Kapital its a terrible book with very little pictures.

With anti-consumerism i mean to spend as little money and buy as little as possible to sustain your own life. I personally do this to a great extent, not for any theoretical reason but just because it feels comfortable to me. I did not realise that other people have very different concepts of what it could mean.

you dont need a marxist to tell you to save your money, you can talk to a financial planner or your priest about that. The use of wealth as a status symbol, like buying the latest fashion trends or getting unnecessary cosmetic surgery is different from wasting lots of money on your favorite chocolates. It's also much different than a rich man giving all of his land, wealth and his mansion that he owns to charity. It's also different than the inventor of penicillin Alexander Fleming giving away his patent for free when he couldve made millions. So yes your question "is consumerism or good or bad" requires a much more complicated answer than simply yes or no.

What i mainly mean with is to not buy from big internationals who exploit workers in other countries. However i think that all products in stores today are made by exploitation, it is impossible for me not to buy anything because i would die, i wonder what everyones view is on buying the "least exploitative" products. Is it helpfull in any way to buy fair trade and stuff like that?

It's mainly based on your relation to the product, you would struggle to find something in your home, that was made in your home country. It's more difficult to ensure that everything you buy comes from some ethically produced source. Fair trade beans are good example, since you dont really know where the beans in your morning coffee came from either way, so something marked "fair trade" could be more exploitative. It also puts a band-aid over the real issue in that the coffee bean worldwide industry is using slave labor so rather than addressing that issue, instead we buy fair trade coffee for a few cents more. Which might help nobody in the end. It has problems like crowding out coffee growers from the poorest countries around the world who cannot afford the certification process. Even though they may be growing coffee the same way they have for centuries. The money may not go to any actual farmers and only go to wealthy landlords in central america and the farmers get paid nothing different, while the coffee growers from the poorest parts of the world no longer can compete because they are not labelled "fair trade".

There is also the question why there is no fair trade hamburgers, fair trade cigarettes, or fair trade gasoline. That "fair trade" is in fact more of a marketing technique used to pander to customers rather than actually accomplishing anything.

Lets say you have a cattle rancher's son who grows up watching cows being slaughtered, being skinned and watching their organs being harvested and because of this he decides to become a vegetarian. So he buys soybeans as a replacement for meat. Now instead of eating the cows living on his own property, slaughtered using his own hands, he instead buys soybeans from bolivia where they use child slave labor. He is now essentially enslaving a child to grow soybeans to avoid eating a cow. So because of this he decides to boycott soybeans until they stop using slave labor, so the company decides to install fair trade certifications that all their growers must pass, so now they raise the price of soybeans so they can stop using slave labor, but now all the other small sources of soybeans where they just cant afford the certifications are now crowded out of the market through no fault of their own. And the company that was using slave labor for years maybe pays a small increase in salary you now now they make $950 a year instead $900 and they pay for some safety equipment, but in exchange they no longer have as many competitors.

[IbelieveInanarchy]

No dont read it. Nobody should read Das Kapital its a terrible book with very little pictures.

you dont need a marxist to tell you to save your money, you can talk to a financial planner or your priest about that. The use of wealth as a status symbol, like buying the latest fashion trends or getting unnecessary cosmetic surgery is different from wasting lots of money on your favorite chocolates. It's also much different than a rich man giving all of his land, wealth and his mansion that he owns to charity. It's also different than the inventor of penicillin Alexander Fleming giving away his patent for free when he couldve made millions. So yes your question "is consumerism or good or bad" requires a much more complicated answer than simply yes or no.

It's mainly based on your relation to the product, you would struggle to find something in your home, that was made in your home country. It's more difficult to ensure that everything you buy comes from some ethically produced source. Fair trade beans are good example, since you dont really know where the beans in your morning coffee came from either way, so something marked "fair trade" could be more exploitative. It also puts a band-aid over the real issue in that the coffee bean worldwide industry is using slave labor so rather than addressing that issue, instead we buy fair trade coffee for a few cents more. Which might help nobody in the end. It has problems like crowding out coffee growers from the poorest countries around the world who cannot afford the certification process. Even though they may be growing coffee the same way they have for centuries. The money may not go to any actual farmers and only go to wealthy landlords in central america and the farmers get paid nothing different, while the coffee growers from the poorest parts of the world no longer can compete because they are not labelled "fair trade".

There is also the question why there is no fair trade hamburgers, fair trade cigarettes, or fair trade gasoline. That "fair trade" is in fact more of a marketing technique used to pander to customers rather than actually accomplishing anything.

Lets say you have a cattle rancher's son who grows up watching cows being slaughtered, being skinned and watching their organs being harvested and because of this he decides to become a vegetarian. So he buys soybeans as a replacement for meat. Now instead of eating the cows living on his own property, slaughtered using his own hands, he instead buys soybeans from bolivia where they use child slave labor. He is now essentially enslaving a child to grow soybeans to avoid eating a cow. So because of this he decides to boycott soybeans until they stop using slave labor, so the company decides to install fair trade certifications that all their growers must pass, so now they raise the price of soybeans so they can stop using slave labor, but now all the other small sources of soybeans where they just cant afford the certifications are now crowded out of the market through no fault of their own. And the company that was using slave labor for years maybe pays a small increase in salary you now now they make $950 a year instead $900 and they pay for some safety equipment, but in exchange they no longer have as many competitors.

You make very good points, i never meant that anti-consumerism as in general( and i know it has a lot of aspects now) as somehow liberating the proletariat. Chaihatsu pointed out really well that our power is in producing, not consuming.

I disagree with your analogy of soybeans and cows because 80% of soybeans is fed to cattle, so not buying meat means you would consume, directly and indirectly combined, less soybeans. And thus having less slave labor in that particular sector. I am not saying this solves any problem, but your analogy is wrong on this. I do however get what you mean, just arbitrarily switching from one product to another without looking at all the implications is senseless. I think maybe a good example of this is switching to an electrical car because you want to contribute less to fossil fuel burning. But then you use electricity for your car which is made by a coal plant. You have to look at the full production chain.

[Blake's Baby]

There is no 'clean' consumption in capitalism. As an individual you can not-buy from companies whose practices you find particularly abhorrent, but there's no way to completely avoid being enmeshed by the beast. Even the deepest green refuseniks going off grid can't escape completely.

In the end that doesn't really help anyway I think. OK it might make you feel better about not supporting some particularly vile companies/practices but with the best will in the world it does nothing to hasten the collapse of capitalism. Lone activities very rarely do. If 150 million people were all boycotting let's say WalMart that might mean something, but one or two here, someone else somewhere else, it means nothing. And supporting that vegan-friendly ethically-sourced workers co-op downtown as opposed to McCorporateFuckBucks might just keep a couple of people in work a little longer but in the grand scheme of things it doesn't bring the revolution one step closer.

Consume in the way that sits best with your conscience - personally, I've been part of Gillette, Nestle, Dominoes and (damn I can't even remember the other one, it's been so long) boycotts, in some cases (Gillette) for three decades, but it's to make me feel better not because I think that another couple of weeks of not eating Kit-Kats is going to make the Nestle corporation collapse.

[IbelieveInanarchy]

There is no 'clean' consumption in capitalism. As an individual you can not-buy from companies whose practices you find particularly abhorrent, but there's no way to completely avoid being enmeshed by the beast. Even the deepest green refuseniks going off grid can't escape completely.

In the end that doesn't really help anyway I think. OK it might make you feel better about not supporting some particularly vile companies/practices but with the best will in the world it does nothing to hasten the collapse of capitalism. Lone activities very rarely do. If 150 million people were all boycotting let's say WalMart that might mean something, but one or two here, someone else somewhere else, it means nothing. And supporting that vegan-friendly ethically-sourced workers co-op downtown as opposed to McCorporateFuckBucks might just keep a couple of people in work a little longer but in the grand scheme of things it doesn't bring the revolution one step closer.

Consume in the way that sits best with your conscience - personally, I've been part of Gillette, Nestle, Dominoes and (damn I can't even remember the other one, it's been so long) boycotts, in some cases (Gillette) for three decades, but it's to make me feel better not because I think that another couple of weeks of not eating Kit-Kats is going to make the Nestle corporation collapse.

Thanks for your insights

[IbelieveInanarchy]

There is no 'clean' consumption in capitalism. As an individual you can not-buy from companies whose practices you find particularly abhorrent, but there's no way to completely avoid being enmeshed by the beast. Even the deepest green refuseniks going off grid can't escape completely.

In the end that doesn't really help anyway I think. OK it might make you feel better about not supporting some particularly vile companies/practices but with the best will in the world it does nothing to hasten the collapse of capitalism. Lone activities very rarely do. If 150 million people were all boycotting let's say WalMart that might mean something, but one or two here, someone else somewhere else, it means nothing. And supporting that vegan-friendly ethically-sourced workers co-op downtown as opposed to McCorporateFuckBucks might just keep a couple of people in work a little longer but in the grand scheme of things it doesn't bring the revolution one step closer.

Consume in the way that sits best with your conscience - personally, I've been part of Gillette, Nestle, Dominoes and (damn I can't even remember the other one, it's been so long) boycotts, in some cases (Gillette) for three decades, but it's to make me feel better not because I think that another couple of weeks of not eating Kit-Kats is going to make the Nestle corporation collapse.

Do you think decreasing our general consumption will destabilize capitalism, since capitalism is based on mass consumption/production. Don't you think that if everyone consumes less that there is less "to live of" for capitalism?

[ckaihatsu]

Do you think decreasing our general consumption will destabilize capitalism, since capitalism is based on mass consumption/production. Don't you think that if everyone consumes less that there is less "to live of" for capitalism?

The short answer is 'no' because whatever capitalism / private-property *can* commodify, it *will* commodify.

The longer answer is 'no' because ending capitalism would require a mass-conscious *action* to make it happen -- revolution -- to bring various kinds of human-critical production out of the market mechanism, to be controlled by workers themselves / ourselves.

In the meantime -- and arguably currently unfolding -- what capitalism does is a process of respective national currency devaluations to attract customers, trade-war, which leads into *real* international wars (like WWI and WWII) that have the effect of destroying / removing economically non-performing productive assets and wealth and workers from the standstill economy altogether, yielding new 'blank slates' of zero-valuation areas that can then be treated as new resources and markets, equivalent to finding virgin areas on the map for imperialism. World War I broke out because at that point the whole world had been colonized so there were no more new geographic areas to expand-into and colonize -- the only dynamic remaining for imperialism was international warfare over *existing* markets, or colonies.

[IbelieveInanarchy]

The short answer is 'no' because whatever capitalism / private-property *can* commodify, it *will* commodify.

The longer answer is 'no' because ending capitalism would require a mass-conscious *action* to make it happen -- revolution -- to bring various kinds of human-critical production out of the market mechanism, to be controlled by workers themselves / ourselves.

In the meantime -- and arguably currently unfolding -- what capitalism does is a process of respective national currency devaluations to attract customers, trade-war, which leads into *real* international wars (like WWI and WWII) that have the effect of destroying / removing economically non-performing productive assets and wealth and workers from the standstill economy altogether, yielding new 'blank slates' of zero-valuation areas that can then be treated as new resources and markets, equivalent to finding virgin areas on the map for imperialism. World War I broke out because at that point the whole world had been colonized so there were no more new geographic areas to expand-into and colonize -- the only dynamic remaining for imperialism was international warfare over *existing* markets, or colonies.

Oh, by no means did i insinuate that consuming less will overthrow capitalism, i just think it somehow can be used as a tool to create class consciousness. I am in no way sure of any of the implications hence why i asked.

[ckaihatsu]

Oh, by no means did i insinuate that consuming less will overthrow capitalism,

Well, just for the record, you did insinuate that by using the term 'destabilize':

Do you think decreasing our general consumption will destabilize capitalism, since capitalism is based on mass consumption/production. Don't you think that if everyone consumes less that there is less "to live of" for capitalism?

---

i just think it somehow can be used as a tool to create class consciousness. I am in no way sure of any of the implications hence why i asked.

You may want to elaborate -- most people probably understand and agree-with 'the poor get poorer and the rich get richer', but that's not necessarily class consciousness, because class consciousness also includes the quiescent *potential* of the working class to make its own destiny without being managed by the capitalist class.