Buy Nothing Day(adbusters.org) |
Buy Nothing Day(adbusters.org) |
As pathetic as it is to see people camping out at Wal-mart to buy products they do not particularly need (indeed, many of them would be better off if they saved the money that they will spend today), one of the results of that behavior is additional economic opportunity for poor countries and poor people.
You could state a case that the net gain from this behavior makes it not worth having, as the social and environmental costs of using natural and human resources to produce unneeded products obfuscates the value of the resultant economic growth, but then you would need to present data and math.
I also think it is ironic that you chose as an example an infrastructure project not built as the result of capitalism.
Growth can probably be too fast - China has some problems in this regard, infrastructure, basic services, environmental concerns, the political system etc. can't quite keep up with the reasonable demands of a rapidly growing new middle class.
The growth rates attainable for the US and Europe, however, are unlikely to be dangerous.
I don't need the internet. Either do you. I also don't need to eat anything other than bean tortillas, but I will. I could probably get through my life wiping with single ply, but I'd rather have double.
If that makes me a bad guy in your eyes, ah well. I'm sure a few of the beers I went out my way to purchase will ease the pain.
You know we can just change certain laws in the patent system to get it fixed right?
You understand that the idea of someone being able to sale their hard work for a living isn't evil right?
Or that maybe just making a true concerted effort of a smaller carbon footprint is enough? We don't need to ban all gas lines, or coal and replace it all with solar wind farms.
Consider this, we are fighting other people's ideals with equally extreme ideals and then wonder why the world doesn't see our brilliance. They think all of torrenting technology is evil because it allows for easier "unauthorized" access of someone else's creative content. It's a tool people. Capitalism isn't bad, overly greedy people are bad, and they just happen to love capitalism.
It's called moderation.
Typical slaughterhouse practices are stressful for workers and lead to damaged product.
Improving worker conditions decreases employee turn over and boosts yield.
It's probably wishful thinking to take this as a signal they're transitioning to become a serious advocacy organization.
If moderation was the natural state of things, we wouldn't have to argue for it.
Move to North Korea, everyday is buy nothing day and best of all, none of that horrid capitalism.
Do you equate spending money with freedom and civil liberties? Is that the only way for you and I to be free, is to buy things?
Also, class mobility seems to be most likely in a society with high economic activity, since there is a lot of demand to be filled and therefore the opportunity to fill it.
Do you have an empirical example of this?
“Today, humanity faces a stark choice: save the planet and ditch capitalism, or save capitalism and ditch the planet.”
There won't be too many startup accelerators or funding rounds when we ditch capitalism, folks. Funny how there was none of this talk on iPhone Launch Day, either...
While I share Adbuster's disgust with the hordes of zombie sheep lining up to consume in excessive quantity things that they do not need, I don't think this has anything to do with Capitalism as an economic philosophy.
The manner in which Capitalism is implemented and followed is just as important as abstract philosophy. Deeds, not words.
seems to be a Reuters photo with this caption:
"AVIANO, Italy (Reuters) - A protestor throws a rock at riot police outside the Aviano Air base in northern Italy Sunday. More than 300 protestors took part in the demonstration against NATO's air strikes on Yugoslavia. Photo by Stefano Rellandini"
Yeah, that's the spirit. Head on over and contribute to the problem [1][2][3]
1. http://robertreich.org/post/36219730368
2. http://www.thenation.com/blog/171389/worker-group-alleges-wa...
3. http://occupyamerica.crooksandliars.com/diane-sweet/support-...
Alright, alright, they do have better ideas for a "delay gratification" message. Credit card cut-up (pre-commitment) and zombie walks (exposure) sound like good ideas.
Don't make a day about not doing something negative, make it about doing something positive. Don't turn off your power for a day, spend a day installing better insulation so you need less power.
This article to me makes an important point -- Black Friday has pretty much descended into self-parody -- but couching it as an anti-capitalism argument (instead of an anti-consumerism one) ruins the message for me.
The criticisms that people are positing here are exactly criticisms of the agenda of Adbusters. The whole thing is about keeping their context in mind and objecting to it.
I guess this doesn't count jumping on the odd humble indie bundle.
A more poignant campaign would revolve around convincing people not to buy certain unnecessary things at all, ever.
First, market socialism is socialism with elements from capitalism, so the particular mechanism (ad-hoc black markets) is a capitalist one, regardless of where it came from.
Second, in market socialism, the market is legal and "white". In North Korea, they are very much not legal - thus, "black".
Interestingly, the resilience of markets to pop up anywhere there's a need, regardless of legality or formal training in how to run them, tells us something about capitalism and it's inherent compatibility with human nature.
"The results show that foremost among the causes of growth in U.S., German and Japanese manufacturing value added is electric power consumption."[1] Now I wouldn't pay too much attention to the word "causes" in there, but...
Define your terms too precisely and there would be nothing to think about.
[1]"Engineering and Economic Growth" http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0954349X04...
The argument -- as far as I have witnessed it -- is not about preventing the poor from becoming rich. The argument is should richer people need to suffer to effect the enrichment of the poor. Acting to prevent is not the same thing as not acting to effect.
The answer to "we can't afford it" is the same to many other scenarios where you can't afford something but need to get it anyway: Figure out how to make it work. Inventing non-fossil liquid fuels would make a very good start.
i think this is the classic problem of people trying to fix their situations from the outside in, instead of from the inside out, ex: better economic situation = better people, but that is clearly faulty logic, i think it should be more like better people = way better economic situation
but then again why would a system that depends on its economy so much enforce such an idea: "better people", better people doesn't make enough money as it stands for them, that is why they don't put that in their ads instead of "buy this because of (some bullshit reason here) messaging" because "buy this because of this fucked up reason we created for you" makes more money, period,
politicians don't give a fuck about you and me man, they care about numbers, because of their vantage point, the ones that do end up getting wiped out, as we have seen throughout history, just like this new awesome movie lincoln shows "man wants people of all races to be free" get asassinated because of people with no self-discipline and no fucking compassion that were mostly focused on themselves
history really explains a lot about us, and so far it looks like we really haven't learnt too much
i wonder to think, what would the world be like if people in current power positions would actually be altruistic, sounds like a pipe dream to me
The fundamental axiom is that you own your own body. It follows from there that you own the output of your body. Trade is fundamentally the voluntary exchange of this output for other people's output. Preventing this exchange amounts to denying you the right to dispose of the output of your body, thus denying you ownership of it, thus denying you ownership of your body.
Most decisions being made about your water supply and the limited natural resources in your area do not include your input and are not for your benefit. That is the face of capitalism today.
You don't have to be an expert, but you did assert that is was possible. That usually implies some level of empirical evidence.
> but I can name a capitalist consumer-driven society that is controlled by fear of their government.
So can I, but luckily correlation doesn't imply causation.
That doesn't follow. Laissez-faire capitalism does not necessarily lead to greater class mobility. The idea that one must abandon "restriction" of capitalism to offer the greatest benefit to any individual is ridiculous.
1: At least many of them
Which is not at odds with Buy Nothing Day and the associated movement. They're not just suggesting you delay purchases, but to buy from independent/local crafters or make your own gifts.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buy_Nothing_Day
I haven't followed the philosophy to a T, but I've avoided the malls and chain stores fully, giving more personal gifts from Etsy sellers, local craft-meetups, handwritten cards, and baked gifts than ever this year. Supporting local/small businesses is always a good idea!
Why?
I have very little control over consumer electronics, and I am a bit too reliant on Amazon for mass-market goods, but I try to be somewhat conscious of my purchases.
We will just wait for someone else to figure it out while we comment on hacker news and have a beer and use the internet all at the same time and eat 1st world burritos and post on facebook with our 9 billion cell phones, all at the same time, hopefully we can all do this all at the same time, and in the process of figuring it out some of us are just unlucky to be born in a different vantage point, where we don't have cell phones, barely can carry water to drink to our families, try to fish in waters that are not polluted, education is scarce, all this because the ones born into the more favorable vantage point wait for others to fix the problems while they fat on their couches and complain that obesity is a problem because the corporations feed us fat food, and to think that we can actually help those people if we just want to? if we just approached the problem with the same vigor as we approach securing our oil-reserves, but who gives a fuck, all we do is just sit here on hacker news and complain and bitch and comment and feel good because we get points and we are on the main page but it all equates to nothing and i am guilty for it, so i'm going to go out and get breakfast at one of the many places available to me, happy thanksgiving
Even poor people spend money on non-necessities. I watched a documentary on how being able to afford a Coke is a sign of status in many third world countries. They obviously don't need Coke, but having it seems to make them happy (I can't complain, I love it as well). Even though they might not be able to afford many of things we deem important, they manage to get enough change together to buy a soft drink.
There is little we can do to help those in the poorest countries. We can give our time or our money, but rarely are either of those things given. I'm going to go out on a limb and assume you've never taken time away from your job to spend a week in Liberia or Eritrea. Is it a problem? Probably. Is it something that is going to be solved by not buying anything today? Of course not.
That doesn't mean those things are good. If our society here in the west was focused on exporting things for the good of the people around the world, maybe we would export good education?
But you just cant export good things when everything is money driven, someone has to suffer, someone has to get the short stick from the bunch and in this case it is the poor people because they don't have enough power to do anything about it. They're problems are real, food, clean water, electricity, education so they accept our so called sharp toothed help because it alleviates some of their problems in the short term, but they don't have the right organization to stop us and say "no, you can't dump your shit(chemical waste, etc) here man", no if you can't find cheap labor in your country "we wont work for you here either unless you pay us the right amount" So the west knows this, corporations know this, so they go and exploit and keep it hidden from us because they want us to be at ease when we pay for their products at the cash register.
When you say there is little we can do, we can also abstain from putting forward idiotic ideals into their television sets so they go buy our shit because they think that is the thing to do, since television and ads are the only major exposure they get from the 1st world countries they look up to it because of their ignorance that there are problems there too.
We can also abstain from going over there and exploiting them because they haven't had the proper education to judge our causes in a equal light.
Yes there are things we can do, and yes not shopping one day is a start, i didn't say not shopping at all, but not shopping on one major day out of 365 days is not too much to ask, because if you want to make a impact it has to be substantial, its the same mindset corporations have when they go look for cheap labor, we need a place to make shit that will ensure us with substantial profits.
I've lived in a 3rd world country before so i know that you can make do with less and even here i make do with way less than the average hard-working american(including immigrants), even though i can live a life that includes many more material things, for me those things don't increase my happiness, so i choose not to.
And this western way of going about things assuming that the major problems of earth will be solved by the people who currently are in the have, is faulty thinking as well, no one can say that the person who can contribute most to this world can't be born somewhere in a very unfortunate environment but with the right treatment can grow up and cure cancer, develop clean energy, produce more efficient systems, for us to sit here in the west and pretend we are the only ones that can even deal with and attempt to solve these problems just because we are in the have category is ignorant.
On some level not providing the right education to all of the worlds population is shooting ourselves in the foot at a global level, because you never know where the major game-changer will be born and by not providing a good eco-system for those people to grow in, you are negating this so called progress ideal which is so feverishly rooted in our future