Tagged: consumerism
Miscreants
The earth turns, the grass grows, the Press publishes articles with zero analysis or respect for human dignity.
Capitalist society marginalises young people, complains about marginalised young people interfering with the smooth running of capitalist consumption, and thinks the solution is to scapegoat them and hide them away.
Let’s drive away the intimidating, anti-social, miscreant capitalist system from our city centre/world.
The best argument against capitalism
Nestlé, the world’s biggest food company, are the epitome of what John Key, Steven Joyce etc. think the world needs more of – competitiveness, innovation, profit maximisation.
To this end, Nestlé have been tireless advocates for water being treated as a commodity, not a human right. Not coincidentally, they’re one of the biggest sellers of bottled water in the world (along with Coke and Pepsi).
These companies are notorious for dodgy arrangements with local authorities to pollute local water sources and/or monopolise public water, so people can’t get safe water for free, they have to buy their own water back in bottles.
This is great for profitability but horrible for people. Access to clean, safe water is one of the main reasons infant mortality and life expectancy in the West have improved so dramatically over the last few hundred years. Nestlé are only interested in providing clean water for the rest of the world if it’s in one of their bottles, with the appropriate market value.
Let’s not forget the sinister combination of dirty water with aggressive marketing of infant formula in place of breast-feeding: Mothers who want the best for their kids aren’t educated enough to know the Nestlé marketing people aren’t the best source of that knowledge. So they buy formula they can’t afford, mix it with dirty water, and 1.5 million babies die needlessly every year (I’m guessing these figures don’t appear in Nestlé’s annual reports).
This is why I think Nestlé are the best argument against free-market capitalism. The theory is that when people have needs, someone will realise they can make a profit off meeting needs, so they’ll meet people’s needs and make their profit… win-win. The reality is companies like Nestlé have discovered you can make more profit selling a temporary solution (bottled water, infant formula) than a sustainable permanent solution (free public water, breast-feeding). And it’s even more profitable to create a ‘need’ you can sell a temporary solution to (a.k.a. ‘marketing’). Basically, psychopathy is more profitable than philanthropy.
This is just one way capitalism under-develops the world.
SumOfUs are running an online petition against Nestlé destroying Pakistan’s natural resources and stealing their water. The petition text, describing what they’re doing to Pakistan, is shocking, yet well-referenced and unsurprising for this company. Please read and sign. SumOfUs have had some wins before – but so have Nestlé.
On the left-right spectrum: A response
Some world leaders according to PoliticalCompass.org (only vaguely related to this blog)
A friend who studies political science commented on Facebook in response to my last blog, saying among other things that she was (I’m paraphrasing) “confused about my determination to attribute everything to left-right frameworks.” She has a good point and I thought it deserved a good response. I wrote what turned out to be a very long response… I’ll let you decide if it was a good response.
I thought I might share it here as well, because a lot of my recent blogs have drawn quite heavily on the left-right spectrum, and I thought some other people might be interested. As always, all comments are welcome.
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The truth is that we probably largely agree that the left-right framework is over-simplified etc. – likewise with the Political Compass, which is only slightly less simplistic (two spectra instead of one).
Where we might differ is: I don’t think the left-right frameworks are completely useless and thus should be thrown out completely. Or at least, I only think they can/should be thrown out by people like yourself who have the time and knowledge to look into, and analyse, each party and philosophy and candidate on their own merits – which is barely anyone. I personally don’t have the time, knowledge or brain-power to analyse everything and everyone on its own merits without any generalisations to help categorise it.
When I use the left-right framework, I partly use it as shorthand for more complex realities (I think conciseness is vital in blogging, and I struggle enough as it is here). But I partly use it with an implied audience not of people like yourself who know I’m oversimplifying things, but of people who struggle to understand politics at all. I talk to quite a lot of people who describe themselves this way, and the number may surprise you as a POLS student… this is not to say that these people are stupid, they just haven’t put in the necessary hours and hours of time to understand politics. With local politics this category is even larger… I think I’ve probably done more research into it than most voters (at least most young voters), but I still don’t really understand anything beyond what I wrote in my last blog.
While over-simplified, I do think the left-right spectrum touches on some truth, for example the way neo-liberalism has shifted the political ‘centre’ in NZ. You as a POLS student would have more sophisticated ways of explaining this than me, but is it completely wrong to say that neo-liberalism involves a shift to the (economic) right? I think it’s a generalisation but a generally true generalisation.
I think if someone doesn’t understand politics at all, nor how NZ parties have shifted over the years, and then they hear my (admittedly simplified) explanation of both Labour and National shifting to the right economically since the 80s, they’ve increased their understanding. I don’t want to sound superior or condescending but if some of the people who struggle to understand politics (because they have other priorities, and haven’t put in the hours and hours you and I have into politics) read my over-simplified blogs and feel they understand it a bit more, I’m glad.
I also note that a lot of polls say that the current government’s policies are unpopular, but John Key as a person is very popular. There seems to be a disconnect from understanding the political realities and trends and philosophies that certain parties stand for (consciously or unconsciously), and the kind of policies they are likely to enact because of it. So if I can help to slightly decrease this disconnect, I’m glad too.
It’s partly my personality… I know a lot of people don’t like generalisations, but I do like them, as I feel that they can help us gain some kind of understanding of the patterns of how the world works. Even if they’re over-simplified, which they inevitably are, I think it’s still better than just seeing the world as random chaos and not having any grasp of the patterns at all.
I don’t think everything should be attributed to the left-right spectrum, and if what I write sounds like I’m doing that, it’s because I like to write in an extreme style, and I like to point out what I don’t think is being pointed out enough. It’s my impression that what’s pointed out a lot at the moment is personalities, individual quirks etc, but what’s not pointed out enough (in my experience) is the patterns and the groups of individuals that tend to believe certain things and do certain things.
It’s a bit like people saying that when multinational companies do horrible things, it’s because there’s a few bad apples. But if there’s a consistent pattern that multi-national companies, in their exclusive drive to maximise profit, act in psychopathic ways (cf. The Corporation documentary – which is probably oversimplified too), I think it’s worth pointing that out.
Likewise with Marryatt’s pay-rise. People might think it’s just a few bad apple individuals on council that voted for the pay-rise. But I think it’s worth pointing out that they seem to have all been right-leaning (correct me if I’m wrong), and that the four of them who are standing again are all standing for right-leaning political groupings (I-Citz and City 1st).
There’s another reason why I stubbornly cling on to the left-right spectrum as a way of describing things. The last few decades have seen a growth of ‘post-modern’ distrust of big stories and grand theories, and part of this is the growth of what has been called a ‘post-political’ and ‘post-ideological’ mindset, where we don’t like politicians to be tied to any big ideas, our politicians claim to be ‘pragmatic’ rather than ideological, and supposedly all the big grand narratives of religion, nationalism, communism etc. are dead.
But what this obscures is that there is in fact one ‘narrative’ that is far from dead. Capitalism (and consumerism, free markets, commodification, inequality etc) is more globally dominant than ever before, and it no longer needs a big narrative to support it – in fact it’s supported precisely by the post-modern turn from big theories to individual feelings and individual consumption. (You could also say that social liberalism/individualism is a narrative that is extremely powerful in the West, but I’d say that capitalism is more globally dominant – cf. China combining capitalism with social authoritarianism and doing it even ‘better’ than the countries who combine capitalism with democracy).
Paralleling this, in political science (from my outside perspective) there seems to be a movement towards seeing the old left-right frameworks as inadequate and seeing people who ‘still’ use them as out of touch. But again, I think this can potentially obscure real political phenomena like neo-liberalism, especially if you don’t replace my over-simplified ‘shifting to the right economically’ explanation with a better and more accurate explanation that is still accessible to non-POLS students.
So my question is what should we replace the left-right spectrum with? I think I’d be happy to abandon the left-right spectrum (and the political compass two-spectrum model) if I saw that there was a better alternative. I’m very happy to be corrected and educated here, but at the moment, all I see replacing the ‘old’ left-right model is A) from academics: complex theories that are inaccessible to most people, B) from politicians: cynical obscuring of the real political realities they represent. I’d rather have an ‘old-fashioned’ model that can be understood and engaged with than intentional or unintentional obscurantism that contributes to lack of understanding and apathy.
The ideology of middle class struggle
I thought this Sunday Star-Times article was quite interesting.
Three economists (from Infometrics, the NZ Institute of Economic Research and the University of Auckland) all agree that although the middle classes in the United States have been hit hard since the global financial crisis, it’s not accurate to say that the same is true here.
Despite the myth of the “middle class squeeze” and politicians’ attempts to appeal to the embattled middle classes, in New Zealand it’s the poor who have been hit hardest by the recession (and by government responses to it). The middle classes, on the other hand, have “never had it so good”. While the economists disagree about whether the rich are doing better or worse, all agree about “the growing level of inequality in New Zealand – it’s this chasm between our poorest and richest that’s probably the real issue“.
The article also provides eight stories from middle-class people about how they’ve been coping financially in recent years. Karol at The Standard points out that this undercuts the above points somewhat, because they don’t give any stories of the people actually struggling. Also, the stories are foreshadowed by this rather peculiar statement:
“Of course, this is about statistics – the average. This isn’t you, living from pay cheque to pay cheque, scraping together the school donation, the football subs, the car repayment, the Sky bill, the rent for the bach this Christmas.”
This might be an odd expression of post-modern skepticism about attempts at pure objectivity, and/or it might be ordinary garden-variety dumb reporting. It seems to be saying: never mind the facts, we know that you’re struggling, and an evocative description of your hypothetical woes can substitute for an argument. But maybe they just meant that you may be struggling even though on average the middle class aren’t.
Some of the stories do represent these exceptions… Those who have lost or quit jobs in manufacturing and the public service, or lost houses in the earthquakes, have indeed found things getting tougher, as you might expect. However, they’re all pretty philosophical about it, and even their complaints are about first-world, nice-side-of-the-tracks problems:
“An expensive holiday is shelved and Mr Barton is holding onto his ageing television and car.”
“We were lucky to have steak at all. Sky was going to get the chuck. Any slight luxuries were gone.”
“they hid their financial struggles from their son and refused to withdraw him from private school”
So what’s behind the myth of the “middle class squeeze”? Is it just lazy importing of American complaints, or is there more to it than that?
I think the best way to understand it is to see it as an ideology, in a critical or Marxist sense: it’s a worldview that functions to justify and support the present economic system and current unequal power distributions.
People from all levels almost always feel like they’re struggling to make ends meet, because their expectations rise with their incomes (usually staying just ahead). That’s how market capitalism works; dissatisfaction and desire is what keeps the wheels turning. If people were content with what they have, capitalism wouldn’t work, or at least not the way we know it (maybe it could work in a nicer, more sustainable way).
This malaise is always there; we’re born into it, and too often we let ourselves remain in it. And I guess when we’re constantly hearing about tough financial times and how our class is supposedly suffering, it’s more socially acceptable for middle class people to express it openly.
The ‘Returning Kiwi’, Emily Swan, gives voice to this plight:
Does Swan appreciate that with that income and a house, many Kiwis would see her as well-off?
“Yes! The average household income is what, $30,000? Crazy. But then a lot of people are sending their kids to school without breakfast. We are grateful for what we’ve got.”
And yet . . . “I look at my age and think, I’m nearly 40 and I’m still living from pay-cheque to pay-cheque. What do I pass on to the next generation? Will I ever pay my mortgage off? I do feel like I’ve f—ed up somewhere along the way.
If she’s “f—ed up somewhere”, it’s not in not having enough money; she and her partner earn $130,000 between them, but people earning twice as much probably feel the same way (and some people earning half as much have learned not to feel that way).
Perhaps situations like this can serve as a reminder not only that perceptions don’t also match reality, but also of just how mouldable our perceptions, desires and expectations are. Hopefully we can learn to mould them ourselves to what we think they should be, rather than letting them be moulded by advertising, conformity and the pressures of a consumer capitalist society.
Cut Your Hair 
