theinstagrahame:
fozmeadows:
there is no ethical consumption under capitalism
Years ago now, I remember seeing the rape prevention advice so frequently given to young women - things like dressing sensibly, not going out late, never being alone, always watching your drink - reframed as meaning, essentially, “make sure he rapes the other girl.” This struck a powerful chord with me, because it cuts right to the heart of the matter: that telling someone how to lower their own chances of victimhood doesn’t stop perpetrators from existing. Instead, it treats the existence of perpetrators as a foregone conclusion, such that the only thing anyone can do is try, by their own actions, to be a less appealing or more difficult victim.
And the thing is, ever since the assassination of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson, I’ve kept on thinking about how, in this day and age, CEOs of big companies often have an equal or greater impact on the day to day lives of regular people than our elected officials, and yet we have almost no legal way to redress any grievances against them - even when their actions, as in the case of Thompson’s stewardship of UHC, arguably see them perpetrating manslaughter at scale through tactics like claims denial. That this is a real, recurring thing that happens makes the American healthcare insurance industry a particularly pernicious example, but it’s far from being the only one.
Because the original premise of the free market - the idea that we effectively “vote” for or against businesses with our dollars, thereby causing them to sink or swim on their individual merits - is utterly broken, and has been for decades, assuming it was ever true at all. In this age of megacorporations and global supply chains, the vast majority of people are dependent on corporations for necessities such as gas, electricity, internet access, water, food, housing and medical care, which means the consumer base is, to all intents and purposes, a captive market. We might not have to buy a specific brand, but we have to buy a brand, and as businesses are constantly competing with one another to bring in profits, not just for the company and its workers, but for C-suites and shareholders - profits that increasingly come at the expense of workers and consumers alike - the greediest, most inhumane corporations set the financial yardstick against which all others are then, of necessity, measured.
Which means that, while businesses are not obliged to be greedy and inhumane in order to exist, overwhelmingly, they become greedy and humane in order to compete, because capitalism encourages it, and because there are precious few legal restrictions to stop them from doing so. At the same time, a handful of megacorporations own so many market-dominating brands that, without both significant personal wealth and the time and resources to find viable alternatives, it’s all but impossible to avoid them, while the ubiquity of the global supply chain means that, even if you can keep track of which company owns which brand, it’s much, much harder to establish which suppliers provide the components that are used in the products bearing their labels.
Consider, for instance, how many mainstream American brands are functionally run on sweatshop labour in other parts of the world: places where these big corporations have outsourced their workforce to skirt the already minimal labour and wage protections they’d be obliged to adhere to in the US, all to produce (say) electronics whose elevated sticker price passes a profit on to the company, but without resulting in higher wages for either the sweatshop workers overseas or the American employees selling the products in branded US stores.
When basically every major electronics corporation is engaged in similar business practices, there is no “vote” our money can bring that causes the industry itself to be better regulated - and as wealthy, powerful lobbyists from these industries continue to pay exorbitant sums of money to politicians to keep government regulation at a minimum, even our actual votes can do little to effect any sort of change.
But even in those rare instances where new regulations are passed, for multinational corporations, laws passed in one country overwhelmingly don’t prevent them from acting abusively overseas, exploiting more desperate populations and cash-poor governments to the same greedy, inhumane ends. And where the ultimate legal penalty for proven transgressions is, more often than not, a fine - which is to say, a fee; which is to say, an amount which, while astronomical by the standards of regular people, still frequently costs the company less than the profits earned through their unethical practices, and which is paid from corporate coffers rather than the bank accounts of the CEOs who made the decisions - big corporations are, in essence, free to act as badly as they can afford to; which is to say, very.
Contrary to the promise of the free market, therefore, we as consumers cannot meaningfully “vote” with our dollars in a way that causes “good” businesses to rise to the top, because everything is too interconnected. Our choices under global capitalism are meaningless, because there is no other system we can financially support that stands in opposition to it, and while there are still small businesses and companies who try to operate ethically, both their comparative smallness and their interdependent reliance on the global supply chain means that, even if we feel better about our choices, we’re not exerting any meaningful pressure on the system we’re trying to change.
Which means that, under the free market, trying to be an ethical consumer is functionally equivalent to a young woman dressing modestly, not going out alone and minding her drink at parties in order to avoid being raped. We’re not preventing corporate predation or sending a message to corporate predators: we’re just making sure they screw other worker, the other consumer, the other guy.
All of which is to say: while I’d prefer not to live in a world where shooting someone dead in the street is considered a valid means of redressing grievances, what the murder of Brian Thompson has shown is that, if you provide no meaningful recourse for justice against abusive, exploitative members of the 1%, then violence done to those people will have the feel of justice, because it fills the void left by the lack of consequences for their actions. It’s the same reason why people had little sympathy for the jackass OceanGate CEO who killed himself in his imploding sub, or anyone whose yacht has been attacked by orcas - it’s just intensified here, because where the OceanGate CEO was felled by hubris and the yachts were random casualties, whoever killed Thomspon did so deliberately, because of what he did.
It was direct action against a man whose policies very arguably constituted manslaughter at scale; a crime which ought to be a crime, but which has, to date, been permitted under the law. And if the law wouldn’t stop him, can anyone be surprised that someone might act outside the law in retaliation - or that regular people would cheer for them when they did?
As many people who’ve tried to excise Amazon from their spending habits have found, it’s next to impossible. Like, sure you can simply not shop on their website or at Whole Foods, but there’s still a significant chunk of the Internet running on their cloud. It’s the holidays right now, and I still have family members who insist on giving and receiving gift cards from Amazon (even when you ask for anything else). That’s also before you go searching for something that your local stores don’t have, and you can’t really find anywhere else but Bezos’ General Store.
Sure, they’re the worst example. But thanks to corporate mergers and buyouts and general consolidation, it’s true for everything. Most foods you get are owned by like one of three companies. The US has 6 major airlines and effectively no other long range travel options (because our trains are so underfunded).
So, yeah, voting with your wallet means nothing when you have to make exceptions constantly. I can’t boycott something if I’m constantly breaking my boycott just to survive.
So when someone takes direct action, and it works, I think that’s the reason the trial of the Suspected Assassin is becoming such a show of force. United may be going all “we don’t negotiate with terrorists”, but Blue Cross reversing their inhumane policies a day later sure makes it sound like it’s a viable option.
And if CEOs don’t want to leave is any other choices…
This is a sidebar from my original point, but the mention of Amazon and its ubiquity makes me want to add on a theory of mine about why I think Amazon has been able to get such an insane foothold in the US market. Because the thing is, while Amazon originates in the US, it’s now a global company - and yet, compared to other places in the world, it seems like Amazon’s dominance over brick-and-mortar stores in the US far exceeds its grasp elsewhere. And while I was doing my Christmas shopping, I was suddenly struck by a possible explanation: the lack of walkable cities and public transport generally in America, coupled with the emphasis on strip malls rather than general commercial areas, which makes it much harder for people to quickly and easily access a wide range of goods in person.
See, in principle, I hate buying from Amazon; in practice, however, I live in a part of the US with negligible public transport and - crucially - do not have a car, which means that, if I want to buy something at at a physical shop, I’m broadly restricted to one of a handful of locations that are within a reasonable distance of my home. While I’m comparatively lucky, in that there are several such destinations to choose from, what’s annoying is that it’s only really feasible to rideshare to and from one of them on a single excursion, as opposed to hitting up multiple locations - and even if I had a car, these places are all far enough apart from each other that going to more than one in a single outing would take up a hefty chunk of time and involve driving on multiple freeways.
If I want to go to, say, IKEA, that’s a 15-20 minute freeway drive to a location where there are no other shops nearby; if I want to go to Barnes & Noble - and I frequently do - there are three locations to choose from, but while the nearest one has the advantage of being next to my favourite boba place, the other surrounding shops contain little to nothing of interest to me, while the two more distant ones have more interesting surrounds, but no boba. There are two decently-sized Targets in driving range, but there’s nothing else near each of them that makes the trip worthwhile, so I never get out there unless there’s multiple specific things I need to buy, because if I only need one thing, the cost of a rideshare both ways is inevitably far more than I’d pay in shipping to get the same thing delivered.
And as best I can tell, this situation is pretty common throughout the United States. Unless you’re lucky enough to live in a place with good transit and/or a thriving commercial downtown area, where you can easily walk between different kinds of shops in a single outing instead of having to drive 15 minutes, park, shop, drive 20 minutes and park again, ordering online ends up being, not just quicker and simpler, but vastly cheaper and more efficient than the alternative. Which is where Amazon enters the chat, using its shitty working conditions and vast resources to further fuck up the brick-and-mortar ecosystem, not because a majority of people inherently prefer buying shit online, but because a staggering proportion of America is expressly designed to require you to drive as much as fucking possible, even when that’s the worst possible way to do things.
Whereas when I lived in Scotland, even though I had access to Amazon and would use it periodically - it was easier for Australian relatives to buy me Amazon gift cards than to either post a physical gift or buy me gift cards to UK stores, because many companies are Weird about people in one country trying to buy something online from them in a different country - for everyday needs, I could just… walk up to the local high street, from my house, on my human legs, and (if I so desired) hit up a homewares store, a hardware store, a bookshop, a pharmacy, a supermarket, a bric-a-brac place, an antique store, a cafe, the cinema, and a half-dozen other places. And this wasn’t while living in a thriving metropolis: I was in St Andrews, a small university town! And if I really wanted a big day out, I could get one of the many regular buses over the water into Dundee and hit up the city center there, to exactly the same ends.
Similarly, when I later lived in Aberdeen away from the city center, there wasn’t much in walking distance of my house, unless I felt like trekking 40 minutes over to the nearest shopping complex - which I sometimes did, stroller and all, with my then-toddler in tow, because even if I got all tired out, I knew there’d be a bus to take me back home again. But I could also hop a different bus from the stop in my street and go straight to the city center, where - again - I could walk around hundreds of different shops with ease. Ditto every part of Australia I’ve ever lived in: even without a car, restricted to public transport or walking while toting around a small child, I was never reliant on internet shopping to get basic goods, because there was enough infrastructure that I could manage. And I’m not saying that’s true of every part of Australia or the UK - rural areas in both countries are frequently very isolated and underserved by their local governments. But the difference now that I live in the US is stark.
Because here, the roads dominate. Freeways break up everything, and while there’s a few nice commercial areas near me - streets with interesting shops and things to see - you cannot just hop a bus or train to access them, and even then, they don’t flow naturally into the same sort of area the next suburb over: there’s always a massive fucking multi-lane roadway in between, and the distance, even if walkable in theory, can be difficult to navigate on foot, because it’s not designed with foot traffic in mind. You have to drive, and if you can’t do that, then those places may as well not exist - and overwhelmingly, what you’re left with access to instead are strip malls: clusters of random chain stores linked by a massive carpark and frequently situated in places with nothing else nearby; or at least, nothing else you can easily access without having to drive and park again.
And I genuinely think that this is a big part of why America has become so dependent on Amazon, as well as big box, everything-under-the-sun stores like Target and Wallmart: because without an abundance of accessible, walkable, local commercial centers, with all the greater variety they provide, they’re the easiest, most efficient way for a car-dependent commuter populace - especially one so frequently time-poor, overworked, and underpaid - to buy shit.
Which suggests to me, very strongly, that one of the best ways to combat the dominance of not just Amazon, but big box chain stores, is to build functional public transport and walkable communities with decent commercial zoning - because the more people can easily access a variety of goods local to them, the less they’ll need to be reliant on a few megacorps. So in the event that you needed another reason to support walkable communities and public transit: this is it. Fuck Amazon.
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