Shopping IS the Problem

Earlier this year, Oprah helped Bono launch Product(Red), a shopping campaign supposedly aimed at fighting AIDS. Companies like the Gap, Apple, Converse, American Express, and Motorola are selling specialized (red) products and give around 10% of the profits to the Global Fund to help women and children affected by HIV/AIDS in Africa. Seeing Oprah and Bono ooh and awe over various products, as they grinned with the pride of being saviours, was one of the most nauseating things I've ever seen.

So, I was pleased to discover Buy (Less) Crap which emphasizes that shopping is not the solution, and asks people to donate directly to charities like the Global Fund.

Not only is shopping not the solution, but it is a huge part of the problem. Structural adjustment programs (SAPs), introduced by the IMF and World Bank displace the rural sector. Restructuring undermines local, subsistence agriculture by opening economies to imports and shifting to large-scale plantations for exports -- providing luxury consumer goods for the Global North. The result is displacement of rural populations. Many men leave rural villages for work in big cities or in mines, contract HIV/AIDS from casual sex partners or sex workers, and then spread the disease to spouses in their home village. As well, the displacement of children and young women into the cities has led to a sharp increase in commercial sex work and heightened rates of HIV/AIDS.

The terrible nature of oppression is that asymmetrical relations are not only obscured, but somehow appear inversed. Think of how women who stay home with children are so often cast as dependent on men, while all the non-waged labour that men depend upon is rendered invisible. Similarly, while we save-and-aid the poorer nations of the world, we fail to recognize that they are subordinated to produce for our needs and desires in the so-called developed world.

So now our manic consumerism is no longer a cause of poverty, but has magically become the solution! We can cruise the mall with chai latte in hand, picking out iPods and Gap gear, feeling that we are helping the world when it is intuitively not so.

Comments

[Red Jenny]

I completely agree. I don't know how consumer capitalism managed to convince people they can shop their way to a just world.

The stupid pink breast cancer products are another example. (buy this yogurt and send us the lid, using a $.40 cent stamp, and we'll donate $.10 to something to do with breast cancer. And who gets the tax credits for the donation? Not the consumer who spent the money.)

[Polly Jones]

Unreal links, RJ.

I think the Pink Ribbon is a great example. It is so sad because profit is being made to find the 'cure' for cancer. Of course, we can't look to the causes of cancer because the trail of carcinogens would lead us right to big business.

One of the most bizarre examples of consume-to-save that I've seen is the selling of wrist bands in Second Life to help make poverty history!

[Green Assassin Brigade]

Consumerism is the root of so many of the worlds problems today, we fund our schools through chocolate bar sales sot there is a bigger market for coco and child labour in the coco plantations.

Our endless diet of cheap clothes, cheap toys, cheap electronics, increase demand for mining, production, energy(ghg) and chinese slave labour. The west is shopping themselves into financial ruin and world into ecological collapse and along the way we are legitimizing human rights abuse, and becoming a society of fat lazy uncaring slobs more concerned about what we own than what we think or do, or how we care for each other.

[Erik Abbink]

Excellent post.

I do see where Bono and Oprah are coming from: it's better to do something than nothing.

But, as you pointed out, it shows a lack of understanding on the issues at large, and it supports the misguided believe that there's a market solution for every problem in the world; if life was that easy the perfect world would already be here.

Of course Oprah has always been a great contributor to this self-fulfilling prophecy (she will do the marketing for whatever product while tv advertising dollars keep rolling in), but it's sad to see Bono seems to have no problem in being part of such shameful behaviour.

Shopping IS good, for those who rake in the other 90% and the free advertising. And all was well.

[Polly Jones]

Thanks for the comments. GAB, I like when commenters seem even more annoyed than me!

Here's another terrifying example: Buy bottled water to help those who don't have access to water!!!!

[Red Jenny]

Wow. That water thing is fucked up.

Why not drink tap water and send all the money you would have spent on bottled water to support water projects?