When I talked about how the system of global feudalism is so huge, and how it destroys people, I got a lot of strong reactions. While a lot of commenters got what I was saying, a lot didn’t. It either sounded to them like I was going to pillory them for shopping at Wal-Mart, or trash them for not doing enough political action. Neither was true–what tends to stop up the works in this movement is the obsession with one or the other.
I’m a big fan of organizing and political action, myself, but I do think it’s helpful to keep ourselves appraised of where the things we buy come from, and at what cost. These small individual consumer choices won’t change the world, but it will help to keep us focused, and keep us mindful of what’s at stake. I also think it could go a long way toward eroding some of our sense of entitlement.
Opoponax had a good suggestion about defining what we want and fighting for it, and Marcy highlighted my point about executive pay and the price of goods. In the thread about the New Bedford raid, Subgrrl talked about supporting actual democracy instead of dictators who spoon with business interests in bed, and Colorado Dave had a vision of what he’d like to see that would ensure social and economic justice.
I think that to get there from here, we’ve got to have a coordinated push on several fronts. Right now, it’s the feudal corporatocracy that controls the conversation. We’ve got to take it back. So here is what I think we could do.
Get real about executive pay. Executives get something 431 times the pay the average worker gets. This was not always the case; while executives have always been paid well, they did not get the proportion of the profits that they do today. Given this, it’s laughable that they cry about staying competitive in the marketplace and use it as an excuse to contract out to export processing zones. They could still pay living wages and make a decent profit if they didn’t take the majority of the haul for themselves. You don’t get to do that to the detriment of the people who work for you. Or at least, you shouldn’t.
Given all of that, a coordinated letter-to-the-editor campaign to newspapers, business publications, and magazines would raise awareness. If anyone owns stock in these companies, you can go to a shareholder meeting (you only need one share). And seriously, a coordinated letter-writing campaign to these executives can’t hurt either. Couple this with actually writing to our representatives in Congress, and we’ll have a decent chance of taking back the dialogue.
Work with organizations that focus on this. United for a Fair Economy is a good place to start, and they provide a lot of seminars and educational materials. They also created the Tax Fairness Organizing Collaborative, a network of grassroots organizations in different states.
Get real about the true cost of goods. I think I saw this in the book Going Local–that if goods had a true cost tag on them, people would have to think more. It makes sense. It would bring reality right home to every citizen who, say, looked at a laptop and saw a note covering the resources used in producing it, the amount of waste generated in producing it, the effects this waste had on the land and the people near the production of these materials, and the pay of the worker(s) who assembled its various parts, and the conditions of the workplace of the workers.
Push for regulations that clamp down, hard, on corporations, and work with international groups to do the same. I don’t see a problem with a tariff against corporations that move their operations overseas–I tend to agree with Colorado Dave that companies that take advantage of the poor should be slapped, hard, in the pocketbook. I tend to think of this as a fine for taking advantage of the poor; and in fact, any extra profit that’s made should be taxed at 50 percent for aid to Global South nations. I think we should also make it mandatory for companies that produce things with toxic materials–computer companies, say, or cell phone manufacturers–to be responsible for the disposal and recycling of these items. Considering the fact that companies push planned obsolescence by no longer carrying the batteries for a phone, or creating goods that just will not last, they should be responsible for the disposal of these goods, and these goods should be disposed of/recycled here, in the US, and not dumped in the Global South.
Take action on things like the New Beford raid. Other bloggers have already posted this info, but the MIRA Coalition is collecting donations and organizing to help and get some measure of justice for the very people our corporate feudalist economy has used. (Massachusetts and Rhode Island folks–we can work directly with the or MIRA.) The Immigrant Solidarity Network is also a good group that needs our help.
Spread the knowledge. We need to start spreading the knowledge about the reality of executive pay, sweatshops, the environment, and human rights abuses. We have to take back control of the conversation. It may sound tedious to hammer the points home over and over again, but remember–people have bought into the mantra that reasonably priced goods require low worker wages, that corporations shouldn’t have their tax loopholes closed lest the jobs they don’t bring to the communities never materialize, that the economy must grow indefinitely, and that US economic interests are somehow divorced from global political theater.
Those are my thoughts, right off the top of my head. What are yours?
22 Responses to “Fighting the system”
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One small thing I try to do, is use whatever products I have purchased until the product is falling apart. I drive a 1992 Ford Escort that has been declared totaled once. I bought it back for “salvage rights,” had the repairs made and that was six years ago. I bought my TV in ‘89 and it still workds fine. I have clothing and shoes that are over twenty years old but they are still quite serviceable.
I had to get a new mattress a month ago but the old one was over twenty years old (waterbed). I am not a marketers dream customer obviously, but why should I allow them to dictate what I purchase. Most products will last far longer than the marketers would like if you just take care of them.
Well-paid workers who can buy the goods they produce are the ultimate sign of a healthy economy—-because they’re not being used up by the economy, they’re contributing to it. Get prepared to make a lot of phone calls and write a lot of letters. This type of change doesn’t happen by wishing. And be prepared for resentment.
Sheelzebub,
With respect to your last post, I felt it was misdirected because the issue is complicated and I didn’t feel like you were offering solutions- which I think are harder to find than people acknowledge. I also felt like it was misdirected because I don’t think American consumer entitlement is the core problem so I will tend to criticize positions that advance this idea, especially if I don’t feel like it clearly explained. But I think this post is much better as it addresses specific issues and specific potential solutions.
There are two general issues here. The first is companies taking advantage of labor overseas and at home. On this issue, we seem to agree and I would support what you’re saying with one caveat- cheap overseas labor is not always exploitative. But it frequently is and it also generally undermines wages in the United States, so you have to be careful there.
The second issue has to do with the way business conducted. Pushing off the cost of waste, planned obsolescence and executive pay are all big problems. But how do you solve them? I still believe that the capitalist system delivers more value than any other economic system we’ve come up with. Many liberals agree with this position, the question is, do you? Because sometimes the cost of enforcement can exceed the benefits delivered. This is the biggest problem with corporate governance. Shareholders can’t run a company. But if you leave it too much in the hands of the board and the corporate officers, they run things to their own benefit, not the shareholders. Thus, high executive pay. Shareholder activism is not a bad idea, but this is not a new idea- its just really hard to get it to work.
I disagree with the notion that small individual consumer choices have negligable effect. The entire system as it currently exists is an emergent property of aggregate individual consumer choices, albeit choices constrained by crony capitalism.
What is needed is a way to make ethical choices easier. Right now the marketplace is dominated by mechanisms devoted to making it easy to buy mass market goods. Something as simple as a directory of socially conscious companies, along with some explanation of their policies, would be a nice start. Such things exist, but they tend to be quite narrowly focused and excessively concerned about absolute purity. Purity is not necessary - all that’s needed is an awareness of one’s choices, and a decision to choose less harmful over more harmful products.
togolosh,
the magazine, Utne Reader, covers some of what you are asking for within its ads as well as the articles it publishes…
I like George Lakoff’s idea that to get to the root of corporate influence on government, there needs to be electoral reform. He talks about publically financing election campaigns to prevent corporations from buying politicians in the first place (there’s a PDF chapter online). It’s hard to make laws that contribute to a healthy, realistic marketplace while corporations can still buy the legislators with perfectly legal campaign contributions. Until that gets sorted out, all the action and awareness is working uphill.
I was reading one of my knitting books last night, a chapter on the history of knitting, and I came across this gem:
Sheezlebub,
You’re simply not getting to the root of the problem - this is precisely not the topic to just suggest things off the top of your head.
At root, the problem is that large corporations (or late stage capitalism, if you prefer) have too much power in relation to our political structures. We need to transform that power inequality to a situation where corporations are more subordinate to the state.
Once large corporations are back in a subordinate position, the state’s controls over them make such things as reducing executive pay comparatively trivial questions. Without that subordination, it is very unlikely for us ever to achieve such goals. IE, a single peasant asking the king to reduce the king’s income will not succeed. The peasantry organized into Parliament, on the other hand, can pass a bill increasing or reducing the king’s income as they so desire.
Of course, how to reduce corporate power and increase state power over them is a difficult question. Clearly, both a overt approach (public exhortation, propaganda, scandal mongering, slander and so on) and a covert approach are both recommended.
At the highest macro level, even if we are not communists, it would behoove us to support the harshest critiques of capitalism, so as to make the moderate socialists seem more reasonable. (Besides, capitalism really does deserve a very radical and complete critique).
So, we require a multi-prong approach:
1. theoretical: refute neoclassical economics.
2. overt extremism: supporting radical rabble-rousing, propaganda and so on against capitalism
3. overt moderate: Increasing strength of unions, increasing minimum wage, supporting mainstream politicians who lean in the right directions (i.e. Edwards or Kucinich, Sherrod Brown, etc) as well as more moderate advocacy groups.
4. covert moderate: advocating for subtle changes in the anti-trust, securities and corporate governance laws to push the overall institutional situation to our advantage.
5. covert extremism: a coordinated plan of infiltration and subversion of the various institutions of capital.
Emergent outcomes are epi-phenomenonal and probably
Unique to systems.
System are either imposed top-down (Russian ‘Communism’, for example)
or more bottom-up. WAY bottom-up is, simply put…mob.
So that doesn’t work well either.
Systems’ balance (fairness?) allows or promotes
input and influence, gathered widely, to outcome, taken whole.
These are the ’strange bubblings-up’, unpredictable, steady
and engine to the whole….the effort, the happening(s).
Got to thinking this morning - about this thread, actually -
about how little my own efforts might bring to the system
but recalled that while almost no single bubble
is ever remembered or often even noted, each contributes.
[Like a comment on a blog like Pandagon]
So think of yourselves each as single wholly-unremark’d
individual bubbles…rising to surface at last into action and outcome.
Emergent outcomes are epi-phenomenonal and probably
Unique to systems.
System are either imposed top-down (Russian ‘Communism’, for example)
or more bottom-up. WAY bottom-up is, simply put…mob.
So that doesn’t work well either.
Systems’ balance (fairness?) allows or promotes
input and influence, gathered widely, to outcome, taken whole.
These are the ’strange bubblings-up’, unpredictable, steady
and engine to the whole….the effort, the happening(s).
Got to thinking this morning - about this thread, actually -
about how little my own efforts might bring to the system
but recalled that while almost no single bubble
is ever remembered or often even noted, each contributes.
[Like a comment on a blog like Pandagon]
So think of yourselves each as single wholly-unremark’d
individual bubbles…rising to surface at last into action and outcome.
mpowell:
I don’t know what you wrote in response to the last post. However, it sounds like what you really want to say is that you didn’t like the last post because it didn’t offer something that you admit is difficult to offer, and because it didn’t say what you want.
That’s not “misdirected”; that’s a call for a trackback with you writing what you think is important, and maybe offering a solution of your own.
Sometimes throwing out ideas is necessary, especially if there aren’t any good solutions. It might be impossible to find answers, but it’s definitely impossible if no one says “okay, here’s something to think about!”
Whatever happened to class struggle? You hardly need to be a commie to realize we live in a class society. Unfortunately most liberals are AWOL when it comes to organizing workers (native or immigrant) into a fight against the upper classes.
I’ve been in unions for more than 15 years, people are already pissed. Unfortunetly their anger is sheep herded into the democratic party by the businessmen who run unions, who year after year delivers nothing. We won’t get universal health care or any other gains until we fight for it— which means organizing campaigns, direct action, strikes, boycotts, pickets etc..
togolosh–While I agree that it should be easier to make ethical consumer choices, I am leery of being reduced to a market niche. It puts all of the responsibility on those with less power than than the executives and manufacturers of goods.
burritoboy–Well, I didn’t suggest that individuals ask those in power to make change, I said that a collective, coordinated action would have a better chance of getting results. And while I agree that more control over corporations is a good thing (and what I had proposed), I also think that we have to stay vigilant–our government has not only allowed itself to be subverted by corporate interests, it has a history of funding and fighting covert wars for these interests. As it stands, we have too many former government workers on boards and vice versa, and too many high-ranking politicians with stock and financial stakes in these companies. We’ve also got a lot of companies doing business with the government, paying lobbyists to push for their causes, and keeping our representatives on their payrolls via campaign contributions. I absolutely agree that we have to keep hammering the message home–as I said in my post, it may seem tedious, but taking back the message is a big part of this. It does sound like we’re mostly in agreement, however, the offensiveness of my ideas coming from the top of my head notwithstanding.
Sarah, WRT to the intertwined corporate/governmental power, I tend to agree with you. We need serious electoral reform. I think too many folks figure that the GOP is the only group we have to worry about, and forget about the DLC.
mpowell–While I’m not a big fan of capitalism, I don’t see any one economic system as a savior–witness how communism in China is turning into another kind of feudalism, in many ways like our own. We need to look critically at our economic system, yes, AND I think we have to be vigilant about safeguarding our democracy. We have to be more engaged in the process, and we have to have time
’ve been in unions for more than 15 years, people are already pissed. Unfortunetly their anger is sheep herded into the democratic party by the businessmen who run unions, who year after year delivers nothing. We won’t get universal health care or any other gains until we fight for it— which means organizing campaigns, direct action, strikes, boycotts, pickets etc..
Yep. These folks aren’t going to hand this stuff to you out of the goodness of their hearts.
IE, a single peasant asking the king to reduce the king’s income will not succeed. The peasantry organized into Parliament, on the other hand, can pass a bill increasing or reducing the king’s income as they so desire.
And if the king and his aristocracy don’t listen, well, historically the people often come up with a means to force them to listen.
There’s one other reason why I think people get annoyed with the “consume less” speakers. Its the reason I’m annoyed with it anyway.
I don’t consume much. I’m too damn poor to consume much. I *can’t* do with less, because I’m already doing with less. If I did with less I’d be starving.
People telling me to do with less and other similar sentiments, trigger a class warfare response in me. Maybe the people you hang out with can do with less, maybe they’re overconsuming, but me and my friends can’t, and aren’t because we’re poor. I don’t know what your situation is, maybe you’re as poor as me. But when I hear people tell me to do with less it sounds like the “let them eat cake” sort of ignorance you typically hear from the well to do.
All I’ve bought in the past month is food, gas, two books, and a $60 used mainboard (that I can’t really afford) because my old mainboard died. Don’t talk to me about overconsumption.
burritoboy, I’m especially intrigued by item #5, covert infiltration. That’s essentially what Ben & Jerry started out doing — building a successful corporation without relying on the inequalities that such corporations normally entail. The tragedy of the situation is that they failed — in particular, the board eliminated the Maximum Wage Ratio clause that was built into the company’s charter.
But just because B&J capitulated doesn’t mean it’s impossible. I’d love to see more of us keep trying. As a community of people concerned about the unacceptable price of global capitalism, we need to take action not only as consumers, but as business owners.
Or even as employees — if we can make the choice (and we too rarely feel we can) we have to select where we apply our labor as carefully as we choose where we spend our wages.
The tragedy of the situation is that they failed — in particular, the board eliminated the Maximum Wage Ratio clause that was built into the company’s charter.
Was that before or after the company was acquired by Unilever? (Who, ironically, also own Dove, which was the subject of another post fairly recently.)
Speaking for myself, I would like some strategies that might work on my Rush-Limbaugh-loving dad to convince him that, no, we’re not planning on taking away all of his stuff and forcing him to live on Tofurkey in a commune in the Arizona desert. My dad isn’t completely in the tank — he’s been a member of and fundraiser for Ducks Unlimited for over 20 years — but he needs a reason other than, “Think of the poor illegal workers!”
Mnemosyne, I’m pretty sure the cap went out the window as soon as Cohen stepped down in 1994 or 1995, which was five years before the Unilever acquisition. I really wish I could find the source where the B&J board explained how they had to eliminate the cap because it was impossible to attract qualified candidates to fill the CEO position with it in place, but I have lost the link.
Ducks Unlimited is great — sportsman-related conservation makes for some fertile common ground. Out here in Montana, hunters like to talk about how much they are doing for the environment, since their licensing fees pay for wildland preservation. And honestly, they make a good point.
“in particular, the board eliminated the Maximum Wage Ratio clause that was built into the company’s charter.”
Precisely - because Ben and Jerry did not really take thinking about corporate governance seriously. Why did they structure the firm that the board COULD do that? I.E. their own thinking about power within their firm was essentially shallow. I myself don’t know the B&J situation well, so I don’t want to comment more on it without learning more.
But, no, B&J would be an instance of prong no. 3 - overt moderate efforts, like cooperatives, ESOPs and so on.
Sweet- answers!
My only beef with the “write your congress-people” action is that I, personally, feel totally and completely disenfranchised from any and all political processes in this country, both local and national. I’ve felt disenfranchised even before I could legally vote, back during the Clinton hearings. I still vote, out of a possibly misplaced sense of civic duty perhaps, but I don’t see how my vote has actually changed anything at all.
During a letter writing campaign I was a part of during college- an art student writing for funding for my university to finally build us a non-hazardous art building, and it was hazardous (2 spontaneous fires in one semester, rats/cockroaches, asbestos, no ventilation system at all in a place where dangerous chemicals are a norm). I wrote my local legislators, and only one had more than a form letter response. Her response, however, was “I was with you until you started threatening me!” My letter contained the phrases to the effect of “we young voters DO vote, we ARE your constituents, and we WILL vote against you if you don’t deliver”. She was THREATENED by the democratic process itself.
This kind of entrenched entitlement on the part of our politicians is one reason why I feel so disenfranchised. My congress people are there for 6 years in D.C., and they don’t win elections on donations that poor people make. They win elections based on large-scale TV ad campaigns paid for by PACs, they stay in power because of pandering to corporate interests that give them more money.
There are all kinds of policy and law changes that I think need to happen before we can even feel like the politics of the country have shifted so that we can advocate for change directly, as constituents and not “the little people”. One of those is the election reform that George Lakoff suggests. But another important one, especially for presidential candidates, is the requirement that they write their speeches themselves, at least to a certain extent. Another important change I think is a basic amendment to the Constitution that would address workers rights.
But I also think that there is absolutely NO WAY any of these changes will be made, especially not without overt class warfare coming from the other side (our side). We have to hit the streets to force our change. Hard to do without weapons when the same people who own the government own the military and the police. So, yeah. I dunno. Maybe I’m too damn cynical. Maybe I’m a tinfoil hat person- I also believe that Wellstone’s death was a little too convenient and that the last two presidential elections were completely stolen and backed up by our “government representatives”.
As for unions, oh man- drydock, I know so much of what you speak. I was an avid union member, and was a part of a historic strike in my state. What did our council do to help us? Nothing. They just took our strike funds granted by the International and doled it out MOST grudgingly. What I saw then, and later as a delegate to various council meetings, was the same thing I see everywhere: Entitled white men running the show for everyone else, and not giving a damn that their workers are getting the shaft as long as THEY get to have their Brooks Bros suits and gold watches. My union was a union mostly of clerical workers, but also hospital workers and other public workers across the state. The best paid persons were the more industrial workers- snow plow drivers- who almost unanimously were men. The worst paid and least-defended (by the Council) persons in the union were the hospital workers, some making not much more than about $8 an hour, and were almost unanimously women.
I have a friend who is and has been an organizer for immigrant workers, working with the UCF to organize meat packing plants. When he was found out to be a “radical” within the union structure, actually photo documenting sanitation issues at the one and doing some pretty risky things to get evidence for a trial, he had his hands tied by the union president- no talking to the immigrants (he was the only organizer that spoke spanish), no fraternizing with them, no going to the plant again. He left, and now he’s working with a local immigrants rights group to start a totally whole new union! Which I find heartening.
What I think most needs attention is american apathy. Even other clerical workers I knew when I was on strike didn’t have any interest in anything other than their own paycheck. Which I can understand in some respects- when you live in a state where missing one paycheck means never getting out of debt for the rest of your life, I can see this.
But many americans simply have no idea that there a) was a labor movement in this country, b) that people died for the things we take for granted now (like pay increases! and vacations!), and c) that the struggle continues.
This is of course due to other monetary manipulations of our education system, another topic for another day.
Simply telling us to do with less- not enough. I’ve been so poor, making payments on credit card debt and school loans, that even on a wage of $12.46 an hour I was living with my parents, didn’t own a vehicle, and couldn’t afford a new pair of shoes if mine broke.
I do think a definite class war is coming up. I think it needs to be fought with education and resistance to hopefully counteract any move towards weaponry-based overthrow. But fuck, if needs be, I will pick up a gun to fight for my right to live with dignity, to love whomever I choose, to abort as many fetuses as I see fit, and to take MY government back from the robber barons who currently run it. We’ve already got 3 cases of ammo in the garage.
The most heartening though to me these days: They are only 2% of our population, and even with them manipulating other people, are maybe only 10% of the population. We could totally take our Corporate Overlords in a fight to the death. They are simply outnumbered. The funny thing is that they made it that way. In fact, their whole system of entitlement crashes if their numbers get too large.
People telling me to do with less and other similar sentiments, trigger a class warfare response in me. Maybe the people you hang out with can do with less, maybe they’re overconsuming, but me and my friends can’t, and aren’t because we’re poor. I don’t know what your situation is, maybe you’re as poor as me. But when I hear people tell me to do with less it sounds like the “let them eat cake� sort of ignorance you typically hear from the well to do.
Exactly. Which is why I think that as a political strategy, just “consuming less” isn’t worth very much–it’s a feel good non-solution by itself. For the affluent who can afford to consume a lot, not consuming and being educated about where their stuff comes from and at what true cost can be useful, if only to keep them focused. But to tell everyone to just consume less is shortsighted and classist. (I’m thinking of an example from Garbageland where people were charged fees for their trash, which screwed over the poor, who maybe couldn’t afford the more expensive, longer-lasting stuff and had to replace it quickly.)