Every Dollar is NOT a Vote
Alright, lets clarify things:
Dollars and votes don't have any of the same physical properties.
Nor do they have the same spiritual, social or political properties.
This is a dollar: |
This is a vote: |
Frankly if Koumbit tried to pay me in votes, I would leave. Votes, you see, have value only in a very limited, simple way. To put it simply, they allow me to express a preference for which bastard will screw me for the next n years. You may find this cynical but I am only making a tangential point about votes.
My point is this: when Laure Waridel tells you that "Acheter c'est voter", or any variation thereof, she is doing one of two things:
- Being unpardonably, appallingly incompetent. (Remember, she is the president of one of the biggest environmental NGOs in the province)
- Deliberately, maliciously, lying to you.
Lets give her the benefit of a doubt shall we and assume number one.
Why is Ms. Waridel still trotting out this old sacred cow?
Because she believes in supply and demand without understanding it. Many people, including Ms. Waridel, naively assume that producers of goods make decisions about production based on what people are actually buying. This idea is pleasing to our egos - merely by consuming we have enormous power, but we intuitively understand it to be wrong in other scenarios.
The Scale of the Problem
Think about it - when you go to a concert which individual has the most power in the room - you, or any of your fellow audience members, or the musician, event promoters, and producers? We intuit the right answer to this question but also understand that the audience collectively has some degree of power over what is going to happen in the room.
Lets face it though - my individual decision to walk out or stay is going to have zero impact unless I am the artist's mother or something. Now a collective walkout would get noticed, and have a certain kind of impact.
To my mind then the first flaw in Laure Waridel's logic then is this: buying something is a profoundly individualistic activity. In order to affect the market this way you need to reach an unimaginable number of people - on the order of millions if not hundreds of millions. Eco-capitalists like to talk up the positive aspects of their campaigns -
"Hundreds of thousands of people are buying our shit. " (Made up statistic)
Not
"One tenth of one percent of all consumers are buying our shit." (Also made up)
But both are true.
We should be asking these people to show us the measurable impact on overall pollution, biodiversity, ecosystems and climate that your products and advocacy are having. And the answers will be that the changes are very slight, or don't register at all. This is why mainstream environmental activists like to talk in terms of tons of pollution, acres of habitat, and kilometers of ocean floor. Because when they talk in percentages, they have to use a lot of zeroes.
Who Makes the Choices?
It is true that we make choices about what we buy. That certain products have different impacts. Implicit in the words "Supply and Demand" is the notion that demand for goods drives the supply of them.
But ultimately we don't choose what companies produce for us - executives do. And we don't choose where we buy them - store owners do. Nor do we choose what goes on the shelves - managers do that.
People who organise boycotts, stockholder's meetings actions and advocate sanctions understand this - mass action and education is a much more effective way to talk back to power than voting. Just ask a lobbyist.
How About Not Buying At All?
OK. Go right now and look at what is in your fridge. Count how many condiments are in there that you cannot remember the last time you've used, or that anyone you live with has used.
If you are like me there are quite a lot of them. (Nineteen to be precise)
If this doesn't satisfy, you can try counting the books on one shelf you haven't read, or the ratio of shoes to feet in your house, or the number of untouched cosmetic products in your cabinet.
The point is, while I did choose to buy these condiments in my fridge, it is highly unlikely I would have bought them if they had never been available to me. Nor would I have missed having them in my life. They don't actually improve my life in the slightest bit. I would much rather have back the hours I worked to earn the money to buy those condiments than have them in my fridge.
If it sounds like I am advocating a radical transformation of our relationships to our economies, then I am getting my point across. If not, then here's one place to start reading about it.
