Buy nothing: improve everything

Humanist, Nov-Dec, 2003 by Ilana Boivie

While Christmas is touted as representing generosity and good will, it has come to fuel a trend of lavish, unnecessary consumption. In the United States, the holiday season is kicked off the Friday after Thanksgiving, which is the biggest shopping day of the year. But as Americans scavenge the mall for luxurious items, elsewhere in the world people must scavenge for food. Most Americans are aware of this; many are even aware of how workers in developing nations are systematically exploited by U.S.-based corporations. Yet they are little affected by this knowledge as they continue to shop.

Enter Adbusters, a Canadian anti-consumption and anti-corporate organization, offering a respite in the form of "Buy Nothing Day." This initiative is an international "24 hour moratorium on consumer spending" the Friday after Thanksgiving. Occurring on November 28 this year, Buy Nothing Day offers a chance for all shoppers in North America to declare their objection to the Western culture of materialism by simply not shopping.

The act of declining to buy, however, can be surprisingly difficult in such a consumer culture. Inhabitants of developed nations, while constituting about 20 percent of the world's population, consume 86 percent of its material goods. This suggests a severely flawed global economic structure. According to the United Nations Development Programme, currently 1.3 billion people--about one quarter of the global population--live in poverty and 1.2 billion don't have access to safe drinking water. Over five hundred million people--including one third of all children--are malnourished. The combined assets of the ten richest billionaires exceed $133 billion, more than 1.5 times the combined total national income of the least developed nations.

Furthermore, UNDP analysts point out that the cost of eradicating global poverty would amount to merely 1 percent of global income. Yet the world continues to move in the opposite direction. Between 1960 and 1997, the gap more than doubled between the poorest 20 percent and richest 20 percent of the global population.

It's a simple cause and effect relationship. The more that private and public consumption expenditures increase in developed nations the more that impoverishment--among those producing the very goods bought by wealthy Western consumers--increases in developing nations. We may occasionally chastise Disney, Mattel, or Nike--after the fact--when we hear publicity about sweatshop-manufactured goods, yet we continue to buy whatever we find on the shelves.

Of course it will be argued that supporting the consumer culture boosts the economy and protects jobs; in this climate of recession, job insecurity, and unemployment, Americans in particular should continue spending. Indeed, the supposed theory behind President George W. Bush's tax cuts is just that--and in the wake of 9/11 Bush called on U.S. citizens to purchase more than they normally would as a kind of answer to terrorism. So, instead of considering global poverty and environmental destruction, Americans are supposed to support their fellow Americans.

Yet it is both unrealistic and immoral to attempt such a piecemeal resolution of this economic crisis. As Princeton University bioethics professor Peter Singer states in his book One World,

   For the rich nations not to take a global ethical
   viewpoint has long been seriously morally
   wrong.... If those "at home" to whom we might
   give charity are already able to provide for their
   basic needs, and seem poor only relative to our
   own high standard of living, is the fact that they
   are our compatriots to give them priority over
   others with greater needs? Asking these questions
   leads us to consider to what extreme we
   really can, or should, make "one world" a moral
   standard that transcends the nation-state.

Furthermore, gross consumption causes tremendous environmental destruction. When those in rich nations consume a disproportionate percentage of goods, they in turn cause a disproportionate level of damage to the environment. On the website for Sustainable Alternatives to the Global Economy, a San Francisco, California, based nonprofit environmental organization, Director Henry Holmes explains that economic and technological

   growth fundamentally contradicts the goal of ecological
   sustainability, because there are ecological
   limits to the depletion of natural resources and
   the amount of waste that the Earth's sinks can
   absorb.... Current resource consumption and
   waste generation levels in the post-industrial capitalist
   economies of the North far exceed these
   capacities.

This problem of environmental destruction and global poverty caused by gross levels of Western consumption is exacerbated during the winter holiday season. This reality became the inspiration for Buy Nothing Day, which has grown in popularity each year since its inception in 1997. Last year's festivities are described by Adbusters as having been "sheer mayhem." They included street parties, leafleting, swap meets, credit card cutups, and street theater. And the day was advertised on a half-minute spot on CNN's Lou Dobbs Moneyline (the only network and program that would accept it) on November 26, 2002. The commercial, depicting a pig that states, "The average North American consumes five times more than a Mexican, ten times more than a Chinese person, and thirty times more than a person from India," was later noted by the London Guardian and Wired News. Both the New York Times and Wall Street Journal have also reported on Buy Nothing Day, demonstrating the initiative's continued growth. As the Times reports, the day is "starting to take on a life of its own, and a certain momentum."