The consumer is dead. The citizen is dead. The voter is dead.
The sooner everybody comes to terms with this, the further along we will be.
I started to make this point in a series of tweets about J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter, and opposing transphobia. It came back to me when people started talking about boycotting Amazon (more? like a double boycott?) for being ready to kill USPS by splitting with it. Rather than restate the points, I’ll start just by quoting them:
I’m not saying people should stop boycotting Harry Potter but I hope people’s plans have moved forward from “we’re going to stop JK Rowling from having money”. You can’t do that. She’s at the level of rich where she will always be propped up.
The idea that you can vote with your dollar is dead. It. Is. Dead. It doesn’t work like that anymore, especially when you’re talking about big business, which is where Rowling is. You cannot use the marketplace as a way to attack her, she is defended on that front.
And when I say you can’t do it, this isn’t me saying like I think you shouldn’t. I’m saying that if you could do it, it would have been done. People fucking hate J.K. Rowling. She’s one of the most odious figures in the world. If you could put her out of money she’d be broke already. She isn’t.
Do you think that the reason Graham Linehan basically walked is because he’s right or something? Of course not. And he’s already suffered most of what there is to suffer as far as reputation and career loss etc. And you can’t put him away. This isn’t going to work I’m sorry it’s not.
The way we view this consumerist society, consumers have so much power because companies make their money off of consumers. All consumers have to do is withhold their money. But we’re seeing more and more that this isn’t true. And the reason it isn’t true is not actually as simple as “people keep giving them money”, at least not in a usable sense.
That is, yes, people do keep giving the ghouls money, it’s easy to state that. But why are they doing that? Why do these things which nobody really supports keep happening?
It really is not the case that people actually truly support the bad things that are going on. We shouldn’t be too naive, of course, and feel that every Republican really has a good heart beating behind their ribs. But we can’t jump towards assuming that people just want a bad thing to happen.
Coincidentally, I just saw a YouTube short about Dollar General and how they price gouge their customers. Their business model is to set up in places where lots of other businesses have already left, where people need things and where there isn’t much competition. They offer low prices and then when they secretly jack the prices up, it doesn’t always click with people right away. Other places might be advertising higher prices already or they already bought it and don’t want to go challenge it or there’s just nowhere else to get the thing.
One woman in the short says that she is a Dollar General shopper but not by choice, and by “is”, I have to assume she means “currently”, which is to say, even as she is pursuing a class-action lawsuit against Dollar General for their price gouging. You have to assume that there just aren’t other options for her. And this situation, where you theoretically have a choice but practically are locked into a bad deal, is very instructive for why the consumer-citizen-voter is dead.
While it is annoying, I’m personally pleased to say yet again that you should go read the Theory of the General Crisis because I am going to reference it here. I’m pleased because this is why I write pieces like that, so that I can refer back to them later, and I’m glad this has proved useful enough that I am actually doing that.
The key idea for the moment is that of the domain: the sub-society which is governed by a constituent of the main state. The value and influence that a constituent can bring to bear in any situation is based upon the domain they control. Jeff Bezos, modern-day architect, first-round pick for American constituent (remember, “constituent” in general crisis terms has a different meaning than the one you learned in US Civics class). Is the fact that he is very influential because he himself is just such a great and brilliant guy? Of course not. It is largely based on the fact that he controls Amazon and whatever other businesses are in his portfolio. Amazon synthesizes the efforts of hundreds of thousands of employees and machines to create the huge amount of value that Jeff Bezos lays claim to. All of these businesses, all of the employees and assets, all of that is part of Jeff Bezos’s domain. This is a simplistic, or ideal, picture but it will do well enough to illustrate.
Constituents will often relate to their domains as cattle herders relate to cattle. Their hope is to extract value from their cattle herd. Their hope is not to extract benefit from the herd, it is to extract value specifically, and value is determined before any extraction takes place. In other words, let’s say that a cattle farmer has enough cows to butcher, prepare, and sell 100,000 steaks this week. Each steak can feed 1 person for 1 day. Let’s just say this number of cows is X. Now let’s say that the herder is able to get 2 times X cows. Well, they have enough to butcher, prepare, and sell 200,000 steaks a week. But the stores can only handle the sale of the same 100,000 as before. Despite the fact that twice as many people can be fed with 2X cows, and therefore the “extra” cows can potentially provide a benefit, those cows are of no value to the herder unless that benefit is known to be realized in some other way. Again, a very narrow depiction, but sturdy enough for our purposes here.
Herders are therefore always doing two basic actions regarding the number of their herd: fostering and culling. When herders foster their herd, they want there to be a larger herd, they want the herd to produce, and therefore they are more likely to pay attention to the wants and needs of the herd. The herd has to at least be treated well enough that those alive can stay alive and birth more cows for the herd. In the culling stage, the treatment of the cows is much less important. Obviously, in an actual farm, it is rarely the case that a herder culls their entire stock at once, but it cannot be said that the herd is being taken care of at the same level. When fostering, a sick cow might be nursed back to health; when culling, the sick cow always dies.
In the United States, we have been unable to recognize the oligarchy we have always lived under because it has largely been in a fostering phase. Certain people will disagree, such as every minority, and those are valid disagreements, but it is still the case that beneficial programs were built in decades past, programs which did benefit minorities of many kinds. Programs which are unlikely to see any expansion or improvement in the United States of today. My argument essentially is that what we thought was democracy, the power of the people to change the state, was actually just the bleating of cows to a disinterested herder. It’s not that we had any power, it’s that when we made noise, it signaled a problem that the state needed to take care of.
But now the United States is in the culling phase. Now nothing matters to the state except for death. And we are all seeing that the influence we thought we had actually counts for nothing. Because like with the Dollar General situation, the idea of “voting with your dollar” is and always was a con. You can purchase anything you want with your dollar as long as it’s on sale. As long as it’s allowed to be sold. And you can withhold your dollar whenever you like, unless you need something to live. And you can boycott companies until they fail, but the state will give them a big loan.
You do not have power through politics-as-usual. To the extent that you ever did, it was power gifted to you by the state. It was like giving a pretend steering wheel to a child, letting them believe they’re really driving the car, and coincidentally going to the ice cream store because they will cry if you don’t go. At no point in this does the child have any power. If the parent simply doesn’t care about crying, they can refuse to take any part in this.
I’m not the first person to say this, but I am not seeing this said often enough in this current moment. And perhaps it’s because some don’t want to spread despair. I get that. I don’t want to spread despair. But we have to get over our malaise.
Every day, I see people online saying “I hope IT happens today”, but I do not feel like the U.S. is in a revolutionary mode. Everybody is angry but nothing is building. And we keep talking about Democratic politicians like they haven’t had as big a hand in leading us to this point, as prominent a role in the culling process, as any Republican. We keep hoping that if we hold out for another vote it’s going to save us.
If you need despair to break you out of that thinking, then despair. But pull yourself out of it. Because the point is not to give up. It’s never to give up. But you have to work differently.
In my opinion, we need to connect the anti-ICE movement. There needs to be a strong base for anti-ICE and anti-fascist activity. This has been built before in a hodgepodge way and it has been smashed before. It has to be built again. The movement does not need one overall leader, but it does need area “clearinghouses” for action and information, and they need to be relatively unified in purpose. There have to be some points of contact for groups around the country to coordinate together.
In time, my hope is that such clearinghouses could gain enough social influence that they could issue statements which have as much (or near as much) force as statements from local government. That is people power. It’s not getting together a Democrat-sponsored whatever-the-fuck. We’re already putting the pieces together. But we need more. We need to know that this isn’t just defense, that we are ready to push forward and complete the revolution that this country demands.
I will never stop speaking harshly towards the left, and the reason I do this is because we have to be serious, and that is what I do not see. We have to see the courage of vision, not just the courage of action. I don’t speak to put down but to light a fire. Because I don’t think I am speaking to a choir. I think most people don’t want to believe this. They want it to be someone else’s job. They’re willing to be told what to do but not to figure out what must be done.
Are you going to remain a voter, in your grave? Are you going to remain a consumer, a bleating and defenseless cow? Are you going to remain a citizen, a fake shadow of an oligarch? Is that all you are?