The Devil: a Friend of Mine?!
The Devil: a Friend of Mine?!
Is ethical consumerism past its sell-by date?
Recently I dropped a post on a social media site to promote the latest BPC publication: an ebook entitled Dialectical Butterflies: Ecocide, Extinction Rebellion, Greenwash amd Rewilding the Commons - an Illustrated Derive, by Dave and Stuart Wise. I mentioned that BPC uses KDP tools for production and Amazon for (exclusive) distribution of our ebooks and paperbacks. A reader commented:
“Amazon?!”
The punctuation (“?” and “!”) following “Amazon” seemed to suggest that no more needed to be said. Pushing back, I replied, somewhat snarkily: “I'm aware of the nature of tech-god devilry, but if you know any other platform that would publish an heretical ebook with 80 colour photographs for a cut of the royalties (yes, unlike academic and most left wheelbarrow outfits they do actually pay out) please tell.”
My interlocutor replied (equally snarkily) that my “criteria” was “capitalist” and he was “uncomfortable” with it. This ended the discussion, which is pity, as the issue is worth exploring.
For one thing, having a capitalist criteria would depend on Amazon and the like being capitalist, which according to Yanis Varoufakis, they aren’t. Varoufakis writes in Techno-Feudalism: What Killed Capitalism,
“Imagine the following scene straight out of the science fiction storybook. You are beamed into a town full of people going about their business, trading in gadgets, clothes, shoes, books, songs, games and movies. At first everything looks normal. Until you begin to notice something odd. It turns out all the shops, indeed every building, belongs to a chap called Jeff. What’s more, everyone walks down different streets, and sees different stores because everything is intermediated by his algorithm… an algorithm that dances to Jeff’s tune.”
Amazon (like Google) accumulates vast knowledge of what people are looking at online and will use that intelligence to confront the individual consumer with ads and promotions as clickbait. One of Amazon’s most startling achievements has been to get half a billion customers to buy and install an electronic bugging device called Alexa in their homes.
Although it looks like a market, Varoufakis insists, it’s not capitalism. “Jeff” (Bezos) doesn’t produce capital; he charges rent, like in pre-capitalism; except it isn’t feudalism, but post-capitalism. Certainly, it seems like toilers in this post-market economy are, as in days-of-olde, serfs, or more precisely “Cloud serfs.” And everytime serf-consumers engage with the cloud they are building value for Jeff-type companies without getting paid for it. In the Middle Ages it was called the Corvee system: vassals doing unpaid (real, hard) work for the feudal lord.
I’m not convinced that Amazon has overcome capitalism, even if, as Varoufakis claims, the tech-gods are becoming more powerful than the bankers. A capitalist society is one in which the means of production are capital (which is why the U.S.S.R was capitalist in an enfeebled state-capitalist form). Even if Bezos was to hand over all his shares to some benevolent state, industrial capital and the military industrial complex would carry on accumulating for accumulation’s sake and polluting the fuck out of the future. What Marx termed the “capitalist mode of production” is still precisely that, whatever innovations in distribution and exchange have been adopted by capitalists.
Insofar as the rule of capital is ubiquitous in todays globalised world, is there anything “outside” of it which could actualise “ethical consumerism” in “making a difference”? The answer is not a lot. For a growing number of people there is nowhere outside of the system (or systems) in which to do business or earn a living. Amazon is estimated to control over 87.9% of yearly ebook sales in the UK. In ecommerce retail as a whole, Amazon notched up £26.4bn in UK sales for 2023/24. It seems rather pathetic that such worthy organs as the Ethical Consumer tout the likes of Google and Apple as lesser-evil “alternatives.” In a Guardian piece entitled The dilemma of ethical consumption: how much are your ethics worth to you? (30 January 2020) philosopher Matt Beard writes
“There appears to be little out for those wanting to be ethical consumers on a budget. Compromises and trade-offs will need to be made. You’ll likely need to benefit from practices that don’t align with what you think is right. However, the lie at the heart of the ethical consumption movement is to tell you this is your fault. It’s not. It’s the fault of a much larger system offering you choices that, in many cases, you simply shouldn’t be permitted to make.”
“Collapsologist” Peter Turchin his book, End Times, warns that the “overproduction of elites,” which led to such historic cataclysms as the French Revolution and the American Civil War, is being repeated in the 21st century: increasingly, inequalities of wealth and public debt are being stretched to breaking point. Pre-Covid, in 2020, 614 US billionaires owned a combined wealth of $3 trillion. Now, as of March 18, 2024, the US has 737 billionaires with a combined wealth of $5.5 trillion.
As, in the face of all this, ethical consumerism seems more and more past its sell-by date, perhaps it is time to drop the “consumerism” and just be ethical, that is ethical as practice, or even better, as praxis
Zephyr Teachout, in Break ’Em Up: Recovering Our Freedom From Big Ag, Big Tech, and Big Money. says that beyond being futile, symbolically avoiding tech-giants is masturbatory:
“The ‘vote with your feet’ model has a lot of appeal, in that it allows people to import virtuousness into their lives without the struggle of organizing and building a coalition.”
As her title suggests, a real counter-offensive is called for. The current campaign by Amazon workers to get union recognition and a £15 minimum wage could be one of the great struggles of our time. Given Amazon’s determination to undermine it, it should be supported by any means necessary, including - when called for by Amazon strikers - an effective boycott of Amazon stores. Breaking up the tech giants and “recovering our freedom” (and taxing profits) would require lawmakers who would and could do something about it. The problem (for them) is that if they were to admit their uselessness, they would never get elected.