Happy Tuesday!
First off, a correction: in two of my past blogs, I cited a figure stating that 85% of public university professors in Argentina are paid wages below the poverty line. This figure is false, since it includes professors who work 10- and 20-hour weeks, and compares their pay to the minimum wage for full-time employment. If you look at the professors working 40 hours per week, 0% of their wages are below the poverty line. What the figure essentially tells you is that 85% of public university professors in Argentina work less than 40 hours per week. I always try to check the data I use, sorry for failing you guys (twice) on this one!
With that being said, since I’m sure everyone’s fed up with all this election talk, today we’re gonna look at some more data (extra-rigorously checked) on a different kind of so-called voting: the kind you do with your dollars.
Many people are aware and concerned that corporations are ruthlessly pillaging and contaminating the few miles between the Earth’s crust and atmosphere that we all share. “Vote with your dollars” is a strategy for addressing this conundrum. The idea is that if consumers made little environmentally conscious choices when we buy things, we could change what’s in demand, and therefore what corporations produce. It would only take a bit of consciousness on consumers’ part, but together, our actions would make a big difference.
If we want to change the world with our dollars, the first thing we should ask is: “Who has dollars?” The answer is the same as it has been for decades: a tiny number of people have astronomically more dollars than the rest. Globally, the wealthiest 0.1% of people own about as much wealth as the bottom 50% (~8% each). This doesn’t even account for the additional wealth of the 0.1% in the form of control of labor-power or intellectual property, which statistics can’t measure. But it’s more than enough to demonstrate that capitalist markets violate a very fundamental premise of voting: equally distributed decision-making power. Why, then, should we think of buying things at the supermarket as a form of “voting”?
The short answer, in my opinion, is that we shouldn’t. Yes, consumers always have a margin of choice in what they buy. And when they coordinate their consumption—or better yet, withhold it, like in boycotts—it can have a significant effect.
But we cannot overlook the fact that effective boycotts are almost always incorporated as a tactic in a larger political movement, with concrete demands and grassroots organizing. “Vote with your dollars” is a highly individualized way of advocating for change, and telling people to vote with their dollars is not the same as telling them to join active boycotts or support their local unions. If people who said “vote with your dollar” were really advocating for coordinated boycotting, sanctions, and divestment from unethical institutions, they wouldn’t say “vote with your dollar,” they would say “boycott, sanction, and divest from unethical institutions.” But we all know these are two very different claims, and one can get you in a lot more trouble with the police than the other.
Furthermore, as I mentioned above, the concept of a vote implies an egalitarian form of deicion-making. This is completely opposed to the principles drive capitalist markets: competition, exploitation, and accumulation. Dollars and votes are two different words with two different implications, and are in no way symmetrical or interchangeable. In fact, the main way they’re related is that one (dollars) corrupts the other (votes). This only furthers the case that dollars and votes should be treated as categorically distinct, and that perhaps “voting with our dollars” is the reason we ended up with rich people are running our political systems in the first place. Whoops.
When someone says “vote with your dollars,” they are suggesting that consumers in a capitalist market are comparable to voters in a democratic arena. This is a false equivalence. It is also dangerous, because if one believes that dollars in capitalist markets can be conceived of in terms of democratic votes, the implication is that giving the top 0.1% and the bottom 50% the same amount of decision-making power (measured in “dollar-votes”) is a perfectly sound starting point. In other words, the belief that dollars and votes are interchangeable perpetuates the illusion that the existing distribution of dollars is actually legitimate.
But if the problem we are trying to address is that the 0.1% became the 0.1% by offloading unconscionable environmental costs onto the general public and their future generations, we should not concede any legitimacy to the existing distribution of wealth. On the contrary, if we are genuinely concerned about bringing an end to extractivism through democratic means, we must delegitimate both the actual distribution of wealth and the extractivism through which it was accumulated.
How to engage in politics without resorting to dollar-votes? The possibilities are limitless, but for me, the starting point must be understanding where wealth comes from: not dollars, but the labor-power of workers. The sleight of hand that “vote with your dollars” plays is protagonizing the general public as consumers, rather than as producers.
“Vote with your dollars” asks what the public can do when we buy things. But the working class, working-poor, colonized, colored, and imprisoned are, first and foremost, producers of the wealth of the 0.1%. While “vote with your dollars” would lead us to believe that our only leverage for change comes from consuming, there is no acknowledgement that one’s status as a consumer, and power within the “consumptive realm,” is defined by your status as a producer. When we talk about our potential for social change as consumers, it doesn’t even register that the raison d’etre of the environmental crisis is the consolidation and reproduction of capitalist social relations; namely, the increasing appropriation of the labor of the 50% by an opulent minority. (The empirical evidence for this is also extensive, from the correlation between wealth and carbon emissions to the simple fact that global warming corresponds almost perfectly, with some decades delay, to the global dominance of capitalism).
The 50%’s capacity to change what corporations do by “buying green” is miniscule against the accumulated capital (“dollar-votes”) of the 0.1%. But when we begin with what the 50% can achieve with their labor when it’s organized, power structures get turned on their head, and actually become open to the enormous value and willpower of exploited classes.
There is a very good reason, I think, why “vote with your dollars” is so popular: it is not fundamentally threatening to the interests of the capitalist class. If the working class started asking what they can do not as consumers, but as the engine of the global economy, the 0.1% would quite rightly start shaking in its boots.
The problem, then, is not simply that “vote with your dollars” is an empirically doomed political strategy. “Vote with your dollars” is a way of seeing the world as a consumer that has been hammered, through tremendous amounts of public relations, marketing, and propaganda, into the public mind. It has been done so, very consciously, to prevent people from thinking about organized production- and labor-oriented solutions to the crises of global capitalism.
Noam Chomsky points out that alternatives to capitalism—such as having those who work in factories also be the factory managers and owners—were not always radical. I would add to this that these alternatives are not distant or utopian, but coexist with us right now. Worker cooperatives, for instance, are forms of production in which profits and decision-making are equally distributed among all employees. There are 20,000 such cooperatives in Argentina, and they also have things like quotas for education spending for employees. The fact remains that these cooperatives exist within the imperatives of capitalist markets, but I think it’s important to remember that anticapitalist futures are always already present within our existing system.
The conceptual jolt is thinking of the political protagonist not as an individual consumer, but an enormous collective of workers with the power to bring the global economy to a halt. Indeed, strikes and protest are a perfectly normal and healthy expression of democracy. But the difference between organizing in the streets and in the checkout line is critical: one relies on the terrain of “dollar-votes,” whose distribution on a graph is a literal representation of tyranny. The other relies simply on disrupting public space and of the productive forces, where the 50% are represented in proportion to their massivity, not their illusory margin of buyer’s choice.
Until next time,
Lucas