>/ That said, I have to side with C. and Kel on the issue that Tully
/>/ brings up: only in a hyperconsumer culture like the U. S. would a
/>/ person conflate individual purchasing decisions and political activity.
/>/
/>/ Miles
/
To which Ian replied,
>Fair enough, but what about VS behavior leading to larger aggregates
>and tipping points in the composition of effective demand leading to
>changes in composition of future investment and output. I think Tully
>is hitting on this old piece of folk economics/folk Keynesianism,
>which in a sense goes back to J.S. Mill, iirc............If large
>numbers of people do adopt VS changes in output will occur, no?
Ha, ha. It's old Eubulides back throwing grains of sand on the heap! Well, there's organic food and the prices have come down because more people buy, leading to more companies producing it and more efficiently etc. etc. But even that kind of thing will not, of itself, lead to social transformation because at root the economy is not, has never been and never will be a free market. The market is a substructure of class rule not vice versa.
What does have potential traction, though, is people becoming mobilized by taking *some kind* of concrete action, no matter how insignificant that action itself may be. I would argue that buying locally intensifies one's commitment to the initally perhaps vague principles underlying that decision. I'm sure the anti-war activists that run my local food co-op could explain this better than I could but there's all these interconnections between, e.g. agribusiness corporations, the oil companies, big banks, the military and right-wing politicians. So maybe my cuppa shade-grown, bird-friendly, fair-traded, organic coffee isn't the revolution. But each time I buy it instead of instant Nescafe, it reminds me of the revolution. And then, you know, there's all these things that government can't do, mustn't do, because they'll jeopardize our trading position. Can't protect the environment, can't protect workers, can't stop bombing brown people who happen to live on top of our oil we need to fly the produce around the world to market... etc. That sort of thing.
If people aren't deepening their commitments through their behaviour as consumers and as workers, how do they do it? Go to a demonstration once every two or three months? Write letters to the editor and to elected officials? Donate to a political campaign? Go to meetings, post to listservs? So what makes the latter activities *more political* than the former? Aren't people perhaps imagining distinctions between public and private realms that are themselves the very essence of what Carrol referred to as "bourgeois ideology"?: Market activity is "private". Political speech is "public". And never the twain shall meet.
Remember, my friends, the flaneur goes for a stroll in the marketplace, presumably to observe, but in reality to find a buyer. We have met the flaneur and he/she is us. Hannah Arendt deplored the instrumentalization of politics but Paolo Virno noted the politicization of work. Not politicization in the sense of class struggle over the conditions of work but in the sense of work itself becoming more a matter of virtuosic performance than of "production".
The Sandwichman