A couple of weeks ago, in All My Flavors, I quoted Arundhati Roy. I'd like to include a little more of that quote this week:
Our strategy should be not only to confront empire, but to lay siege to it. To deprive it of oxygen….With our art, our music, our literature, our stubbornness, our joy, our brilliance, our sheer relentlessness – and our ability to tell our own stories….
The corporate revolution will collapse if we refuse to buy what they are selling – their ideas, their version of history, their wars, their weapons, their notion of inevitability. Remember this: We be many and they be few. They need us more than we need them.
I like her idea of withering empire by withholding our participation and our compliance.
I'd like to take Roy's idea of empire here and focus on its monstrous offspring, the corporate-governmental-media complex that basically controls what we spend money on; the range of ideas we get to consider; and the shape and size of the institutions that define the parameters of our lives.
Of course, unpacking this is a huge undertaking. For today, I'd like to begin, in a modest way, to look at the question of how we spend money and the reality that that "how" contributes to the siphoning of wealth upward to buttress an ultrarich class that doesn't share our interests. Because considering even this small corner of the corporate-governmental-media complex is enormous, I will bite off a smaller piece to zoom in on Amazon, Jeff Bezos, and food purchases.
I don't know about you, but my patterns of consumption are so deeply intertwined with The Man at this point, I will need to really put my thinking cap on to figure out how I can begin to extricate myself.
Jeff Bezos has apparently increased his wealth by $25 billion since the year began—during a period that included 22 million Americans filing for unemployment. At the end of May, Bezos, the richest Homo sapiens in the world, was worth $146.9 billion, which seems excessive for one guy when the world is crumbling and there's such enormous need.
It really hurts to read accounts of Amazon employees being fired for participating in protests, being underpaid and overworked. But it also makes clear that Bezos probably doesn't share our belief in basic, decent, fair treatment and the importance of our First Amendment right to peaceably assemble. That's good information: It's useful to understand where individual representatives of the ultrarich class differ from most Americans. It makes it easier to consider the possibility that their accumulation of vast wealth probably wasn't simply a just reward for right action, but more likely resulted, at least in part, from taking advantage of others' vulnerabilities. I really hate it when the ultrarich exploit others' vulnerabilities.
I know all this. And yet, I still buy a ton of stuff on Amazon. I focus on Bezos because I have become so accustomed to going on Amazon to buy—you name it—sunscreen; oils to wash my skin; socks; ume plum vinegar; coconut milk; sneakers; a repair kit to fix a broken screen door; neem oil to spray aphids in the garden; et cetera and so forth. (I also go to Whole Foods—owned by Bezos--every couple of weeks to get things that are hard to find in other grocery stores, like stevia-sweetened chocolate chips and fresh turmeric root.)
Today, for instance, I went to Amazon online to buy stevia-sweetened chocolate syrup and alcohol swabs. Amazon recognizes me immediately, and remembers my username and my buying preferences! Amazon thoughtfully recommends other things I might want to buy. I didn't reflect on the purchases I made today until just now, writing about this. The whole process has become completely automatic for me, and the ease of ordering online—they already have my credit card information and address, of course—and having it delivered quickly to my home has been so agreeable, that I have not spent much time considering the implications.
Given that institutions, which most of us have participated in or at least understood as part of the landscape, are currently being dismantled and reconsidered—policing as we have known it; work as we have known it; school as we have known it—this seems an appropriate moment to rethink what we support with our dollars. To consider dismantling commerce as we have come to know it.
Money spent on food seems one appropriate place to start, because it's a frequent, ongoing, pretty universal expense category. There are people who grow and produce what they eat, and I want to acknowledge that. But most of us buy most or all of our chow.
When I was in college, I shopped at a Food Co-op, owned collectively and run by members. You could either pay a certain amount of money per month or work a certain number of hours to maintain membership in the co-op. I was able to get everything I needed there. I assumed that, going forward, that was how I'd shop.
But it hasn't worked out that way. Once life got busier, with children, work, various and sundry obligations, it became easier to go to Safeway, Trader Joe's, and Whole Foods and line corporate coffers instead of seeking more community-based, localized options. I do shop weekly at the Farmer's Market, and I'm grateful for that. But it certainly doesn't represent the bulk of my food budget.
Arundhati Roy, quoted above, says: "The corporate revolution will collapse if we refuse to buy what they are selling." Interpreting that literally, I need to start exploring my options here where I live, to figure out how I can get what I need without automatically buying it from The Man.
I've become very complacent about what I buy and what I eat. There's no question that an alternative arrangement would be more labor- and time-intensive. Years ago, I looked into the possibility of joining a different kind of food co-op: Instead of a storefront where you contributed your labor, this co-op was basically a group of people who received bulk deliveries of food, which were then distributed to the members. Responsibility for being the delivery dropoff site and for coordinating distribution rotated among members. Honestly, I didn't want to get involved in something that seemed like it could potentially consume a lot of time and energy. Now I'm rethinking that resistance. Buying on Amazon is easy peasy, sure; but what's the real cost?
Arundhati Roy also says: “We be many and they be few. They need us more than we need them.” Jeff Bezos would not be the multibillionaire he is today without so many of us buying what he hawks with our hard-earned $$.
I don't really have answers here. I'm just stumbling around, trying to begin asking some of the right questions.