STOP SHOPPING!
Spend time with family and friends, rather than spend money on them.
IN HIS FIRST speech to the American nation after the disasters of September
11, 2001, George Bush told the citizens, "If you love your country,
if you want to fight terrorism, go out this weekend…and shop!"
That is the essence not merely of capitalism but of Americanism, of patriotism,
even of just warfare. Shop. And, mind you, it doesn't matter what you're
shopping for - it is the act of shopping that matters, not what you buy.
Shop and you make the nation strong.
However bizarre that may strike you as being, Bush meant every word he
said, and he was expressing a very profound component of the American
belief system. Shop, and you help turn over the engines of commerce; you
make people rich. Shop, and you keep the United States going on the cycle
it has been on for twenty-five years now, spending more on imported goods
than it earns on exported ones - to the tune of about $666 billion a year.
That's $1.8 billion every single day.
Not surprisingly, this madness has long drawn its share of critics, debunkers
and resisters. The rising number of people over their heads in debt and/or
declaring bankruptcy has been a well-known scandal. For years, psychologists
have given lectures, written books, gone on TV to try to get people to
escape from the addiction of consumerism. Economists regularly point out
that an economy dependent on debt, in the billions of dollars, cannot
last for ever.
Now, however, within the last few years, a whole new set of resisters
has emerged: activists and artists who are actually urging people, in
all seriousness, not to shop. Or at least not so much and so often, and
not in chain stores, nor in the 'big-box' stores, and especially not on
the day that has traditionally been the kick-off for the big Christmas
buying frenzy, the fourth Friday in November (the day after Thanksgiving
in the US).
The stop-shopping movement is a somewhat odd sort of coalition, but it
is serious and active and has extended its reach worldwide, almost everywhere
that industrial capitalism has lifted its banner.
Buy Nothing Day (BND) is probably the most popular expression of it.
One version of it was started as long ago as 1992 by Kalle Lasn, publisher
of Adbusters magazine in Vancouver, and it has grown every year since.
Last year, for example, there were Buy Nothing Days in New York, Washington,
Portland (Oregon), Newark (Delaware), Lafayette (Louisiana), San Francisco,
Vancouver, Montreal, Tokyo, Tel Aviv, Sydney and London, and that's probably
leaving out many that didn't get great publicity (which is often a problem
- newspapers and TV stations, which depend on advertising, often refuse
to publicise BND actions). There are several BND websites, including www.buynothingday.co.uk.
The impulse behind BND is simple enough: "NO PURCHASE NECESSARY!"
The challenge is to try simple living for a day: spend time with family
and friends, rather than spend money on them. People make a pact with
themselves to take a break from shopping as a personal experiment or public
statement, and the best thing is that it's free!!! But the idea is not
just to change habits for a day - Buy Nothing Day exposes the environmental
and ethical consequences of consumerism. It asks people to make a commitment
to consuming less, recycling more and challenging companies to clean up
and be fair.
Another group, not connected to Adbusters, has a www.buynothingday.org
website, where it asserts, "We believe in nothing and we think you
should too." It argues that the friendliest thing you can do is "give
the gift of nothing."
Consume®Evolution, a new magazine for the stop-shopping movement,
or at least its anti-mass-marketing division, has just been launched in
New York City by Scott Ballum. "In a world where there is a Starbucks
on every corner," he says, "independent retailers are undersold
and out-marketed by global corporations, and fashion individuality is
mass-produced and marketed to every demographic as 'unique,' it's time
for a revolution - an evolution of consumerism." The magazine, its
initial statement says, "was created out of the desire to raise awareness
of the crippling effect mass-marketing and globalisation has on local
industry, our buying habits, and our culture. As more and more Gap-wearing,
iPod-listening, Starbuck-drinking, Fox-watching, Wal-Mart-shopping, SUV-driving,
metrosexual clones appear in our neighborhood…it's time we started
making more personal decisions when we go shopping."
As serious as the anti-consumerism message is, the groups involved do
not take themselves with great seriousness. But easily the wackiest, and
most colourful, revolves around American performance artist Bill Talen,
who calls himself the Reverend Billy of the Church of Stop Shopping and
dresses in a white suit with a clerical collar under a dyed-blond pompadour.
His mission is to preach the gospel of resisting consumerism and he is
backed up in his performances at New York's St Mark's Church by The Stop-Shopping
Gospel Choir.
But there's more than preaching. In fact, there's very little street
theatre the Reverend Billy hasn't done. He has gone into chain stores
with his followers and performed 'exorcisms' over the cash registers.
He and his group have gone into Wal-Mart stores, walking around with empty
shopping carts until they mysteriously form a huge conga line going up
and down the isles. He regularly produces 'interventions' at stores like
Starbucks, where he starts preaching to the customers: "We are from
the Church of the Necessary Interruption" and warns them that daily
consumption is the road to damnation. (So regularly, in fact, that at
one point Starbucks sued him, got a sentence passed against him for one
day of community service, and obtained an injunction forbidding him to
set foot in any Starbucks store now or in the future.)
The Reverend Billy, for all his theatrics, has a deeper message, though
he puts it with characteristic levity: "Not-buying is a brave thing
to do. At first it may induce vertigo, identity weirdness, and a desire
for an unwanted pregnancy. But most often a new believer will have an
abnormal kitsch-acquisition fit. The first response to the break in buying
may be a huge sucking sound in your hands - you want to buy something,
anything…
"When you lift your hand from the product and back away from it,
a bright, unclaimed space opens up. Consumers think it is a vacuum. It
is really only the unknown.
"In the Church of Stop Shopping we believe that buying is not nearly
as interesting as not-buying. When you back away from the purchase, the
product may look up at you with wanton eyes, but it will slump quickly
back onto the shelf and sit there trying to get a life. The product needs
you more than you need it - remember that."
The Reverend Billy has carried his message around the world since 1997,
including a Stop Shopping Roadshow in Britain in 2003 www.breathingplanet.net,
with a performance at the FACT Centre in Liverpool. He even descended
once on the headquarters of Halliburton in Dallas and started preaching
to the people in the cafeteria. He told them that Halliburton was the
devil and that for their salvation they had "to quit their jobs and
divest" their stock.
His message is also to be found in CDs, videos, and books, available
- for buying, mind you - on his website, www.revbilly.com.
(That's 'com' as in 'commercial'.) He justifies the contradiction by saying
that not all shopping is sinful, and when criticised because his CD is
sold by the giant chain Tower Records and by Amazon.com, he replies only:
"We have to embrace the contradiction." It's the same contradiction,
actually, faced by any artists who have a message they want to get out
to a wide audience, since those that control the media are more often
than not the corporations most culpable in commercialism and mass marketing.
The stop-shopping movement may not bring down the edifice of capitalism,
but it is proving effective at raising some important issues of the excesses
of market capitalism and its handmaiden corporations, media outlets, and
advertising firms. And it seems to be having a good deal of fun while
doing
so.
Buy Nothing Day in the UK is on Saturday 26th November.
