I don’t think you’re ready to have an adult conversation about politics until you’re able to admit that there are things you love and enjoy that would not and should not exist in a just world. $8 billion dollar budget movies every other month don’t exist in a just world. New 900 GB AAA video games every year don’t exist in a just world. Next day delivery doesn’t exist in a just world. 80 different soda brands don’t exist in a just world.
All of those things come from exploitation on some level, and if you wouldn’t trade those for a world where everyone can eat and have a home no matter who they are or what they do, I don’t know what to tell you.
i think about this a lot from an environmentalist perspective because the reality of fixing the climate - correctly, justly, sustainably - is that life is going to have to change substantially. And i mean specifically for folk in “wealthy” countries which take up a disproportionate amount of the joint global carbon budget, who have got used to a standard of living that (environment aside!) has always been built on the exploitation of countries you don’t think about and (environment aside!) needs well-thought-out restitution and rebalancing.
& the goal of that isn’t exactly to make folk feel guilty, but like
mentally preparing oneself; starting to build consensus for it; starting to imagine ways it could be cool and good and beautiful, equal-or-better; starting to work on savoring experiences which are “this is worse but it’s morally better” as a form of beauty; building practical changes into everyday life, where one is available - or building up to them - or working politically for them.
That meme about “actually it’s only ten companies that do all the polluting” isn’t incorrect, but it can also function as a form of soft progressive climate denial. A way to reassure people that they can carry on as usual - a desire which is equally seductive across the political spectrum. i’ve had these conversations with so many people now, and they always boil down to “I just don’t want to lose a part of my life which i like”, with varying degrees of political ideology and rhetorical sophistication as trimmings. That’s not wrong or bad, but - small things are going to have to give throughout our way of life. Probably big things as well.
Imagining a future in which i don’t eat an orange again, is that bad or good? It could be good. If the trade off is between my pleasure in food and someone else’s suffering, it could be very good. And it’s a cliche of the war generation that they have this anecdote about “never having seen an orange before” and i think about, did those people not have full, happy lives with their families and friends and passions despite their lack of consumer choice around rare international fruits and the answer was yes. humans have survived for centuries without this much choice. Perhaps a lower-luxury life can be liberationary, freeing us from the other ways that corporate logic seeps into our daily lives, freeing us from some of the demands consumer capitalism traps us with.
& shaming yourself or others isn’t the goal here; nor is putting yourself to a disadvantage if you have no other options; nor is opting for personal austerity over political participation. This post doesn’t really demand any of that, because it’s not helpful.
It’s more about the terrain of the argument. When the conversations happen, are you able to acknowledge - with regret, perhaps, but with honesty - that life will need to change, and it is an essential part of the process; or are you jumping to a short term defense of the status quo because thinking about that change is still too uncomfortable.
As a way of thinking about this, consider replacing “Environmentalist demand X is problematic as fuck because it’ll impact group Y” with “Environmentalist demand X is probably necessary as part of a profound reorientation of how we distribute resources internationally, but it’ll impact group Y: what are the options we can start working on now to minimise or prevent that impact”
I think there’s a tendency to focus on particular small consumer luxuries and to panic about losing them, because those are the only luxuries most of us have, and so when we imagine losing them we don’t imagine anything replacing them.
And I feel that framing “you must give up cheap, ubiquitous oranges” as a lower-luxury life is itself kind of buying into the idea that that kind of small consumer luxury is what luxury is, and obscures the ways that a more sustainable way of living incorporates–must incorporate–things that a lot of people see as not just luxurious, but unattainably so.
I own one bespoke garment, a wool greatcoat. I saved up for months to afford it. It’s beautiful, and its materials and construction mean that I can continue to pay a tailor to mend and remake it until the fabric wears out. (Wears out at places that aren’t stress points, that is; I have already had silk facings added to the edges of the pockets, where it was starting to wear through, and had the cuffs turned; when the cuffs start to wear out again I will have decorative ones added in a contrasting fabric, and probably epaulets or another accent on the shoulders where my purse strap bites into the fabric. I have already squirreled away a vintage Persian lamb muff with the lining rotted away for possible use as cuff and collar facings. But I digress.)
Most people who don’t sew themselves, though, have never had even a single garment made to their measure and their specifications; when most people hear that we need to shrink our wardrobes, they don’t think about going back to a landscape of tailoring and bespoke clothing. They’re not imagining the three perfect dresses they’d commission from a dressmaker, and how comfortable and beautiful they would be; they’re not imagining having the stability to save up for a bespoke dress, without student loans or usurious housing prices sucking up everything they earn–they’re imagining Thanos snapping his fingers and leaving them with the same shitty clothes, just fewer of them, and not being able to replace them because they still have the same drains on their income, with no end in sight.
When you tell Americans that we need a future without passenger air travel, what we hear is you will never be able to go more than a day’s travel from home again; you will never again see your family 900 miles away–because it’s almost impossible to imagine having the leisure time to travel by a slower method.
So. I entirely agree with
consider replacing “Environmentalist demand X is problematic as fuck because it’ll impact group Y” with “Environmentalist demand X is probably necessary as part of a profound reorientation of how we distribute resources internationally, but it’ll impact group Y: what are the options we can start working on now to minimise or prevent that impact.”
But I think we need to start, not even with Environmentalist demand X would trade A for B (fast fashion for small bespoke wardrobes; fast air travel for slow sailing ships, fewer oranges but more rewilded blight-resistant chestnuts) but with Why are group Y’s lives so constrained and miserable that cutting down on some consumer goods feels like the apocalypse, and how do we fix that?
