You want a revolution? Stop shopping.
You want to bring down the whole rotten system? Don’t buy new stuff. Global capitalism depends on the American consumer to keep it going. Without our compulsion to buy new plastic whatever, and to change our entire wardrobes every year to keep up with fashion, Chinese factories, sweatshops in Bangladesh, and phone banks in India would close their doors. Container ships the size of small cities would sit idle at the docks. Even Amazon would be in trouble.
Advertisers manipulate us from the day we’re born and from the moment we turn on our devices. Children watch ten commercials between every two segments of their favorite television shows. Each toy has many parts, but each set is sold separately, so even after kids talk their parents into buying the first set there are many more little pieces to acquire. They are sold fried food, sugar cereals, sweet and crisp and greasy treats of all kinds. Nobody sells them vegetables.
Grownups feel we need to trade our perfectly good cars for new ones every two years. We have to have the latest gadgets in our kitchens, even when there’s no counter space for all the old ones. We have to give each other piles of presents for Christmas although nobody needs anything we get.
Ever wonder why the media make so much fun of hippies? You’d never know the movement was actually about stopping war. You’d think we were zonked out all the time, looked ridiculous in bell bottoms and beads, and spoke only in clichés like peace, man, and wow. Capitalism had to belittle the hippie movement. We were dangerous, because we stopped shopping.
When hippies “dropped out,” we lived on as little money as we could, to avoid participating in a culture that we could see even 60 years ago was quickly destroying the planet. We didn’t buy new clothes. We didn’t buy fast food; we grew gardens. We shared things. We reused things. We did without things. We believed that people were more important than stuff. This kind of lifestyle posed a serious challenge to the powers that be.
Hippies were threatening business as usual. So there was a concerted effort to portray us as hopeless fools and as clowns, which continues to this day. The real revolution was those patches on the knees of our jeans. One of the first counter-revolutionary moves by global capitalism was to manufacture jeans with worn-out fabrics and pre-sewn patches. They got people to buy new clothes that copied the look of old clothes hippies got for free. What the mainstream culture could not destroy, it co-opted.
The human race is tearing every possible useful raw material out of the guts of the earth, just so we can compete for the biggest piles of toys and gadgets. Most of what we make is so transitory, it might as well go straight to the landfill and save everybody a lot of time and trouble. This is a stupid, unbelievably wasteful and destructive system that is trashing the very resources we need to survive.
You want to do something about it? Stop shopping.