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It’s reassuring to see Harold Henderson outline the tactical confusion in the Buy Nothing Day strategy (especially in its tendency to inflate the role of retail consumption in environmental problems), as he does in his “Buy the Right Thing” review essay in the December 18 Reader. While Henderson’s account of the economic innocence in the “buy nothing” strategy seems generally incisive and on the mark, such a strategy may well be more muddled than he suggests. Capitalist markets are not things we simply step in and out of like the retail establishments that serve as the consumer’s tangible port of entry. Diverting consumption from one point is likely to do little more than direct it to another point. When I stay at home or at work and buy nothing on Thanksgiving Friday or any day, I will quite likely consume countless other goods I would not have consumed otherwise. Unless Buy Nothing Day advocates have a few acres of soybeans, some livestock, and a windmill out in back of their apartments (and even then they would need to rely on given markets to maintain these things), even an enduring commitment to voluntary simplicity will register as a blip on particular retail radar screens and little more. To treat capitalism as anything less pervasive defeats the purposes of resisting it, yet many otherwise sensible people have persuaded themselves that there is something inherently subversive in a stylized, urbane frugality and the indiscriminate nonconsumption it counsels. If one’s quarrel is with capitalism–and there are good reasons to believe that it should be–it’s probably more effective to acknowledge that changing it will involve a conscious deliberation on how we must participate in it while it’s here than to delude oneself that it can be avoided like a bad restaurant.
It is by no means clear, however, that this is the most plausible conclusion to be drawn from such data. One might rightly point out that the inverted U observable in the relationship between environmental pollution and per capita income is based on a time-slice of many nations, not a longitudinal assessment of any one nation throughout its economic history. Given this, we cannot assume that it is an accurate picture of any single nation’s development (note that a synchronic interpretation of the inverted U is just as intuitively plausible as the diachronic one of “sustainable capitalist development”: poor nations at any point in time lack the productive capacity to do much damage, developing ones have the capacity but lack the resources to provide countermeasures to its attendant problems, and wealthier nations have both the capacity and the means to mop up afterward). Even if this account does happen to portray the development of a particular nation, that nation’s “descent” down the backside of the inverted U (i.e. its experience of improving environmental conditions as income rises) would not imply a net loss of environmental degradation in the world; it may just as well be farmed out in the form of pollution-intensive production in some other nation still working on the upside of the hump. Again, this makes intuitive sense. The notion that heavy industry gets exported from the developed world to developing nations with eager, low-wage workers strikes few of us as news. There is, moreover, an equally plausible economic rationale for this scenario: as developed nations find it cheaper to shift production away from pollution-intensive goods than to clean up afterward, the price of those goods will (assuming constant demand) increase, inviting others in the world market to enter into their production and fill the void. Yes, this is a fairly orthodox Marxist understanding of what the neoclassical models are really telling us. Unfashionable as it might be, however, it’s not at all clear that it has been discredited, and empirical evidence of the sort in question here won’t do it. We can point to a coincidence of first-world wealth and relative environmental progress, but just as easily as we might attribute this to a passage of all interested nations through common stages of capitalism and environmental betterment, we might describe the situation as a chronic condition that requires at any given time a developed “center” and an underdeveloped “periphery” to absorb its costs (in the form of pollution, poverty, and the whole honor roll).
