This may seem like a sidetrack from on-going consideration of the Occupy movement, but I think it won’t turn out that way. I mentioned a while back that I have never been in a Walmart. This is a statement that cries out for examination if not deconstruction. Here are three things I’m thinking about:
First, I wonder if there isn’t an undertone in my position based on race and class. When I was studying the US supermarket industry as I wrote my first book 20 years ago, I learned that sometimes a supermarket would decide to go “down-market,” to appeal to poor people. They didn’t just move to a poor neighborhood and slap lower price tags on their food. Instead they’d install harsher lighting, move the aisles closer together, remove the ceiling tiles and sometimes pull up the floor to the bare cement. What they didn’t do was lower prices – some critics believe prices went up – after all it turns out to be expensive to look poor.
I go to Target. Where I live, it’s just down the road from the Walmart I never go to. Am I self-sorting according to social class? And if so, who is affected by this decision? Do members of the Walton family sit around their beautiful cherry dining table down there in Bentonville Arkansas, sipping oolong from thin china cups, and say, “Oh goodness, I just heard that Marty drove right by our store again. He’s back in Target!”
This image leads us to issues number two and three. Number two is the question I frame in my mind as witness versus self-righteous self-indulgence. My mom never rode in a VW in her life, because of what that car represented to a person of the Holocaust generation. I don’t buy certain products and I don’t go some places, Walmart is hardly the only one I avoid. I’ve had some bad experiences with certain huge food producers (which are interestingly often organized as co-ops), like the now defunct Tricon (KFC, Pepsi and Taco Bell), and I’ll go without butter before I’ll let Land O’ Lakes into the house.
Some people are quick to call this a “witness.” I object. Witness is based on deeply held religious or religious-like beliefs, but most important I believe it involves a commitment to the consequences of that witness. Witness is not passive, it’s an action. It’s an affirmation of belief partly by the assumption of jeopardy. It’s more of a verb than a noun if you know what I mean. Buying the butter that I do, and not another brand, is a preference, but I think it’s way too grandiose to call it a witness; in fact it dishonors the many people who have engaged in real social and religious witness at their occasional great cost.
Let’s follow this along one more step before we arrive at item number 3 in my list. The additional step is, if I now stop in at Walmart because Jimmy’s puppy pads are on sale there (they’re not, this is an example of what might get me in the door), am I a hypocrite?
In our age, we leap to the charge of hypocrisy fast, because I think having shed much of a communal values system based on moral absolutes (think of medieval Europe), everyone is supposed to have their own moral code, and so the only way people have of deciding if others are doing something OK or not (and my, how we love judging our neighbors), is to find out what that person’s own belief system entails and pounce on seeming contradictions.
As I lurch along a rough path in the treatment of my myasthenia gravis, I know that sometime down the road my poorly-controlled disease might be better dealt with if I take a drug, made by Genentech, that is not only genetically engineered, it’s a chimera – a genetic combination, in this case, of humans and rodents. Back in the days when I was president of the Council for Responsible Genetics, I worked hard against these things, on the grounds of such products being socially irresponsible (the patenting of life, the subject of my second book co-authored with Hope Shand), but also biologically high risk – what are we loosing on the world and do we really know how to recall it if we goof?
Anyway, will I take this drug if I’m up against the disease wall, or to dramatize slightly, even save my life? You betcha. Them am I a hypocrite? Does the individual’s behavior matter, or do we achieve social change only through movements? Does individual non-witness action require consistency with individual beliefs? While you’re wondering about that, we are now ready for item number 3 that will wrap this long post up and prepare us to return to the Occupy movement in a subsequent posting.
Some years ago, I think in the 1970s but I wasn’t there, a small group of activists met on an island in the Gulf of Mexico off the Texas coast, with the express purpose of inventing transnational activism. Letters, fax machines, cables and telexes, and phones were the technology of that day. It’s a fascinating story that those who were there should tell. For this conversation, it’s useful to know that they decided to achieve their goal via the targeting of a large transnational corporation, so there would be many opportunities for activism around the world. And they very methodically calculated the amount of leverage they would need. That is, they never sought to bring the target (this campaign became the Nestle Boycott) to ruin, only to find out the magic number that would cost the corporation enough for it to change its practices. It turned out to be an astonishingly small number relative to the gargantuan finances of the ubiquitous company. What I want you to notice here is the goal – we were always taught in community organizing school to know in advance exactly what would constitute success before we started out.
The stated goal in the Nestle Boycott was to get Nestle to stop its marketing of infant formula in ways that harmed children in poor countries. But the underlying goal was to create a network of international activists, because these amazingly far-sighted people saw globalization coming, and knew that people who wanted to establish a bulwark against the misbehaviors of transnational corporations needed a comparable level of activism. No matter what had happened with the infant formula campaign, the Nestle Boycott was a complete success quite early in its history, even in the dark days when it looked to the public or the media like the Boycott was losing in its infant formula struggle, because they were quickly successful at creating a coordinated worldwide movement of social activists.
I think this is the right framework for looking further into the Occupy movement: it’s silly to hear seemingly smart commentators, even those relatively high on the food chain like NPR, getting all sarcastic and snarky about the OWS folks, on the grounds that scruffy kids wiggling their hands in the air are hardly going to bring down our mighty capitalist system. When we return to examining OWS, let’s keep the Infant Formula Boycott and witness and hypocrisy frameworks in mind as we try to understand what OWS is, and if we should pay attention to it.
Or even join it.
