In high school, I participated in a service-learning program called Global Visionaries. Along with a group of about twenty US high schoolers, I spent the school year doing local service work and attending workshops on social justice and anti-oppression. The program culminated with a two-and-a-half week trip to Guatemala, where we did more service, had Spanish lessons, and learned about the US-backed 1954 coup which toppled democratically elected president Jacobo Arbenz, largely because his land reform policies threatened the interests of the United Fruit Company (now called Chiquita). The coup kicked off a thirty-year civil war, during which the US-funded army basically attempted a genocide of the Mayan indigenous people and used rape as a weapon of war. After watching a movie about the war, we gathered as a group to discuss the events that had shaped the past half-century in Guatemala. We talked about the horrors and heartbreak that the country had been made to endure, largely at the hands of powerful US interests. After we had been talking for a while, Chris Fontana, our program director shook his head sadly and said to the group, “And all this so we could have cheaper bananas…”
At the time, that statement angered me unspeakably, though I couldn’t quite articulate why. Learning about Guatemala’s violent history (which I’d been previously completely unaware of), I had been furious. This was back when I was a fervent idealist, before I understood just how many coups and wars the US has staged all over the world. I was angry at the way the United Fruit Company had political connections which allowed them to basically request a coup from the State Department. I was angry at the lack of democratic process inherent in military operations. I was angry at the collusion between corporations and the state. I wanted transparency, accountability, authentic political participation. Chris’s statement seemed to ignore all of these concerns. He reduced the issue down to one of individual choice, of conscious consumerism. His message seemed to be that if US consumers had been paying enough attention, they could have successfully boycotted Chiquita and demanded that the price of bananas reflect their actual cost, which would have magically prevented the coup. We all know that when the interests of power and capital come up against a group of law-abiding citizens making respectful demands, the people always win. Every single time.
Sarcasm aside, I should thank Chris for this lesson, which it took me years to realize the full implications of. Liberals sadly have a long history of equating personal purity and change with political action, something I believe has been extremely detrimental to the achievement of leftist political goals. I talked about this during my last post about veganism and the animal rights crowd, and the idea extends to almost every social or environmental issue I can think of. Anti-sweatshop activists try to convince people to buy fair trade or Made in USA items, while largely ignoring the economic reality that for many children working in sweatshops, the alternative is prostitution or slow, painful death by starvation. Pro-sweatshop people (yes, they do exist) have pointed out that when sweatshops close because of pressure by activists, many children wind up on the street, starving, or as sex slaves because they don’t have any other way to survive. And yet we persist with the myth that the solution to this problem isn’t critiquing and attacking the neoliberal trade agreements or economic systems that make sweatshops a virtual necessity, it’s encouraging people to buy fair trade. Not even to buy less (not like consumerism is feeding the rise of low-wage factories or anything), but just to buy differently. This is how liberals are going to save the world.
This framework appears in so many other places. Worried about global warming? Change to fluorescent lightbulbs in your house! If you’re serious, maybe buy a Prius. If you’re really serious, install a solar panel and generate all of your own power. Don’t bother protesting the opening of a new coal plant or putting your body in front of the bulldozers that will soon be clearing the ground for the Keystone pipeline. That might be confrontational, might get you arrested. It’s probably better to take shorter showers.
I have this conversation all the time with liberal friends, and I’m often met with a lot of resistance. People defend their individual choices, cling to the meaning in them. I’m absolutely not saying that people shouldn't try to live their lives in an ethical way, whatever that means to them. Personal choices are often catalysts to larger political action. Being vegetarian is what made me aware of factory farming, and by extension, most of the problems with our food system. But then again, I was a vegetarian for almost twelve years, and factory farming is still going strong. Why wouldn't it be? Slaughterhouses operate at capacity, twenty-four hours a day, which means that the meat industry is largely supply-driven. The world population is still growing and getting less poor in absolute terms, which means more Chinese and Indian people are demanding meat in their diets. My one choice, even if it’s magnified by the impact it has on my friends and family, is not going to bring down the Tyson-ConAgra-IBP-Cargill empire.
I do believe that positive choices matter much more than negative ones. Boycotting Coca-Cola because of their appalling human rights and environmental record won’t to a single damn thing to change their business practices, even if you write them a strongly worded letter about it. But supporting a local co-op which is just starting out and trying to do things right will help them stay in business, which is important. Still, while consuming differently (or better yet, just consuming less) is a noble and worthy thing to do, it shouldn’t be confused with legitimate political action. You can be as pure as you want, living on your organic farming commune with a mini-hydro system on a nearby river supplying all your power. You can hand wash all your clothes and make your own cheese from scratch and knit your own clothes until the cows come home, and the planet will keep right on getting warmer. Large corporations will continue to dispossess people of their land in the name of resource extraction. If you want is to withdraw from the system instead of trying to change it, that’s your right. But saying that your choice to opt-out amounts to some kind of radical political action is disingenuous.
This might be a depressing notion for liberals who are used to thinking in terms of the personal. But as I’ve gotten used to the idea that my personal choices are not an effective political tool, I’ve found it incredibly freeing in two ways. The first is that it lifts a lot of the guilt that’s a daily part of life as a well-meaning leftist. I remember this past spring, I was driving to a food justice conference with some fellow Whitman students. As we stopped for lunch at Whole Foods, we were talking about driving. I mentioned loving road trips. Another girl on the trip concurred, but then quickly shifted into guilt mode. “I should try to drive less.” she said. “I try when I’m at home, but it’s hard sometimes. I know I should be better...” I interrupted her, having heard one too many conversations go this way in recent weeks. I told her unfortunately, it’s virtually impossible to live your life in modern America without driving, and that that system wasn’t her fault; she didn’t create car culture. I told her that the worst, most self-serving thing that those in power have ever done is convince us that our individual choices are the most powerful weapon for change that we have. I told her that instead of feeling guilty all the time, she should keep trying to drive less when it was feasible, not worry about it when it wasn’t, and direct her attention at constructing a reality where driving isn’t a necessity. I stopped ranting, concerned that I may have offended someone I was trying to befriend, someone I still had three more hours in an enclosed car with. Instead, she smiled at me and said, “Wow, that was actually really inspiring.” And that’s basically what I’ve found. It is kind of inspiring, albeit in a terrifying way, to know that your use of a disposable cup this one time is not going to cause the apocalypse. It’s so freeing to re-channel the energy you’ve been spending feeling awful into thinking about how to go about building a better world.
The second benefit of moving beyond individual choice is that it makes it so much easier to not be a self-righteous asshole about the way other people are choosing to live their lives. I spent a good portion of last spring working out my feelings about whether vegetarianism was environmentally a good idea, and if so, under what conditions. I’d basically decided that all things considered, eating meat did more harm than good for the planet. I had a pretty well thought-out set of arguments, so I set about trying to convince my friend Henry, who had started eating meat again about when I did, after we both The Vegetarian Myth. I explained to him about the agriculture and water required to sustain cattle (even grass-fed ones), the reality of trying to feed a growing world population, the global warming contribution of cows. He listened to me and said I had made some good points which he mostly agreed with, but that he was going to keep eating meat. I tried again a few days later, after he’d gone out and gotten a beef burrito for lunch. I said that in a situation like that, why wouldn’t you just order vegetarian? I said it’s so, so easy not to eat any meat, especially if you’re used to it because you’ve done it for years. I said that yes, our choices weren’t going to stop anything, but knowing the way animals suffer in slaughterhouses, why wouldn’t you just do that one little thing for them? I said again and again how it’s the easiest thing in the world to be vegetarian, knowing that he’d done it for almost as long as I had. He listened to me patiently, and then said, “I feel better and healthier when I eat meat. Being vegetarian is the easiest thing in the world for you. For me, it isn’t. For me, it’s the easiest thing in the world to not have a cell phone or a laptop. So when you’re willing to give up your cell phone and your laptop, then we can talk.” I was absolutely stunned. I had nothing to say, except, “Shit, you’re totally right.”
We all have things we’re personally capable of doing. We all have forms of opting out that are easy for us, and things that we’ll never be willing to do. Some people are vegan. Some people bike everywhere. Some people live off-grid. You do what you can. But once you recognize that political action is far more important than individual choice, you can stop monitoring and judging the actions of fellow liberals. You can understand that systematic factors shape people’s “choices” and that most people lack the means to be able to install solar panels or even go vegetarian (meat is cheap, calorie-dense and relatively quick/easy to prepare, all of which are hugely important if you’re busy, overworked and poor). You can encourage people to make good choices and try to educate your friends without coming off like a pompous asshole, because you know that the future survival of the planet doesn’t hinge on your success. And once again, you can put the energy you formerly devoted to judging people into thinking about how to meaningfully change the world so that people actually have options in their lives.
Rejecting the framework of individual choice is the most important political decision I’ve ever made. Don’t get me wrong, I love my local raw milk as much as any other foodie, and I absolutely make conscious choices to live my life a certain way. But knowing that those choices won’t even make a dent in global problems has let me get much more creative in my thinking. I’m opposed to global warming (what sane person isn’t?), but now I can focus on doing whatever needs to be done to make sure the Keystone pipeline isn’t built instead of trying to change all my lightbulbs. I recognize that having the time and energy to engage in activism is, in itself, a form of privilege. Many, many people don’t have the time, energy or inclination to do anything beyond make a few lifestyle changes, and I’m not going to attack anyone for that. It’s a daunting task trying to engage in bottom-up political change. I’ve been thinking about it for most of my life, and I’m still not quite sure where to start. But at least now, I know the answer doesn’t come in the form of a veggie burger.
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