Black Friday and It's Discontents

I know Black Friday is a Spectacular orgy one might hope to someday look back upon with incredulous contempt, but the fact is, for the beaten down working class, camping out in front of a mall to get a bargain on a product might not be something the left wants to mock. Maybe we should sympathize. From a position of privilege it is easy to say "You shouldn't buy a giant flat-screen TV" but this could be said about anything anyone of us owns. Adbusters, for whom I have a great deal of respect, focuses much of their critique on "consumer culture" and accumulation but I think this is the weakest part of their analysis.It's an action in search of a logic.

An action like Buy Nothing Day could have revolutionary potential, but not nearly as much as Don't Work Month or Don't Pay Your Bills Month. And the tactic of shaming Black Friday consumers runs into issues of coherence when we consider those just trying to afford something they need.Those struggling against a de-humanizing system should not be compared to zombies. The potential is only manifested when the anti-capitalist critique is well understood by everyone and the ones shamed are the profiteers.

This conscious-consumption ethic also drives much of the environmental movement and the Transition Town thing I am investigating. It is unavoidably ambiguous in it's attitude toward technology or modernity more generally, adopting a notion of provincial/pastoralism as a brake on the runaway locomotive of capitalism. Here, slowness becomes an ethic, slow-food, slow-production, slow-consumption. It is a hearkening back to a pre-literate orientation to time itself. "Quality" time, sensual time, less teleological time. A more dignified time.

In the end however, I think people do want the trains to run on clock time. We can adjust the pace of life and embrace a little " pasado manana" without romanticizing inefficiency or un-utilized capacity as the New Way Forward.