Telling people not to shop at Christmas is nothing more than snobbery
It’s a tradition now as strong as the trees, snowmen, carols, and dare I say it, the presents. Each year, bolstered by a growing anti-consumerist movement, people are using the holiday season to call on us all to shop less.
“Try buying almost nothing for Christmas and you might experience the most joyous holiday season you’ve ever had,” the anti-commercial magazineAdbusters says. “Bake them a cake, write them a poem, give them a kiss, tell them a joke, but for God’s sake stop trashing the planet to tell someone you care. All it shows is that you don’t,” argues George Monbiot.
Don’t shop this Christmas, for the sake of the planet.
Driven by concerns about resource depletion, over recent years environmentalists have increasingly turned their sights on our “consumer culture”. Groups such asThe Story of Stuff and Buy Nothing New Day are flourishing as a movement that increasingly blames all our ills on our desire to shop.
But will a “buy nothing Christmas” actually help the environment?
We clearly have a growing resource problem. The products we make, buy, and use are often linked to the destruction of our waterways, biodiversity, climate and the land on which millions of people live. But to blame these issues on Christmas shoppers is misguided, and lands us in the old trap of blaming individuals for what is a systematic problem.
How can we attack people for buying a new car for example, when lack of investment in public transport makes it almost impossible to get around by any other means? How can we blame individual shoppers for the impact of Coltan mining in Africa when it’s now virtually impossible to buy a phone or computer without the important metal? This is particularly true given evidence that phone companies design their products to slow down or die after a couple of years, forcing people to buy new models. In a world increasingly based on mobile technology, are we now expecting people to go without a phone? Who gets to keep their phones, and who doesn’t?
The same can be said for so much of our consumption patterns. We can’t blame individuals for buying clothes made with sweatshop labour whenstagnating wages make them the most, if not only, affordable option. We can’t blame people for buying more kitchen appliances when increasing work hoursmake every minute at home increasingly valuable.
Environmental problems go much deeper than how much we buy, and when. Talking endlessly about a “consumer culture” does nothing to solve this, blaming individuals for problems that actually lie at the level of government, big business and the wealthy.
In ignoring these issues, campaigns for a “buy nothing Christmas” amount to nothing more than an attack on the working class.
While we rant about environmental destruction over Christmas, environmentalists often forget what the holiday season actually means for many people. For most, Christmas isn’t an add-on to an already heavy shopping year. In fact, it is likely the only time of year many have the opportunity to spend on friends and family, or even just to buy the necessities needed for modern life.
This is particularly true for Boxing Day, often the target of the strongest derision by anti-consumerists. While we may scorn on the queues in front of the shops, for many, those sales provide the one chance to buy items they’ve needed all year. As Leigh Phillips argues, “this is one of the few times of the year that people can even hope to afford such ‘luxuries’, the Christmas presents their kids are asking for, or just an appliance that works.”
Who can blame people for wanting to take advantage of these deals when it means the difference between having a much needed item, and not?
This becomes particularly pernicious when you take into account that those shopping on Boxing Day are only a fraction of our consumption “problem” anyway. Why are environmentalists attacking these individuals, while ignoring the likes of Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich, who has his own £1.5bn yacht, which is equipped with a missile defence system?
Or what about Jamie Packer, who recently sold his Vaucluse mansion for a whopping $70m? This year stories appeared about Packer’s new life in Israel, including information about his “relatively small” mansion in the town of Caesarea that he has revamped with a new swimming pool and entertainment area.
Even our favourite anti-poverty billionaires engage in this sort of conspicuous consumption. In 2014, for example, it was reported that Bill Gates had taken his family on a holiday aboard the “Serene”, a US$330m yacht that he was renting for $5m a week. Gates recently finished building his new mansion in the United States. Worth US $123m, Gates’ new home includes an underwater sound system in the pool and an $80,000 feature that allows you to change the artwork on the walls with a touch of a button. It was reportedly built with 500-year-old Douglas fir trees.
When it comes to needless consumption, the rich far outweigh the working class.Data out of the United States shows that the bottom 10% of Americans spend 60% of their money on the basics of housing and food. The wealthiest 10%, however, only spend 40% of their money on these items. This leaves a lot of money available for consumption on private jets, expensive holidays and missile defence systems.
This has an impact. Research from 2009 showed that the richest 7% of people are responsible for 50% of carbon dioxide emissions. The gifts bought by the working class over Christmas have little impact compared to the fuel needed for a private jet trip around the world for the rich, yet somehow they miss out on the criticism.
This is the problem for the anti-consumerist movement. While our overly productionist society may be at the root of many of our environmental problems, we are targeting the wrong people. Instead of campaigning against the companiescutting corners, governments that aren’t funding other options, or the wealthy who are buying multi-million dollar yachts while many others can’t afford the basics of life, we’re attacking working class people who simply want to enjoy the holiday season.
In doing so, anti-consumerism has become a movement of wealthy leftists talking down to the working class about their life choices, while ignoring the real cause of our environmental problems. It is no wonder no one is changing their behaviours – or that environmental destruction continues unabated.
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