Columns

I never got behind the Occupy movement, despite agreeing with most of the many and varied changes that they were calling for. I never spent a night asleep in the Octagon; I never bashed away on my keyboard writing about their campaign to make the world a fairer, better place. Occupy failed to motivate me as I never saw it as anything more than a flaccid outpouring of anger at the inequality in the world, with no real plan or idea for creating the change they wanted to see.

While occupy was always vague about its goals, its motivations were clear. Inspired by the Arab Spring and camping protests in Spain, the occupiers sought to change the economic structure of our society and the power relations between us, in an effort to make the world a generally fairer place.

Over the past 30 years, the richest one percent in America tripled their wealth, while the 99% increased their’s by only 40 percent. And the influence of huge corporations with massive wallets on the political system had undermined their belief that there was a democratic solution to the issue.

The reality of what happened in the “Great Recession” doesn’t seem to have sunk in for many people, especially those on the right. The market failed. It created the conditions of its own collapse, and it was only through the huge injection of taxpayers’ money into private enterprise that we avoided a massive economic depression. The entire doctrine of the political right is that the market should not be interfered with, but by allowing it to act without regulation, by not preventing banks from undermining their own balance sheets, we ended up needing a much larger interference in the market through massive financial bailouts.

The point is that we are capable of regulating our markets, and we should force our governments through democratic action, including protest, to make sure that they do so to prevent them harming the very citizens for whom they are supposed to work. But I have a more important point that I would like to make: We, as individual citizens, are capable of regulating the market ourselves. As consumers, we hold power over the producers and suppliers of goods and services.

By deciding where we spend our dollars, we decide what kind of world we want to live in. We can use banks that follow the best practices, purchase food from local ethical producers, and support organisations that are creating the change we want to see in the world.

The reality of a globalised world is that our economic choices are not limited in their impact to our own communities, or even our own countries. The decisions that we make as consumers, from what shoes we wear to how much petrol we use, can end up supporting undemocratic regimes around the world. Want the violence in Syria to stop? If even a small proportion of the world stopped buying Chinese products, you would see how quickly the Chinese would start supporting the West’s efforts to intervene.

We need to come to terms with the power of our consumerism. And rather than being bound by the industries that work so hard to sell us things, we should bind them to our own desires, with the strength of our consumer dollars.

– Joe Stockman