An editorial by W. Doc Stodden

Now that most of us are, for the most part, done eating the Turkey and Stuffing and potatoes and yams, and whatever else most of us eat on the fourth Thursday of November, and after we have watched the last football game of the evening, and put the kids to bed, and have undone our belt to let the food completely digest before we finally hit the rack ourselves, there is one thing we need to remember:

Tomorrow is Black Friday.

There are a few facts that we need to keep in mind.  First, the American economy is now built on the American Consumer.  Without you, the economy does not exist.  Americans blow more money in commercial outlets, acting as consumers than they do on anything else.  The consumer economy, that is, the buying and selling of garbage and services that most of us don’t really need, and much of which is really rather bad for the people who finally end up using it, makes up a significant portion of our country’s GDP.  We don’t really make anything much anymore.  The automobile industry is not enough to keep our country afloat, and heavy industry is either performed in a different country, or is owned by capitalists from a different country.  No:  our economy is built on McDonalds and WalMart.  So if you don’t spend your hard earned money on something you will often no longer physically possess in a very short period of time, our economy really sort of falls apart.

Second thing is:  if you save your money instead of spending it, that doesn’t help the economy.  Regardless of what the economists say, Japanese workers can save upwards of 20% of their pay, because they actually do things in their economy.  We can’t:  Our economy can’t afford that, for the above reasons.  It may be rational for an individual to stash money in the bank, regardless of the interest rate.  But if everyone acts rationally, nobody spends anything and the economy falls apart.  Also, the banks aren’t in any mood to lend that money out, the way they are supposed to, and so, the money simply sits there, and does nothing.  For all our economy cares, it may as well not even exist.  Save if you like, but for the sake of the economy, pray that nobody else does what is in their financial interest as well, because that sort of individual rationality leads to a destructive outcome.

Third thing is:  Tomorrow is the biggest shopping day at stores.  And several groups are calling on us to boycott that consumerist mentality.  You may agree with these calls, but the only way it is going to work is if everyone does it.  Otherwise, you may as well just go shop.  Because there is zero point in you sitting out the shopping day when hundreds of millions of other Americans are going to go undo your personal sacrifice.  And you know that you are going to shop anyway (on Saturday).  Even if you choose not to shop tomorrow, it should be for a more reasonable reason, like you hate dealing with all those other hundreds of millions of consumerist zombies who are all on their own special program (which, according to them is always far more important than yours is) and are willing to fight and trample one another for the newest toy for their precious spoiled little kid, who is clearly more important that the person they just ran over or punched at 3:15 in the morning at the WalMart.  If you don’t shop tomorrow, do it for rational reasons, not because you are committed to indivdually holding back the tide of idiot holiday shoppers.  Protesting the economy by taking one day off of it is kind of pointless.

What do all these facts point to?  More or less, our entire economy is built on some pretty shaky grounds, and the only way to resolve the problems in our economy is to abandon this way of doing things.  But no one of us, or no thousand of us are going to do it:  to undo our economic organization requires a fundamental shift in the way we think about the economy.  The economy right now is completely out of control, and as long as private mega-capital dominates the economy, it isn’t going to get better.

My suggestion:  We all endorse complete nationalization, and reorganization of the workforce of the United States to begin production for need, and not for profit.  I am currently re-reading Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward, and it presents a pretty interesting proposal on how to organize the economy in a reasonable way, that denies the individual the ability to make money by creating demand for crap, and using that manufactured demand to supply the product to fill it. Not the only way:  there are significant modifications that need to be considered, such as the rise of state social services and the economy beyond simple production of goods.  But generally speaking, development of a socialist economy which is bent toward serving the needs of the country, and not the wants of the egoistic individuals in our society is the only way to prevent a complete collapse of the economy and the country more generally, which currently stands like a house built upon sand.

On a more immediate level, there is really not a lot you are going to do about the fact that capitalism still exists, and will likely continue at least through Christmas.  It really does no good attempting to resist that fact.  Even if it causes consternation for one and all.  Even if it exists on the backs of the tens of millions of poor and underpaid workers in the service economy in this country, who consider themselves lucky to have any job, given what seems to be a new level of permanent un-employment in this country (up from 5% now to about 10%).  Capitalism will continue to exist, and metastasize until drastic intervention, like one would take in the case of aggressive cancer, is taken.  Until that point: until we are ready to cut the cancer out completely, any attempt at treatment is likely to just make things worse.