Noam Chomsky - Consumerism

to consumerism were abandoned by 50% and requires consumers imagine 50% of people or something suddenly refuses to buy but we're committed so the question is are we committed consumerism and what would happen if people stopped wine well the consumerism is doubtless drilled in here in fact part of the reason one of the reasons economies are kind of speculating as to why the economy is in such a rotten state why is there been such low group and one of the speculations is that it is very much it's becoming kind of a craft economy where you can't sell people things they need you know like or want like say a refrigerator or a car or something like that I mean they wear things that people want it I mean I remember when my parents got a refrigerator you know it's like a big thing and that's a Cardian big piece of ice every day and that sort of business so there's a reason to want a refrigerator but you know Gillette has just spent how many billions of dollars on some new razor blades there's going to be identical to the one they had thirty years ago and the question is why anyone would want that you know well the economy is more and more being driven to that so Nike for example puts out a new line of sneakers every six weeks there's a place called the gap I'm not exactly sure what they sell jeans I think or something but whatever they do they change their line also about every six weeks no automobiles there's this is true and services to like if you you know you want a long-distance carrier or an insurance company or something this little hundreds of different things which are all alike you know and in fact everyone's kind of trying to find some niche to try to force people to consume things they don't want you know and that's pretty inefficient so that may be driving down the economy you can see why it's being done if you want to maintain the smug prosperous Americans and make profit on all of this try to do if you want to start there plenty of things that people need like us public investment investment in say infrastructure meaning things like education and health and roads and bridges you know the kind of things that matter to people that's going way down in the last twenty or thirty years that's another effect of this economy well you know those are things people really want like it'd be nice to have our kids educated you know and it would be nice to get the you know pollutants out of the environments or advising and dying of cancer you know and all kind of things that are nice but people put private industries make profit out of those I don't think the answer to this is to stop buying you know I mean that maybe that's okay maybe it isn't okay but if unless the structure of power is changed that's not going to have much of an effect of them to put people out of work it's the structure of power that has to be changed why should decisions over investment be in the hands of private tyrannies who for their own purposes would prefer to have to spend you know once about 1/6 of gross national product in marketing meaning trying to induce people to buy things they don't want ok that's a big piece that's like over a trillion dollars a year why should decisions be in their hands to do that rather than to then in the hands of the public which might make quite different decisions like for example to improve schools or to get people health care in order to have mass transportation system you could use or something like that I think that's the question the question is ultimately really one of the mocker see who's going to control who decides that's the question yeah that's right oh is it the question was people here being downsized many others their will to do it that's what Alan Greenspan is and the Clinton administration cheering about worker insecurity you know which is from their point of view good for Americans so yeah but you know you can say the same about I mean we're people scared and it's when they were slaves I'm gonna take slavery did the slaves have reasons to be scared and honey reasons to be scared does that mean they accepted slavery well their slavery volts all the time you know the kinds of things that we're scared of are pretty minor is compared with what most people in the world face very minor in fact and if you know if we if we're unable to make the effort to deal with these problems that's pretty sad and I think that people are not that scary I think they are made to feel helpless they're made to feel yes there's a free market economy and it's doing all kind of wonders and if you feel rotten there's something wrong with you you know and there's nothing to do a better in any way because it's immutable economic laws it's kind of like arguing against a law of gravitation or something so they feel helpless but they're not you know none of this stuff is immutable laws they're not helpless that plenty of opportunities to do things it's happened plenty of times in the past actually we've been through this ourselves in the past the 1950s were very much like today in the 1920s or even worse you know I'm in the 1922 labor movement Ollie smashed mostly about violence and it was like you know end of history utopia the masters and all that sort of thing a couple of years later the whole country was blowing up the 50s was again a period when it was thought that the Beast had been caged you know everybody was passive and apathetic and you know consumerist and so on well 1960s came along you know again whole place blew up this is a recent history trace it back in the past it goes back as far as you can go there's no reason to feel helpless and but I think it doesn't make sent a lot of sense to pick away at the margins I mean maybe these are good tactics but if so they're organizing tactics like anti-consumerism might be a tactic to get people to think about deeper problems but in itself it's not you know it's not doing anything to the system I don't think

Channel: Chomsky's Philosophy

Views: 73,144

Rating: 4.9431577 out of 5

Keywords: Consumerism, Chomsky, Market, Downsizing, Jobs, Production, Fear, Organizing, Noam Chomsky, Hopelessness, Capitalism, Corporate, Propaganda, Workers, Consume

Id: Mg50wCe-Z7U

Length: 6min 33sec (393 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 06 2017