Green Organic

As “going green” and “eating organically” become increasingly popular trends, I start to worry. I worry not because these things are bad, in fact, I think they are very good things to do. Rather I worry because the engine that runs our society is fueled by capitalist and consumer ideals which are at their core the antithesis of what “going green” and “eating organically” are really all about. Since these two notions, capitalism and “organic green,” are so diametrically opposed, the “organic green” camp risks exploitation from the “capitalist consumer” camp. I’ll discuss one such example.

I recently saw a documentary on 60 minutes about technological waste and in particular what may be happening to the computer monitors and other such devices we think we’re recycling using “green” (eco-friendly) measures. Reporters from 60 minutes tracked e-waste from a company in the U.S. claiming to domestically handle e-waste in a green & eco-friendly manner. Cars were lined up bumper-to-bumper for blocks to drop off their e-waste, doing what they thought was the responsible, ethical thing. But in fact the company was shipping their technological waste overseas to China to a town that had been turned into a wasteland of post-technological trash, the festering toxic underbelly of unfettered capitalist consumption. In this particular town they were melting down the e-waste in order to retrieve the precious metals. However, all the toxic run-off was going into the water supply for the city and literally killing their children and citizens. The reporters were run out of the area at gun-point and some of their cameras were confiscated. The Chinese government was turning a blind eye to this black-market. Meanwhile it’s safe to say that this one U. S. business exporting e-waste is just one small component in this complex web.

One of the many problems with capitalist consumption is the irresponsible and hazardous byproducts that it imposes on our environment. One ideal of capitalist consumption is that newer is synonymous with better; couple this belief with the impulse to always be improving on what already exists and we have an ideology that posits its products are most successful when they are obsolete before they even enter the production phase. This trend, if not already here, is not far off. Just think about how the VCR dominated the home video market from about 1970 until the late 1990s. It’s taken less than a decade before technology has improved the DVD player to the Blue Ray, and from what I’ve heard there’s already technology for a device beyond the Blue Ray. But this is nothing new. The automobile and computer industries have been doing this for decades. There’s something severely wrong when you have to update your car, computer, TV, home video system, etc., etc. every two years or less. The consequence of this pursuit is more e-waste than we can reasonably manage, and as a consequence this damages and harms our environment and the lives and welfare of people.

Another problem of constantly renewing technology is that the market for it is based on speculation. It presumes that capital must also be regenerating itself at the same speed. But when this fails (as we are seeing now) then the new technologies which have been over-produced will be instantly become worthless. Jobs will become obsolete or superfluous and unemployment will rise. This is what keeps the federal government pumping our capitalist system full of more capital when it runs dry. We can’t toss in the towel and opt for a total revolution. Instead we try to cure the ills of capitalist consumption with more capitalist consumption.
The bottom line for capitalism is profit, and profit is realized via consumption. This is the vicious cycle. This is what worries me about “going green” and “eating organically.” When big businesses realizes that organic milk costs $8 a gallon when they are selling regular milk for $4 a gallon, how can we trust that the “organic” or “natural” or any other marketing synonym they come up with to justify raising prices to match organic milk they are doing so because they are ensuring the product they are selling costs more to manufacture because of its better health benefits or that they are paying livable wages rather than outsourcing jobs overseas, etc. It is pretty much impossible to track all the food, goods and services you buy to ensure that the corruption happening with the e-waste on the 60 minutes report isn’t happening in similar and various ways in the organic revolution as well.

One of the basic tenants of organic eating is returning to a pre-processed, pre-industrial way of eating. Instead of eating processed food and foods which have had chemicals, perseveres, pesticides, etc. added to them, people who want to eat organically seek instead whole foods, raw food, foods that our ancestors from centuries ago would have eaten, or maybe ancestors just a few generations removed. The ideal of organic eating and living is not about realizing greater and greater profits. It’s not about big business and manufacturing. It’s not about shipping products across the country or overseas. And most importantly it’s not about reification (treating a social relationship as if it were a thing), whereas capitalism divorces labor from its unit of exchange via capital. In other words, a non-capitalist society would focus on social relationships and the exchange of goods and services. That is, I may raise chickens and exchange my eggs for my neighbor’s milk that s/he yields from the cows s/he raises. In such an exchange the social relationship is built and the goods exchanged express a mutual understanding. On the other hand, a capitalist market masks this social relationship by the exchange of money. Unlike the eggs in my example, money is not something that has any worth or value but only as long as it can be exchanged for something else that has worth and value. In this sense worth and value are dislocated from capital, and this dislocation is one fundamental breakdown in the social relationship. How this works is that if my neighbor professes to be giving me milk from a single cow which is grass-fed on a pasture that is untainted from chemicals, I merely need to pay frequent visits to my neighbors house, engage him/her in dialogue (and all the other sorts of activities one does to foster a relationship) to verify that this is true. On the other hand, how would I do such a thing if I buy my milk at the store? I could spend the rest of my life trying to track down where the food comes from that I purchase at the store and not get very far.
All this is to say that I have very little faith in our capitalist system to do anything “green” or “organic” when the fundamental goal is profit and its method is reification and as best I can tell the true ideals of alternative living seem to have little profitability in them and seek to reconnect goods and service with a social relationship. What seems attractive to me, but miles away from where I’m at now, is to live on a self-sustaining farm in close proximity to neighbors whom I can develop relationships with and also exchange goods and services with for other goods and services, not capital. I don’t need to have a new car, computer, TV, etc. every year and as a result I won’t need to be making more and more money to keep up with my consumption. Less consumption equals less capital. If I could buy a farm with cash, raise all my food on it, and generate my energy needs off the grid, then in theory I’d need very little capital at all to survive. I want to break out of this vicious and corrupt cycle. I don’t expect this concept to have much mass appeal. It is, after all, a throw back to an older, less technical, less “sophisticated” way of living.