Kyla sent me a blog post that does a wonderful job of criticizing Buy Nothing Day. Like many second-wave liberal beliefs, Buy Nothing Day confuses anti-oppression rhetoric with cool aesthetics:

You disapprove of Black Friday because you believe your consumption preferences are superior to the preferences of those people. You believe that materialism is inauthentic and morally inferior. You believe that the pleasure from consumption is the wrong sort of pleasure to have.

Society is structured such that it is impossible not to compare your standard of living with those of other people (real or fictional). You can’t just get a better house on sale, so people try to make their lives more enjoyable with tangible consumer goods. Deals on goods can make a big difference for lower-income people, so don’t trivialize their interest.

Rather than saying “I did my part by not buying stuff on sale (even though I can afford to buy gifts at regular price)”, work toward restructuring society so that people are not pressured into measuring their standard of living. Give them the carrot of free paths to happiness rather than the stick of consumer gilt. At the very least, go after the advertisers who encourage desire in the first place and the retailers who create false scarcity rather than the people who are human enough to be affected by these tactics.

A few of my friends have been asking their social networks for help finding ugly Christmas sweaters to wear to a themed party (full disclosure: I didn’t get invited). I’m sure they’re at least vaguely aware of the politics of such a theme, but I’m going to make it explicit: the wealthy and the cool distinguish themselves from the poor and the square by arbitrarily categorizing some sweaters as “ugly”.

Stuff White People Like imagines this exchange at such a party:

“Hey man, nice sweater. It’s so ugly.”
“Yeah, when my family first got to this country we had to shop at Goodwill, this is the first one my father bought to get him through his first winter here. Good thing they didn’t have these parties back then, right? He would have died.”
“Geez, man, I’m sorry, you can cut in line for egg nog.”

The Critical fashion blog Threadbared talks about sweaters in a larger (and ongoing) discussion about the politics of thrift stores:

At the Salvation Army closest to campus, there is an “ugly sweater” rack for all the students purchasing these as novelties for themed parties. Similar sweaters are not separated at the store that serves the non-students, and that is located in the same building that provides other services to low-income or homeless persons. And because bodies and clothes interact and activate certain ideas about each the other, the same sweater on a college student going to a themed party is funny because it is outdated, and on a young fashion blogger pairing it with leggings is innovative because it is renewed, and on an older woman imagined as its appropriate owner the sweater will be “just” unfashionable because (supposedly) so is its wearer.

In other words, poor people just call them “sweaters”.

Value Village is the largest thrift store in Victoria. In the past year or two I’ve heard a few people complaining that it’s too expensive. For the first time they have a “Christmas sweater” section – coincidence?

I haven’t read the comics. I recently watched Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, which I enjoyed despite the racism.

Scott Pilgrim’s world is one where white is not a race, it is the abscence of race:

• Knives Chau is Scott’s “Chinese girlfriend”, but Ramona Flowers is not Scott’s “new white girlfriend”, she’s just his girlfriend.
• Matthew (evil ex #1) doesn’t just happen to look Indian, he has to do a (effeminate) Bollywood dance. And of course Asian guys can’t be sex symbols, so he never got to 1st base with Ramona.
• The Katayanagi twins (evil exs #5 & 6) don’t just happen to be Japanese, they play electronic music on superior consumer electronics and send their Asian dragons (or robots in the comics) to attack across the sea [of people].

Knives Chau embodies a number of Asian woman stereotypes:

• To Internet geeks in particular, Asian girls are innocent and passive, waiting to be conquered.
• Asian people cannot have an alternative look, they are all clones (the Katayanagi twins literally). When Knives dyes her hair, it doesn’t last long.
• Asian characters must always fight with martial arts and Asian weapons.

This is surprising given the diversity of Asian culture presented in manga and implied by video games that Scott Pilgrim pays homage to. Remember, these tropes might not be a big deal if they appeared in a single film, but when they appear in Hollywood movie after Hollywood movie they serve to create a culture of oppression.

I thought the handling of gay characters was much more reasonable, although it’s a shame that Ramona only dated Roxie (evil ex #4) because she liked her cherry chapstick.

Jack and The Tyee have both criticized the latest edition of How to Be a Canadian by the Ministry of Citizenship and Immigration. It made me think about the book A People’s History of the United States (which I haven’t read and don’t plan to because I don’t care about the US). It’s a history of oppression in the US that looks at major national events and oppressive episodes from the point of view of the least powerful.

Apparently A People’s History is an invaluable teaching tool for critical American History. But from what I’ve read, none of the spin-offs (A People’s History of the World, in particular) are as good.

What do you get when you Google “A People’s History of Canada”? The historical TV series published by the government. It’s a nice project for teaching people the framework of Canadian history, but even a sometimes-rogue Crown corporation like the CBC can’t be expected to produce truly critical history.

Does a popular critical history of Canada exist? If not, why doesn’t someone make one?

The CCPA tried to measure how much we benefit from public service. But they noted that the biggest problem with their study is that actually the only data available is to measure the cost of public services consumed by households. Government cannot use the market theory of value because the things government produces (mostly as a monopoly) are not traded in markets; instead, government accountants use the cost-of-production theory of value.

Cost theories of value have been rejected by neoclassical economics. Not having any way of measuring the value besides the cost means that cost-benefit analysis is meaningless. So when business people look at government services they see them as at most zero net benefit.

This is similar to the problem of measuring government’s success by changes in gross domestic product (GDP). Government needs critical accounting more desperately than the private sector does.

My friend Tara recently wrote an excellent summary of what a neo-Marxist revolutionary does. My summary is that neo-Marxists believe that the majority of us live under a false meta-narrative, believing that our alienation is either desirable or has no alternative. (This sounds a lot more like The Matrix than Baudrillard does, eh?) The neo-Marxists (and Tara uses the Situationist flavour of neo-Marxist jargon) attempt to raise our consciousness by doing stuff like avant-garde art.

I don’t really get neo-Marxism, while I do dig postmodernism, so I see the situation through a postmodern lens: The neo-Marxists are incredulous to the dominant meta-narrative (ie: work is good) but see their own meta-narrative (ie: wacky stuff is good) as more authentic. Postmodernism says that all meta-narratives are not credible and the craving for the authentic is part of the late-modern meta-narrative, so the neo-Marxists are part of the system they’re attempting to overthrow. (The highly accessible text that introduced me to this idea is The Rebel Sell.)