But where's the personal sacrifice?

Posted in Mike Wood's blog on ,

A few weeks back I had a big argument with someone I met at the FEM 05 conference, and I’ve been dwelling on it for a while since. I knew them from York University, and they knew me as a No Sweat activist. We talked briefly about the left at the Uni, and what campaigns were ongoing, or coming up. She said she had problems with a few of them, and then remarked that she disagreed completely with No Sweat’s methods in particular. Why? Because we don’t call for boycotts.

I’ve talked before with people who think that the anti-sweatshop movement should be all about wearing ethical clothes, but this particular person seemed to be taking a rather extreme form of that position. As I tried to argue with her the position just seemed to get worse and worse. When I asked what we should do about food, as most supermarket produce was probably not all that hot ethically, she said it would be possible to buy only organic vegetables. I tried to argue that this really wouldn’t change much, and that surely the point was to help people working in sweatshop conditions, therefore we should look for more effective methods like supporting the workers. In reply to this came one of the most stupid arguments I’ve ever heard: “Yes, but where’s the personal sacrifice?”.

This kind of took me back for a while. I still don’t think I’ve really come to terms with how utterly bankrupt as an argument I think it is, which is why its taken me several weeks to really think about writing something on it. I kind of spluttered around for a while before asking what the hell that had to do with anything at all. Want to stop world poverty? Well, you can only join in a campaign if it is in someway detrimental to your personal well-being. The point is not to help the starving, but to flagellate yourself until you feel better... errr… I mean worse. It’s not about making yourself feel like a more worthy person at all…

Except, of course, that it is. Many times I’ve argued with people on this issue where I’ve tried to persuade them that all this boycotting and ethical consumerism is just about middle class guilt. This is the first time when someone has pretty much come out and said: “Yeah? So? That’s the important thing!”. In some ways it’s hard to write much about this idea because it sort of destroys itself before your very eyes. I’m merely recounting this episode so that everyone else can share in this train wreck of an argument. It’s an amusing story, and quite an indicative one of the kind of political current that runs through a certain section of the student left, but I don’t really feel the need to refute the actual argument here. If you feel you have a coherent argument as to why your involvement in political campaigns should be predicated on the amount of suffering entailed then please post it in the comments boxes. This rare beast must be catalogued.

Besides which, involvement in No Sweat, or any other campaign, does involve a certain amount of what could possibly be termed a sacrifice (although I’m tempted to say that if it hurts you’re doing it wrong, as the actress said to the Bishop). Doesn’t the time and energy spent in campaigning actually count? If that isn’t deemed suffering enough then I suppose I’ll have to pay my penance for wanting to change the world in some other way. Possibly after every No Sweat stall I attend I could slam my hand in a door, or watch a Michael Bay film. If that’s not enough then I’ll have to make the ultimate sacrifice of going to a different shelf in the supermarket from usual, but let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.

The main problem with the idea that our personal sacrifice is the all important thing is that it’s just simply not really true. People are involved in the global justice movement to make people’s lives better. Happiness is not a zero-sum gain; I can make peoples lives better without making my own much worse, and peoples lives aren’t terrible because mine is currently pretty good. People’s lives are terrible because of a huge systemic problem in the world, not because a lot of consumers have decided to buy the wrong kind of chocolate. The point is to help make the world a better place, not make ourselves feel less guilty about the fact that it’s so bad.

Comments

Submitted by Janine on Sat, 19/11/2005 - 21:08

Working-class people already sacrifice quite enough under capitalism, thank you very much.

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