With the up-to-the-minute contemporary humour of Karl Marx and the insightful dialectic materialism of Harpo Marx, she explains how capitalism works with the enthusiasm of a drunken sailor, the vocabulary of a Sesame Street character and the rigorous intellectual analysis of a paranoid harpie.
In her video The Story of Stuff she summarizes 300 years of scientific, technological, philosophical, medical and educational progress – into a resource that only the brain dead could get excited over.
Here’s her thesis in a nutshell.
Capitalism is evil. Its aim is to trash the planet as quickly as possible. We have already used up 1/3 of all the world’s resources. [Note – we haven’t even got through 1/3 of the resources in the Earth’s crust, which is only 5% of all the Earth’s resources!]
The USA is, especially trashing foreign countries. Over 80% of the world’s original forests are gone. [Note – 100% of all the world’s original forests were gone 400 million years ago – forests die, fall down, get replaced all the time for millions of years]
This is called Extraction. Once extraction is done, we move to Production: toxic chemicals are used to create toxic products.
Toxins in = toxins out.
They build up in breast milk so babies are getting high doses of toxins. We do not know the impact of these toxins. [Note – except that, for 250 years life expectancy has increased, infant survival has increased, cancer rates (age-standardised) are falling, children are bigger and healthier than their parents.]
To increase production, in poor countries 200,000 people move from the countryside to the city every day, this is bad. [Note – people move because life on farms is very, very hard – life in cities is just very hard. Ask how many living in cities want to go back to the country … none.]
There is a lot more in the same, depressing, ignorant, unimaginative vein.
Eventually, she gets to Planned obsolescence – of mops DVDs, cameras and computers. Strangely, she seems to think your computer needs a new central chip every year, but because the new one is a different shape it won’t fit so you have to buy a new computer(??!!?!whaaaaaa??).
This suggests she has never bought a computer and certainly doesn’t know how one works.
Eventually, she tells you to ask your Grannie whether we were all happier in the 1950s because that’s when studies show maximum satisfaction from life. She thinks its because there was less consumerism then, but surely its more likely because:
Men and women knew their place. Men at work, women in the home cooking and cleaning.
A woman simply must accept a certain amount of domestic violence to maintain a happy home.
If a woman did work outside the home, she must get used to being judged on her looks, being paid less than men, and having sexual innuendoes thrown at her every day.
Blacks also knew their place – at the back of the bus, separate schools, separate toilets, separate lunchrooms, different hotels, no voting rights.
Jews knew their place too – not in country clubs, not in certain neighbourhoods, not in some companies.
This is the dreamy wonderland to which the anti-globalisation-brigade wants us to return. Interesting that the leader of this movement in the US is a “feminist academic” and in the UK The Ecologist is owned by a family of far-right politicians.
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