A headline on today's MarketWatch.com says it all: "Shoppers on strike in September". In an earlier blog post, I suggested that the decrease in consumer spending may seem like uncoordinated fear but is actually partly the result of an organized campaign by fed-up consumers who are using a General Consumption Strike as a tool to change the world. Now is the time to join this growing movement to consume less and live more.

The mass media is understandably alarmed by the sharp declines in consumer spending that have happened in the last three months: as everyone knows, our economies are based on unhealthy, unsustainable consumption. The more we destroy the earth by turning our natural resources into disposable garbage the "healthier" our economies are, or so we are told. But it is becoming obvious to most people that, as the revolutionary leader in Ursula K. Le Guin's classic The Dispossessed taught, excess is excrement and the only way to restore health to our social body is to decrease the unnecessary excesses of our society and to lower our consumption of the earth. In other words, live simply so that others may simply live.

The New York Times summarizes the gains of our General Consumption strike thus:

Retail sales fell sharply in September as consumers shunned department stores, auto showrooms and shopping malls, ratcheting back spending for a third consecutive month.

Last month’s 1.2 percent decline in retail sales was the sharpest drop in years, and it came in the heart of the back-to-school shopping season, traditionally the busiest time of the year for retailers outside of the December holidays.

 

The scent of capitalism's decline is in the air, people are now looking for alternatives. Some are turning to Marx -- the Guardian reports sales of Marx's books are up 300% in Germany -- and others are looking to local currencies and alternative economies. Our time is approaching, let us be prepared.

Let’s be honest: no one understands economics anymore. It’s been over a hundred years since Marx published Volume One of Das Kapital, a book whose audience was the working class. Today, only specialists are expected to enter the debate on economic policy, the rest of us it seems are supposed to wait on the sidelines while the value of their money varies widely without understanding why. The ongoing economic collapse, grants us an opportunity to rethink our reliance on a currencies that are inhuman and make no sense.

A growing number of activists are focusing on the question of the role of money in the ongoing destruction of the natural environment. Last month, Enric Duran, a Spanish activist borrowed over €500,000 from banks, gave it away to activist organizations and then distributed 200,000 copies of a newspaper in which he publicly refused to pay the money back. 

Duran explained his actions thus:

This financial system depends on more and more money being given in loans. The loans in the end have an environmental impact as people use them to buy a car, to travel, to expand a factory facility or to build houses amongst other things. Thus this system of economic growth by means of loans depends on the constant and growing conversion of natural resources into CO2 and waste. Hence at a time when we are reaching the limits of growth in energy production due to the decline of oil and when the output limits of many mines are also being approached, it seems safe to conclude that this system created more than 300 years ago on the basis of expanding credit cannot continue in the way that we know it today." (click here Duran's full statement)

We have become so dependent on money that while we may entertain critiques of capitalism, there are few people who would entertain a movement against money itself. How are we to live, eat, pay our rent or buy things without money? This is a question that we must begin to address.

Some proposals include Time-based currencies, local currencies, Local Exchange Trading Systems, and ROCS among others. And the most inspiring news is that there are already dozens of community currencies in the United States.

What would a Blackspot Currency look like? Would it be time-based? Would it be international or purely local? Let's get to work imagining a new economy based on Blackspot principles and local flair. And maybe one day, Adbusters will be the first magazine to offer subscriptions paid for with an alternative currency.

In a silent moment a blackspot sprouted as a scribble upon the wall – the remainder of a black crayon circling, blotting out what lay beneath. As pure possibility, the blackspot grew through negation, composting decaying culture to fertilize seedlings of renewal. Taking an ad bloated with pestilential desires, swirling its mark until nothing remained but tilled field, the blackspot prepares the fecund ground, dark with becoming, for our new beginning.

Not a product, a brand nor a marketing campaign, the blackspot is a call to shake off the chains of resignation. Feel the most powerful tremble when faced with our challenge. Slipped into their hands, thrown into their faces, the blackspot signals our ongoing mutiny against consumerism. But our rebellion is of a different kind, where not only the captain of the vessel walks the plank but also the course and even the maps are destroyed. We are not sailing for a distant shore, nor seeking the middle passage. Instead, our destination is here, where we stand. We will retake this ground with the blackspot as guide, pointing toward an alternative present, a viable vision for transforming our communities into lush forests of homegrown culture, unhomogenized by corporate toxins.

Like all untimely ones, the blackspot remained a potentiality yearning toward actuality – waiting for necessity to pollinate its delicate flowers until, weathering storms of cynicism and resignation, the blackspot bore first fruit: we emerged, a tenacious people inspired, prepared to remake the world. Our initial offering, a simple sneaker destined to unswoosh souls by kicking corporate ass, was a fast success. But the shoe was mere beginning, symptom of the coming upheaval, a small taste of the envisioned world to come: castrated capitalism, blackspotted.

See the world freshly made. There’s no need to raze it all, we can embrace what is good and compost the bad. It takes only the courage to daydream, to gaze with intolerance for corporate blight. Our aspirations may be bold but our strategy is sound: dig in for the fight, prepare for the struggle and recruit allies who’ll await the decision moment.

From a scribble on the wall to the incubator of a people, the blackspot’s design unfolds with time – the destined catalyst of cultural rebirth.

Speaking of PBR and all the love it receives from hipsters, here is an interesting excerpt from New York Times Columnist Rob Walker's new book, Buying In:

"The Blackspot sneaker that I mentioned earlier-the creation of the antibrander, Kalle Lasn, and his Adbusters crew-is premised on the belief that a logo (or antilogo) product can have real meaning for people who are sick of logos; it is premised on the belief that the marketplace of goods is a marketplace of ideas. The "hijacking" of PBR [Pabst Blue Ribbon Beer] shows how this really can happen, although its different from the Blackspot idea in two important ways.

The first is that while the meaning of the Blackspot as a sort of protest brand was created by Adbusters and announced to potential consumers, the meaning of PBR as a kind of protest brand did not come from its owners; it came from the grass roots, from consumers, from the bottom up.

And here is a second difference: On the side of every can of Pabst Blue Ribbon is a P.O box in Milwaukee. Pabst does trace its roots to a brewery foundered there in 1844. These days, however, Pabst Brewing Company is based in San Antonio. In 1985, the brewery was bought by Paul Kalmanovitz's idea, a self-made beer and real estate baron. While other big brewers were spending to build national, image based brands, Kalmanovitz's idea, apparently, was to buy up ailing ales, slash all associated costs, and let them "decline profitably." Kalmanovitz died in 1987 (Pabst is owned by the charitable foundation he left behind), and his lieutenants ran the show for the next dozen or so years along the same lines. The current Pabst Brewing portfolio includes Schlitz, Carling Black Label, Falstaff, Olympia, and Stroh's. It also owns a few regional stalwarts (Lone Star, Rainier, Old Style) and malt liquors (Colt 45, St. Ides). Its top seller, with about 1 percent of the U.S. beer market, is Old Milwaukee.

Along the way, Pabst shuttered its Milwaukee brewery, eliminating nearly 250 jobs and touching off a legal battle over pension obligations to former workers. This might explain another quirk of the Pabst resurgence-that it has radiated out from a part of the country that had no particular historic tie to the brand. "They really aliented people in Milwaukee," Dennis E. Garrett, a marketing professor at Marquette University in that city, told me. In 2001, Pabst finalized an outsourcing deal with Miller, becoming a "virtual brewer", as one executive put it at the time. Having virtually wiped out its blue-collar workforce, Pabst employed just 166 people, about half of them selling beer in the field and the rest in the home office. This, in other words, is exactly the kind of scenario that people like Lasn and books like No Logo were complaining about.

That is to say, PBR's blue-collar, honest-workingman, vaguely anticapitalist image-image attached to it by consumers-is a sham. You really couldn't do much worse in picking a symbol of resistance to phony branding."

From reading the hundreds of comments on the hipster article, I expect many people would say, "I drink PBR because it is cheap, not because it is cool". But if you were in the liquor store, staring at a fridge that had Budweiser and PBR next to each other for exactly the same price, which would you choose? Some would probably choose PBR because its image is grassroots and blue collar. But this image is false. What do you do when you find out that PBR is owned by an American company, but that the production of all its twenty-nine beers is outsourced to SABMiller, based in South Africa? What do you do when you find out your rebellious Converse are now made by Nike in China? In a time when image is cleverly manipulated, we need to become increasingly aware of where our products come from and what our brands stand for so we can hold them up to the standards we expect.

I know thoughts of meditating in boardrooms and choir sessions in the lunch room come to mind, but try not to take "spiritual capitalism" so literally. Carleen Hawn from Ode Magazine explains what spiritual capitalism means:

"...the success of an enterprise is measured by values like “integrity” and “commitment” as much as by targets like “efficiency” and “profitability.” It’s based on the recognition that every businessperson—whether you’re the CEO of a major multinational or the head of your own small firm—is in the service industry, and the services rendered must benefit not just yourself and your shareholders, but the planet and other people as well. The first commandment of the growing spiritual-capitalism movement is: Taking care of business means taking care of others."

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Inspirational speaker Azim Jamal has another term for CEO with ethics and a conscience, a Corporate Sufi.

Whatever you like to call it, buddha in the boardroom, spiritual capitalism, corporate sufi, or jesus businessmen, the question still remains the same:

Can we shift the entire system from profitability and the bottom line to taking care of others and the environment? And if so, is it solely in the hands of the CEO's, or do the people of a company have any power to bring about this change?

A lot of buzz is happening around the experimental run of the new V1:R coming out this summer, and we want to keep everyone as updated as possible. So here's the latest:

Word from our factory owner, Pedro, is that the shoes will be done production this week! The shoes will then make their way to our warehouses in the UK, Canada, and the US.

At this point we are looking at the shoes being a couple weeks away from hitting the streets and we are getting very excited for their arrival. Check back soon for pre-orders to open up in the culture shop to guarantee you get a pair!