Freegan Identity (23 June 2010)

The Buffalo freegans profiled by Jake Halpern in this NYT magazine piece from a few weeks ago seem like a case for some Kranton-Akerlof identity economics, the basic concepts of which are well presented in this review by Tom Slee.

Freegans purport to be proud freeloaders off the wasteful consumer society: they are "dedicated to salvaging what others waste and — when possible — living without the use of currency," Halpern writes. Yet the identity is a fragile facade, and not merely because it is incoherent, as Halpern explains: "Freegans maintain that by salvaging waste, they diminish their need for money, which allows them to live a more thoughtful, responsible and deliberate existence. But if they succeed in their overriding goal, and society ends up becoming less wasteful, the freegan lifestyle will no longer be possible." The freegan identity, in the case that Halpern covers in the article, relies on institutional support that masks the way they actually help the society they profess to scorn.

The freegans' oppositional identity is something that can be factored in, game theory style, by institutional agents when dealing with them and trying to orient them toward helping contribute to the system they think they are leeching off of. That is, freegans want to provide useful services to the existing economy, but only if it makes them feel like outcasts from that economy. Their practices can only produce the outsider identity they hope for with the help of some ideologically oriented playacting from the broader establishment:

Eventually, one of the city’s “board-up crews,” which seal off abandoned homes, discovered the squatters and reported them to Judge Henry Nowak at the city’s housing court.... He was approached by a group of neighbors who lived near the mansion. They said they wanted to discuss the squatters. To the judge’s astonishment, the neighbors praised the young people, saying that they had kept the thieves, drug dealers and arsonists away. What’s more, they attested, the squatters were fixing up the place, making it less of an eyesore. Their presence, and the fact that the mansion was now occupied, had made it easier for people on the block to get homeowners’ insurance. Odd as it seemed, the freegan kids helped stabilize the neighborhood, and the concerned neighbors wanted them to stay. “They said, ‘Don’t you dare kick those kids out of the house!’ ” Judge Nowak told me.

After this encounter, the judge found himself in a difficult situation. “I was left with two options essentially,” he told me. “One would be to put the house in receivership, where I would tell all of these children that if they want to stay, they have to now pay rent.” This option was problematic, Nowak said, because the squatters were “enamored with the fact that they moved into a house that wasn’t theirs,” and given their freegan sensibilities, they would not consent to paying rent. Or, Judge Nowak explained, “I could essentially let things stay as they are and trust that the children are going to make the repairs to the property.”

For the time being, the judge decided to let the squatters stay. “It was a close call,” he told me. “It was an awfully close call.”

The freegans had basically embraced the quintessential bourgeois ethos of property improvement and had only a veil of radicalism to prevent themselves from recognizing that. Insiders -- the bourgeois neighbors -- had to try to accommodate the freegans' outsider status to continue to reap the benefits of their dirty work. Eventually they had to buy into the system overtly:

The squatters had already paid off back taxes and were paying utility bills — not the most orthodox of freegan practices — but, as they saw it, they were still beating the system. Ownership would, arguably, catapult them into the ranks of propertied classes.

“Many of us in the house see the whole system of private property as being something that oppresses people,” Tim said. “And if we owned the place, suddenly we’d be the ones kicking people out or the ones calling the cops.” But, in the end, Tim said, ownership was “a necessary step to keep the project alive.”

The obvious question at that point is, What does the "project" consist of? Is it still a freegan project, or has it evolved into an experiment in cooperative living within the institutions of consumer capitalism? It seems to me that freegan identity is probably a liability that prevents the more widespread acceptance of such experiments that might actually alter the institutions of capitalism for the better. But is there a way to motivate individuals to participate in such projects without baiting the hook with the promise of a oppositional, self-aggrandizing identity?

The complexity of that problem -- how to cultivate people who want to live in a "community economy" without their being stuck in capitalism's model of individuality -- is evoked in this introduction to J.K. Gibson-Graham's The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It), which is a condensation of A Postcapitalist Politics by the same author. Freeganism could potentially reveal alternatives to capitalism, alternative subject positions to inhabit (i.e. a different way to go about living, with entirely different guiding values and principles), but only if it abandons an ideology that is parasitical upon capitalism and emphasize instead communal approaches to production, consumption, distribution, and subjectivity -- reorganizing the sorts of markets we have and the sorts of people we become when we inhabit them.

Too many stores? (21 Feb 2008)

In a recent Slate piece, Daniel Gross considered whether America has too many stores and whether the current recession (or near recession) will spur an anti-retail backlash.

Developers opening new malls this year clearly timed the economic cycle poorly. And the cultural cycle isn't helping matters any. The extreme consumption of this current gilded age has inspired a backlash. In December, hedge-fund bil­lionaire Ray Dalio ran full-page advertise­ments in newspapers urging Americans to eschew Christmas gifts and instead make donations to charity. Maybe he's just run out of things to buy. Or maybe he's surfing the zeitgeist. "There's a glut of stores," says Judith Levine, author of Not Buying It: My Year Without Shopping. "Our physical, intellectual and emotional and psychological space is filled up with consumption." Levine laments the wholesale transformation of open spaces into enclosed retail environments (like, say, Barnes & Noble superstores, where you can buy Not Buying It). And the in­cessant bombardment of advertising may be inspiring a backlash that pushes people to consume less. The anti-con­sumer freegan movement—urbanites who try to get by through recycling, scrounging, and foraging—are taking it to the extreme. These modern Henry David Thoreaus have opted out of the whole rot­ten capitalist system. Working 60 hours per week and chasing job promotion "for the sake of buying the latest crap off the Sharper Image store shelf is no way to live," says Adam Weissman, spokesman for Freegan.info. (Hey, dude, one might say the same about diving into Dumpsters in search of day-old bread and discarded futons.)

Clearly, Gross is skeptical of just about anyone's anti-consumerism, as most commentators (me included) tend to be. It's not that we aren't inundated with advertising and retail spaces. Of course we are, and these things are virtually inescapable in America. The problem is that anticonsumerism becomes an identity pose that is either manifestly hypocritical or deeply reliant on the same individualistic values that support consumerism in the first place -- one advertises oneself as an anti-consumer, making that one's brand on the marketplace of social approval. Not to get all poststructuralist, but when you found your self-concept on not shopping, you are in effect deeply invested in shopping. In some ways, you'd be better off making your shopping as unconscious as possible, which is actually one of the chief gripes against consumer society -- that it makes us take shopping as an activity for granted. We are already inside consumerism, and it's virtually impossible to construct an identity outside of it -- it's the only viable language of identity that we learn in the West.

Since experiences have been reconceived as products -- by the tourism industry, by retail psychologists who want to sell -- its hard to undertake any activity that doesn't feel like shopping, that doesn't feel as though it has been mediated to us via marketing. This is bad enough, but it seems to have broader ramifications, in that stores in and of themselves become a soothing sight, destinations and havens independent of any particular shopping need. Their presence becomes reassuring and familiar, a reliable guide to the sort of place you are in, and the sort of place you want to be. We understand places, then, mainly through retail (and what it tells us of demographics), rather than any other natural or geographic considerations. So the need fulfilled by the rapid proliferation of stores is not merely a matter of the specific things they sell but the marking function the stores serve in telling us what sort of place we are in. And shopping in such stores can be as much about endorsing those demographics and belonging to them as actually buying anything.

Dumpster diving (26 June 2007)

Via Brad Plumer, a link to a recent NY Times article about dumpster diving. (Oh wait, according to Webster's 11th that should be Dumpster diving -- wouldn't want to infringe on that copyright! Yeah, right.)

On a Friday evening last month, the day after New York University’s class of 2007 graduated, about 15 men and women assembled in front of Third Avenue North, an N.Y.U. dormitory on Third Avenue and 12th Street. They had come to take advantage of the university’s end-of-the-year move-out, when students’ discarded items are loaded into big green trash bins by the curb.
New York has several colleges and universities, of course, but according to Janet Kalish, a Queens resident who was there that night, N.Y.U.’s affluent student body makes for unusually profitable Dumpster diving. So perhaps it wasn’t surprising that the gathering at the Third Avenue North trash bin quickly took on a giddy shopping-spree air, as members of the group came up with one first-class find after another.

Apparently I'm not the only one fascinated with other people's trash, not the only person who conceives a potential ethical mission upon discovering usable things piled on the street. I've sort of vaguely intuited that this sort of thing was happening, but never really thought through the implications as the people profiled here obviously have.

Freegans are scavengers of the developed world, living off consumer waste in an effort to minimize their support of corporations and their impact on the planet, and to distance themselves from what they see as out-of-control consumerism. They forage through supermarket trash and eat the slightly bruised produce or just-expired canned goods that are routinely thrown out, and negotiate gifts of surplus food from sympathetic stores and restaurants.
They dress in castoff clothes and furnish their homes with items found on the street; at freecycle.org, where users post unwanted items; and at so-called freemeets, flea markets where no money is exchanged. Some claim to hold themselves to rigorous standards. “If a person chooses to live an ethical lifestyle it’s not enough to be vegan, they need to absent themselves from capitalism,” said Adam Weissman, 29, who started freegan.info four years ago and is the movement’s de facto spokesman.

I seemed to remember a similar movement from the late 1960s led by this man

that believed in freeloading off of society's garbage. He even wrote some catchy tunes about it, namely "Garbage Dump", which featured these lyrics:

Oh garbage dump oh garbage dump
Why are you called a garbage dump
You could feed the world with my garbage dump...
Here's a market basket and a A&P
I don't care if the box boys are starin' at me
I don't even care who wins the war
I'll be in them cans behind my favorite store

(Of course, he had some other, more radical ideas about racial conflict and what his group needed to do to foment the inevitable black-white struggle.)

Anyway, I'm skeptical that shopping in someone else's trash exempts you from participation in consumer society, and "absents" one from capitalism, as the "freegans" seem to believe. I'm sure the logic is that by reusing something, they are circumventing the need for new objects to produced. They are not adding to the problem by contenting themselves with stuff that already would have existed anyway.

But parasites need their host to survive, and in fact they will in some cases do what they can to perpetuate the lifespan of the creature they feed from. It's no good to castigate a culture while living on its leavings. Obviously if everyone decided to live on the refuse of others, we'd quickly run out of refuse -- somebody (people who would no doubt be derided as wasteful and evil) would need to be throwing stuff away for this system to work.

And if freegans are merely fulfilling the same consumer desires with secondhand goods, how are they opting out? Opting out would seem to imply conceiving an alternative set of values, desires, ways of fulfilling one's human potential, etc. The means don't justify the ends; getting a cool thing out of the trash doesn't make the acquisitive lifestyle righteous.

Sadly, this sort of article tends to discredit leftist politics, as it is populated with people like this:

Many freegans are predictably young and far to the left politically, like Ms. Elia, the 17-year-old, who lives with her father in Manhattan. She said she became a freegan both for environmental reasons and because “I’m not down with capitalism.”

Leftism becomes associated with an interim period of youth when you are not yet firmly entrenched in the system, not yet making the most of your earning potential, and are disgruntled with the effort it takes to become assimilated into in society as it is. You consider dropping out and rebelling against mainstream society by rejecting its rules, like "Don't eat what other people throw away." So when you are not busy watching Fletch you have time to complain and conceive of schemes to freeload off the capitalist society you blithely put down. Then one day you grow up, and you give up picking up trash items from the sidewalk, and you stop crying about the environment, and you set your worn-out, second-hand ideology by the curb.