Oh, the humour!

I'm surrounded by a bunch of hippies who don't want to buy into the 'machine,' or the 'corporation.' These people who deem themselves anti-consumerist seek to emancipate the labouring classes around the globe through fair trade and sweat-free production. Oh, the fallacy! What they don't realise is that being a labourer = being a consumer. You labour to produce products that you then consume to sustain yourself so that you can then wake up the next day and go labour again. It's an endless process.

What Nunavut and Africa need are jobs! They need to labour, so that they can then be free and buy things. And people in Asia and South America need unions and labour laws to ensure that they have adequate time to spend their hard earned money, because, you know, we don't want their blood, sweat and tears to be in vain.

There are real social issues beyond my sarcasm. However, my point is that the notion of 'emancipation' of the labouring classes, while considered a challenge to the status quo, relies precisely on the fact that we are consumers. In making labour more fair and equitable, we aren't emancipating ourselves from labour and our consumerism, we're only making these very processes run more smoothly, and, in doing so, we only perpetuate the endless cycle of production and consumption.