Black Friday Is More Political Than Ever

Corporations and retail stores aren’t the only ones capitalizing on the day after Thanksgiving, otherwise known as Black Friday. The American consumerist holiday has been co-opted this year by anti-consumerists, environmentalists, fair labor activists, and even folks protesting Israel’s policies towards Palestine, among others. The first official Christmas shopping day is more political than ever.

Since 1992, anti-consumerists have protested Black Friday with “Buy Nothing Day,” a day where you stay at home and buy, well, nothing. The AdBusters page on this anti-holiday protest suggests if you don’t shop on Black Friday, you “just might have an unexpected, emancipatory epiphany,” or go through a “personal transformation.” Protesters in recent years have taken to walking through malls and streets in zombie get-up, no doubt to point out how we’re all mindless consumerists, or making long conga lines in Walmart with empty shopping carts. If you don’t need it, don’t buy it, is more or less their message.

Forget shopping, what about the environment? In a recent op-ed on Al Jazeera, Boston College Professor Juliet B. Schor asks readers to use the day to think about climate change and how the one percent (Americans) can alter their lifestyles to cut back on emissions, including driving to stores to shop. Schor advocates for a “Holidays 2013: Extreme Makeover edition,” and hopes readers will follow her example by going vegan, driving less, and giving gifts of “survival” which include “investments in clean energy cooperatives, carbon-sequestering farming methods and forest preservation projects that protect poor people's livelihoods,” as well as “sponsoring climate activists,” and donating to environmental groups like 350.org and the Sierra Club. Buying nothing on Black Friday will not make enough of an impact, writes Schor—not if we want to cut emissions by 70 percent.

Over at Walmart, the “cathedral of capitalism” and “America’s biggest welfare queen,”  workers are more concerned about their own immediate welfare and are out protesting their low wages, dangerous working conditions and inadequate hours. They don’t have the means to worry about the environment or going vegan, or indeed shopping for things they don’t need, because they simply don’t make enough money to do so. According to the Organization United for Respect at Walmart (OURWalmart) protest organizers, comprised of Walmart employees, as many as 825,000 workers earn less than $25,000 a year and rely on public assistance programs like food stamps to make ends meet. Wages are so low, Walmart actually held a food drive for its own poverty-stricken employees earlier this month. In addition, a study done by the US House Committee on Education and the Workforce determined each Walmart store costs American taxpayers anywhere from $904,542 to $1,744,590 a year in public benefits.

OURWalmart’s Black Friday protest, now in its second year, plans to hit more than 1,500 stores with activists, leading one judge to bar Walmart protesters in Maryland because it hurts the company’s “reputation, sales, and shopping experience.” Walmart has struck back against the protesters the past year, as Allison Kilkenny points out at The Nation, by illegally disciplining “more than 80 workers, including firing 20 worker-leaders, and more than 100 Unfair Labor Practice charges have been filed with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) against the company.” All this disciplining by Walmart has only made the movement stronger, like it often does. According to aTopsy search, #walmartstrikers has been tweeted more than 9,000 times in the last 24 hours, and the cause has been picked up by the Internet hacktivist collective Anonymous.

Speaking of Anonymous, besides tweeting in solidarity with Walmart strikers and living wage activists, the digital collective is also using Black Friday to protest Israel’s policies towards Palestine, long likened to an apartheid. In keeping with Black Friday’s shopping tradition, Anonymous is asking folks to protest Israel by buying gifts from Palestine this holiday season, in order to boost the local economy and support businesses, farmers and artisans in the region. Gift suggestions include olive oil, hand woven rugs and purses.

Black Friday has become a political lightning rod for causes that in some ways now contradict each other. If you buy a Palestinian good to boost their economy, will anti-consumerists yell at you for not needing to buy that, because your loved one doesn’t really need some fancy olive oil? Why don’t you make your own olive oil? What about the emissions you create by shipping the Palestinian good to you? Is the good created by supporting an impoverished farmer offset by the harm done to the planet? How are Walmart employees affected by this? It’s all become so very confusing.

Even NASA has gotten into the Black Friday fervor, co-opting the PR fray by launching #BlackHoleFriday, an educational campaign for the twitterati featuring facts and pictures about black holes. Black Friday will never again be just about shopping and laughing at YouTube footage of Walmart fights and shoppers getting trampled. And maybe that’s a good thing.