As we near the October 22 public hearing for the Small Business Jobs Survival Act, I want to think critically about the use of the phrase "Shop Local."
First, let me be clear, I am not critiquing the act of shopping locally, which is important and necessary. I am critiquing the use of the injunction "Shop Local" by city leaders, which I believe is sometimes weaponized against the real possibility of systemic change to help save small, local businesses in the city.
It is, quite simply, a way to deflect blame from the system and onto the individual, stopping progressive change in its tracks.
I was struck this summer by the appearance of this deflection at a town hall meeting with Mayor de Blasio and City Council Member Helen Rosenthal on the Upper West Side.
When an audience member asked
what can be done to stop New York's mom and pops from vanishing, the mayor said that, while he supports a vacancy tax to stop landlords from leaving storefronts empty,
"We don't have...good tools to protect small business in a free-market system... But there's a citizen piece of this, too, and I don't mean to minimize the problem, but people need to go to those stores and patronize those stores."
To this, the audience member responded off mic, possibly saying, "They do," to which the mayor replied, "They do and they don't. My experience is...a lot of people who value those stores could also be part of the solution by going to them more often."
Helen Rosenthal concluded,
"Mr. Mayor, I'm with you. We all need to step up and shop local. It's very frustrating."
Again, shopping local is necessary, we all can do it more, but it won't solve the main problem. And when we hear it in response to the question "what can be done?" we are often in the grip of neoliberal ideology. Sometimes, the people saying it don't even know they're part of that ideology. For decades, it has been the air we breathe. We have all become, to some extent, brainwashed by it.
Many of us say to each other, "If only we shopped there more often." On this blog, commenters inevitably accuse, "When was the last time you shopped there?" As if we are the main problem and not the landlords who quadruple the rent or refuse a new lease.
Neoliberalism, in short, is a free-market capitalist ideology and approach to governance that uses the policies of privatization, deregulation, and fiscal austerity, redistributing wealth and other resources from the lower, working, and middle classes to the wealthy.
It's not new and it's not liberal.
It began in the U.S. in the late 1970s, kicked off as a response to New York City's fiscal crisis, and went global under Ronald Reagan (trickle-down economics) and Margaret Thatcher.
Whenever you hear "it's the free market," you're hearing the voice of neoliberalism. It is the reason for the 1% and why we have such massive income inequality.
It is also the way New York City has been governed since about 1979. It's why we have gentrification as public policy, with tax breaks and incentives going to big real-estate developers and corporations, private parks, etc., while our public resources suffer. In this system, celebrated by former Mayor Bloomberg,
the city is run like a corporation and its citizens are consumers.
This brings us to the "
neoliberal individual."
In the neoliberal worldview, there's a philosophical shift from state responsibility to individual responsibility. Now, there's nothing wrong with individuals being responsible for each other and their own actions. But when we're talking on the level of systems of power and governance, it's another thing altogether.
From the point of view of the neoliberal individual, if climate change is causing death and destruction, well, it's your fault for not recycling plastic bags, and don't blame the deregulation of polluting industries (
read this). If you're a woman and you're sexually harassed in the workplace, it's your fault for not reporting it, and don't look to the system of patriarchy. And
if small businesses are shuttering by the dozens, it's your fault, New Yorker, for not shopping local enough, and don't dare blame the big real estate machine that is supported by our neoliberal state and city government.
In short, the problem lies with you, the individual. If we hear this enough, we might become convinced that the problems of society are all our fault. If only we were better. If only we tried harder.
That idea is toxic enough, but it goes further.
If the problem lies with individuals then there's no point in trying to change the system. The system is blameless! Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.
This is a clever way to make us feel guilty and hopeless, and thus to render us passive. It makes us squander our power as citizens and give up on democracy. Don't fall for it.
In so many cases, small businesses are not closing because we didn't shop enough. In over a decade of writing this blog, I have walked the streets of this city talking with countless small business people. Over and over, they have told me that the number one force shutting them down is a landlord who demands a high rent increase or who refuses to renew a lease. Thriving, beloved, successful businesses that were staples of their communities for 20, 40, 80 years are pushed out by rents that double, triple, quadruple, and more.
No amount of "shop local" is going to fix that.
We need systemic change from the top. The first step?
Pass the Small Business Jobs Survival Act. It's getting a public hearing on October 22. So act like a citizen. Show up and speak your mind.
Click here for a list of easy, quick things you can do to tell the City Council you want this bill.
