The Truth About Capitalism: Teach a man to fool me and I'll be fooled for life.

As everyone already knows; capitalist society relies on you buying things that you don't always need in order to keep money and the system functioning. I don't disagree with this system, it can work well, even before capitalism people would exchange goods with other goods of value, so there has always been some type of exchange within society. The part I disagree with is the wastefulness of buying and selling mass amounts of unnecessary goods which ultimately end up in landfill. The manufacturing of a lot of them has also led to the exploitation of workers, deforestation, pollution of land and rivers, animal testing and many other societal and environmental problems. 

The scary thing is that this has all happened within one generation. My parents' generation, who grew up during the 50s and 60s, never knew of rubbish bins, there was no need for them, everything was reusable, compostable or burnable. Within 50 years we have polluted the world with our consumer rubbish, we've let ourselves be manipulated by the big companies, becoming zombie consumers and questioning nothing. ¨Only when the last tree is cut down, the last fish eaten and the last stream poisoned will we realize that we cannot eat money.¨ - Cree proverb (Native American Tribe). Even though nowadays the reality and knowledge of what we are doing to our world and the workers are becoming more mainstream there are still people burying their heads in the sand or pushing the blame on to the big companies themselves. They think if there really is a problem they wouldn't be allowed to get away with it, it's not their responsibility or they can't do anything about it. But the reality is the big companies don't care as long as they're making money and they will not change until they are forced to change or if they are no longer able to make money selling those products. As a consumer you have more power than you think. For example the wave of sustainable production has become more popular due to the consumers learning about what is really happening with landfill, the plastic pollution in the oceans and horrendous working environments for employees. Big companies haven't suddenly started to care about sustainability, they care that their consumer has, therefore they have started to create more sustainable products to keep up with what the consumer wants. 

There are four branches of capitalism that allow it to succeed: the first is low quality manufactured goods that are cheap but made to break in a couple of years or after a few uses so you have to replace it, entering into a loop of buying again and again. This system has made things affordable so we can buy not only one but many items in some cases, this makes us feel like we're winning in the capitalist society. However, even though they are cheap, the amount you buy (or have to buy because it keeps breaking) over your lifetime isn't cheap, but the brain does not focus on that, only on the price and the amount you're buying today, making it a good deal. For example, a lot of people would never buy a fifty pound sweater over a five pound one because that price is seen as extortionate nowadays in the western world. However, the consumer will end up unconsciously still spending the fifty pounds either on having to replace the cheap sweater many times due to its low quality or they end up buying ten five pound tops because they're so cheap, but never end up wearing them and eventually throw them out. Capitalism propaganda has taught us to stop valuing our items, stop repairing them, just to throw them away and buy a new one instead. We've also become dependent on buying things; we no longer know how to make things, repair things or do things ourselves. These skills have stopped being passed down to the next generation, maybe purposefully or maybe they're just not seen as useful anymore because the capitalist world provides you with the opportunity to pay someone else to do it or just get a new one. They are also associated with not having much money, which is not the image you want in the capitalist world. When we have very little money we value our items only because we don't have the money to replace them, when we have disposable income we value hardly anything, especially if it is cheap because most things are replaceable. Thus proving we don't value things, we value money.

The second is making you think you need that product, it will improve your life and make you happy. The marketing structure of capitalism is to create a problem that the consumers might not be aware of and magnify it, then sell them the solution. The advertisement companies spend an extortionate amount of money on trying to persuade you to buy their items and we fall for it. These adverts stage things very cleverly and subliminally showing you who you'll become with this product or how it will add to your life. The majority of the items we don't need we just get sucked into the glamour or potential of what it would provide for us. We've even created a societal hierarchy with products; they have the power to show how successful a person is if they buy and show off this item and the population separates themselves depending on what products we buy and what others don't buy. When it comes to brands we even put pressure on ourselves and other people to buy a certain type, we do the marketing for the companies. 

Linked to this is the marketing of multiple products, convincing you that everything thing/process needs a different product, leading to you buying multiple products that in reality could be replaced by just one or two products, for example, shower gel can be used for hair, body, face, washing up liquid, cleaning your house, hand wash, bubble bath etc but instead of buying one item we buy seven different ones. Yes they do tweak the formulas a bit so that it would benefit the area you are using that product, but the base is still the same and can be used for multiple purposes. However we don't use something unless we have been told how to use it, never daring to deviate from the instructions. The companies rely on our ignorance to sell us other products to make us buy more and the majority of the time they have very similar, if not the same formula in other products.

Thirdly, with cheap labour. For the company to be able to make a large profit from their sometimes cheap prices (depending on the industry), they need to cut down on overheads, so outsourcing manufacturing and labour costs to third world countries is very common. Companies are exploiting these workers, they get paid a very low wage and the hours are long, they usually have no rights, if they're sick they don't get a wage, if they're injured during the job and can't work they're out of work and if the working conditions are unsafe nothing is done. If they don't want to do it, they are just replaced by someone else as the companies rely on the fact that there aren't really any other opportunities for these workers. Along with cost saving, there's also a high level of pollution during manufacturing, therefore outsourcing manufacturing saves polluting your own country and the hazards, laws and fines they would have to deal with.  Corruption is also a big issue commonly involved in outsourced labour. One of the most corrupt industries today is in the renewable energy sector, mainly the ones that depend on cobalt. This has been named the new blood diamond, due to the savage slavery involved in collecting cobalt for renewable energy, mainly batteries for electric cars, solar panels etc. This is why looking at what suppliers a company uses or what accreditation the suppliers have, such as B-corp, fairtrade etc. to know if it has fair legal working conditions for their workers, is so important. 

And lastly they need to hide all this from the consumer in order to get them to comply without questioning their morals: out of sight, out of mind. When you throw that item in the bin that's headed for landfill you have to realise that there is no ¨away¨, throwing away your rubbish just makes it disappear from your sight. ¨Landfill¨ has become a general word that people say without realising what the reality of landfill is, they trust that the people in charge are dealing with it appropriately. Landfill sites are purposefully not put near a population, the sight is shocking, they are mountains of rubbish that emit horrendous smells into the air and toxins escape into the land and waterways, it's a horrible sight. If people witnessed this they would think twice before sending things to landfill and would lose all their trust in the system. 

So what´s the way out? I believe there is sustainable capitalism, this was how it was from the industrial revolution until the 1960s. The truth we need to face is that we can't keep consuming and wasting things at the rate we are, we need to retrace our steps. We need to learn to value items again, having a couple of products that we truly need that can be used again and again, and repairing them when they break. I think this regression would benefit the consumer along with the planet, making us realise the importance of other things in life that capitalism has blinded us from. There is more than possessions and money, we need to remember the real value of things and get away from our unhealthy impulses, superiority that money brings and detachment to real life.

This is why at Jacur Cosmetics we only sell things that we feel will benefit you, if it has a multiple purpose we will tell you. We make sure that our products are of high quality, they are handmade in small batches and we only work with suppliers that provide good working conditions and are accredited by companies such as B-corp, to verify this. Lastly all of our containers are recyclable and we are working towards zero waste.