I don’t see anything wrong with buying “shit you don’t need.” There are lots of things that I don’t need, but which I choose to buy anyway because it makes my life better to have them. E.g., books, music, tasty food, computer equipment, furniture, hot running water, trips to visit my family and friends, etc. etc. etc. Of course, I could choose to abstain from these and limit my spending only to necessities. But why should I?

Of course, there are also many activities that make your life worthwhile that do not require a purchase. To the extent that corporatism cuts people off from these forms of enjoyment, corporate capitalism should be undermined and resisted. But whether or not one chooses to personally abstain from spending on non-necessities does just about nothing to address these issues. The power of corporate capitalism to restrict alternative forms of enjoyment has very little to do with individual decisions about consumption and a lot to do with the monopolistic privileges granted by State power at the points of production and acquisition of land and resources. These are better resisted through labor organizing, targeted strikes and boycotts, resistance to State coercion, etc., rather than doing what “anti-consumerist” groups typically do, i.e. adopting an ascetic lifestyle and chiding, ridiculing or harassing those who aren’t as personally hardcore as you are.

benkilpatrick: Who was radical in the 1930s? … My question implicitly excludes state socialists and “old leftists” from any possibility of being radical.

daysofthegun: Then, pick up “The Spanish Anarchists” by Murray Bookchin, and “Homage To Catalonia” by George Orwell.

The revolution in Catalonia is a good example.

daysofthegun: You might also want to do a google search on anarchism in Korea and Japan in the late 1920’s. Then, read up on the International Socialist League (don’t let the name fool you, they were IWW style syndicalists) in South Africa in the late teens/early twenties.

These are not good examples. Not because they’re not radical, but rather because they are not from the 1930s. (If you are going to include the “late teens / early twenties,” why didn’t you just cite the Wobblies in the United States?)

daysofthegun: Then, take a look at the rise of the union movement in the United States in the late 1930’s/early 1940’s.

This is not a good example, either. The surge in membership and resources for government-recognized unions has been catastrophic for the radical labor movement. The reason that membership surged was because the New Dealers and other governments around the world decided that unionism had become too much of a threat to the status quo, so they provided new “pro-labor” regulatory bodies (such as the NLRB in the United States) that made it easy to form a union and get some government privileges in conflicts with the boss—if you submitted to the new government bureaucratic framework. That meant “growth” of the labor movement at the price of government colonization of it, and (in effect) a massive government subsidy for conservative, top-heavy, boss-dominated unions. That meant a “rise” for the AFL and CIO and catastrophe for (say) the IWW. That’s certainly workplace-based, and it’s certainly organized, but it’s certainly not “anti-authoritarian” and whether it’s really “class-struggle” as “fuck” is dubious at best.

There were certainly radical people and organizations in the world in the 1930s, but frankly the time has to be recognized as a disaster for the radicalism that had been rising in the early part of the 20th century. Because while there were prominent and important exceptions, the dominant trends of the decade for radicals were (1) having their effort co-opted and replaced by New Dealers, fascists, and/or Bolsheviks (thanks to backing from the governments of the imperial powers of the world), and (2) being jailed, shot, and bombed by New Dealers, fascists, and/or Bolsheviks (thanks to backing from the governments of the imperial powers of the world).

The rise of labor unionism during the Roosevelt administration is an excellent example of (1). The end of the revolution in Catalonia is an excellent example of (2).