Here’s a tiny fact. Burberry recently had $35 million of unsold clothes — and so it burned them. Just set them alight. If you think there’s something weird, infuriating, and perverse in that, you’re not wrong. It contains in it the whole story of how predatory capitalism operates — and why it’s failed a system to organize and shape human life.
Why did Burberry burn the very goods that people had worked so hard to imagine, create, fabricate, and try to sell? The cotton and silk and wool in them? It’s a way to create artificial scarcity. Burberry needs to keep its prices high — or at least it thinks it does — because people are playing a game of status competition by buying its stuff. “Oh, that dirty poor person is wearing my Burberry scarf!! Now it’s worthless to me!” The only way in which that can be true is if what you’re really buying isn’t the scarf, but exclusion, social status, primacy, and dominance.
(It was just a few days ago that Economics Professor from the University of Queensland, John Quiggin, said climate change is primarily an economic problem and this story reinforces that argument - Robert McLean)
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