Beware of false profits: The strange growth of corporate activism

Previously endorsements lay at the margin of a message, an option adjunct to the central product. Now they are fundamental.

In March 2021 Israel faced a new embargo; perhaps Jordan was withholding medical equipment or Turkey banning the state’s broadcasting services. One statement clarified everything:

‘We believe it is inconsistent with our values for Ben & Jerry’s ice cream to be sold in the Occupied Palestinian Territory.’

Luckily for Tel Aviv based fans of ‘Half Baked’ and other flavours of the giant conglomerate, Unilever, which own the company, has yet to boycott the region.

There is of course a long tradition of soft power being used to reprimand rogue states. The Beatles refused to play in Apartheid South Africa and more recently Jethro Tull have pulled out of a series of concerts in the Russian Federation.

Artists however can be seen as emissaries of a culture, witnesses to a shared hope and guardians of a free society. It is very hard to make any of these claims for an ice cream manufacturer.

Leaving aside both the intractable complexity of West Bank politics and the horrifically unhealthy content of Ben & Jerry’s, we can see a new and alarming new chapter in the history of consumerism: Virtue as a lifestyle accessory.

Advertising has been part of industrial capitalism for at least a century and a half and has undergone a sophisticated evolution. initially suppliers targeted people needs rather than their aspirations, now companies try to connect to the values of their customers.

Predictably the reasons for this are varied but also ultimately commercial. Social media has revolutionized product placement, allowing far more dynamic relationships between audience and brand. The line between marketing strategy and Instagram phenomenon is ever more porous.

Complementary to this is the rise of a generation of graduates who often see themselves less of an elite than as an elect committed to the furthering of ideological agendas. That this can be done without interrupting the structures that safeguard their own prosperity is so much the better.

Finally, sophisticated mission statements and expensive advertising campaigns inevitably favour vast multinational enterprises. Only monopolies can afford to set aside millions of dollars to genuflect to social awareness. Smaller and local businesses are driven out by the spate of human resource initiatives and diversity programs demanded by modern corporate culture.

It would be misleading to suggest that commercial ventures, especially in America, have previously been free of didactic purposes - Domino’s Pizza and Chick-Fil-A have both expressed conservative religious leanings (though neither expects their clients to respond to them).     

Previously endorsements lay at the margin of a message, an option adjunct to the central product. Now they are fundamental.

Recently Starbucks became a determined advocate for Mermaids, a charity supporting gender reassignment in children. Accompanying this was a promotional video in which a teen wrestling with their identity finds acceptance at a local Starbucks where they can have the name of their choice written on the coffee cup.

That the path to self-realization lies through a range of approved commodities is a dubious enough proposition but more serious is the notion that a corporation can have responsibility for the life changing decisions of vulnerable young people.

Last year the Tavistock clinic was closed after serious complaints were raised about patients being rushed into irrevocable treatments they later regretted. In 2020 Keira Bell accused it of treating her ‘like an experiment’.

As so often in corporate activism the appearance of compassion masks grubbier realities. In 2019 Starbucks amongst other coffee importers was found to have obtained Brazilian beans harvested using underpaid and coerced workers. Similar complaints have come from Ethiopia where farmers are often paid as little as twenty four US cents a day.

Starbucks is certainly not responsible for global inequalities but given its relationships with these territories and vast power it would seem a better token of benevolence to focus on improving the industries in these countries.

Allegiance to noble sounding abstractions can also work to the detriment of communities and local infrastructures.

Amazon is repeatedly criticized for conditions in its warehouses with concerns about mandatory overtime and safety recurrent. Like many other multinationals it was swift to descry the death of George Floyd, an irony not lost on its many black working class employees like Darryl Richardson in Bessemer Alabama:

‘They don’t care about black lives…they’ve got flyers and pictures of Martin Luther King and black history in the hallways. They’re just trying to make it seem like they do because the majority of the plant is black.’

Not only can progressive PR assure the legitimacy of flawed business models but the profits generated can mean independent shops, rooted in place and history can no longer compete. The hollowing out of distinctive tradition and character continues.

The domination of our cultural landscape by these monolithic organizations coincides with the fall of other forms of representation - religion is receding as a moral force in the West and unions rarely orientate executives to their local concerns.

 We live now in a featureless universalism in which market forces and their accompanying liberal shibboleths are more powerful than nation states or domestic identities.

Writing in her book Private Government, Elizabeth Anderson reminds us of the millenarian origins of free market ideology as a rejection of the power of king, church and guilds and an affirmation of the individual:

‘Eliminate monopoly, and far more people would be able to attain personal independence and become masterless men and women’.

So successful has this project been that we are now at a stage where the absence of authority at the heart of our civilization has become the source of its own repression.

Woke has become the wrong answer to this quandary, it addresses a thirst for a principle that hyper liberalism has lost.

Until we rectify this situation we can expect justice and freedom to remain items in a market place.