Fairtrade Promotes Consumerism by Alleviating Guilt

I once met a charming young American lady in Vietnam. Her family was originally Vietnamese and had emigrated to California before she was born; and they had prospered there, building a booming business in office furniture. Before joining Law School, she decided to take a break and to visit her parents’ homeland. She took the opportunity to donate her time as an English schoolteacher as she felt giving back was the only fair thing to do, because she had received so much in her childhood, and that the kids in Vietnam had received nothing. She felt it was her duty because while she had received a good education and tons of opportunities, most of the kids she taught would never even be able to purchase a plane ticket. She genuinely felt sorry and indebted to them.

As simply a passing tourist, my experience from seeing kids in the developing world (Vietnam, Mexico, Cambodia) felt quite different. I saw them laugh and run, and skip school and sell junk artefacts and postcards to tourists. I saw them play with dirt and sticks and do flips when they jumped in the water. I compared them to western kids, craving for toys and sugar and moaning in restaurants; and I knew which of those kids I’d rather be.

Part of the reason we feel so guilty when thinking about the developing world is the media’s continuous banter on its tragedy: hunger, illiteracy, dictatorships, wars, famine, disease, water shortage, dysentery, destruction of the habitat, slavery, prostitution, etc, etc. This appears to be the only angle from which every story about the developing world is being told. That’s to be expected because firstly, misery sells papers and secondly it makes advertisers happy when you promote an ideology where economic development is a moral imperative.

It’s common to project one’s own desires and ambitions on to others and to think: “Poor Vietnamese kid can’t even go to school every day. Poor African family can’t afford an automobile. Poor Arabic woman married into polygamy in order to have a roof over her head.” But on the flip side, mandatory schools, highway-covered landscapes and monogamy are not universal desires. (Our obsession with sending every kid to schools reminds me of a comic where one mother asking another “Don’t you just let your kid go around and do nothing?” and the other to answer: “I couldn’t find a class for it.”)

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t subscribe to a philosophy of total tolerance: I don’t believe that any culture shall be defended unconditionally, even in the name of pluralism or diversity. Some cultures definitely need to be fought and eradicated. I understand why the UN wants to promote education for all children, why we wish for better working conditions in poor countries, why we should support research to end epidemic diseases, and why militants should stand up against oppressive regimes and dogmas.

On the other hand, I don’t approve of the contradictions in our policies. You cannot on one hand wish for a world where we live in harmony with nature, a world without pollution and where men work just enough to sustain themselves and at the same time think that you can attain that world by buying more crap. Today, we are concurrently promoting a return to a more sedentary “natural” lifestyle and pushing for high-pace economic growth.

Surprisingly, that’s the entire premise of the now famous label “Fairtrade”. That label, which is now being slapped on everything from high-speed trains to chocolate bars, indicates to the consumer in no ambiguous terms that buying this [INSERT STUFF] will make the world better. This is pure genius on the psychological level, but I trust consumers will wise up soon and realize that there is no zero-impact-consumerism. Capitalism and consumerism don’t stop with Fairtrade, instead that label is a vehicule for them; if you don’t want Vietnam to become a factory for cheap crap, the best is still to stop buying it.
Here’s another “sustainable spinoff” I saw on the back on a London cab seat. It reads:

THE (RED)TM IDEA.
(RED) is not a charity.
(RED) is not a cause.
(RED) is not a theory.
(RED) is an ingenious idea that unites our incredible collective power as consumers with our innate urge to help others.
(RED) is where virtue meets desire.
Each time you buy a (RED) product or service, at no extra cost to you, the company who makes that product will give up to fifty percent of its profit to buy and distribute life-saving antiretroviral medicine to fight AIDS in Africa. Every pound goes straight in to Africa. Straight to the people who need it. Straight to keeping them alive so that they can go on taking care of their families and contribute socially and economically to their communities.
(RED) is an answer to an emergency. Buy (RED) SAVE LIVES.
It’s as simple as that.
(RED). Desire and virtue. Together at last.

Absolutely brilliant. Complete genius. Desire and virtue…. love it. RED even manages to get the buy-in from the anti-charity, anti-preachy and anti-economist consumers. Buy shit and save lives? It’s a no-brainer! Let’s sign up for RED labelled credit cards, drive our RED labelled electric car to the store, buy some RED labelled corned beef and organize a house party to save Africa…. What’s there to think about?

Unfortunately, there’s a lot. Whether your corned beef is RED labelled or not, its production will consume considerably more potable water than eating vegetables and nuts for instance. Electric cars cost double the price of regular cars because it takes double the resources to manufacture them. That doesn’t faze advertisers, as a recent TV commercial from Volkswagen illustrates: “You are worried about nature? What if your first citizen act was to buy a car?” So… We buy cars and that saves the planet?

Every purchased item, whether it has a nice label on it or not, has a considerable impact on the world we live in. When you purchase RED or Fairtrade products, you indirectly impose your western view on how businesses should be run and you also help to finance a marketing campaign alleviating the consumers’ guilt. Instead of buying “fair junk”, shouldn’t we simply buy less junk? Instead of taking Prozac, shouldn’t we take a break from work?

As a capitalist and an entrepreneur myself, I don’t want to go back to the Stone Age, and do not subscribe to the absolute anti-growth solution, but I wouldn’t mind living in a world where the economy was in recession for a few years if it means we spend less on junk and more on the ideas/aestheticism/knowledge. This begins by defining our values, such as Mr. Williams Morris does in the abstract below taken from a speech he gave in 1884. Mr. Morris was an English textile designer, a writer, and a socialist and he wanted to revolt against a society that was being absorbed by useless toil instead of useful work. After ranting against the ruling class, and the middle class, he describes the producing class in those terms:

Next there is a mass of people employed in making all those articles of folly and luxury, the demand for which is the outcome of the existence of the rich non-producing classes; things which people leading a manly and uncorrupted life would not ask for or dream of. These things, whoever may gainsay me, I will for ever refuse to call wealth: they are not wealth, but waste. Wealth is what Nature gives us and what a reasonable can make out of the gifts of Nature for his reasonable use. The sunlight, the fresh air, the unspoiled face of the earth, food, raiment and housing necessary and decent; the storing up of knowledge of all kinds, and the power of disseminating it; it means of free communication between man and man; works of art, the beauty which man creates when he is most of a man, most aspiring and thoughtful – all things which serve the pleasure of people, free, manly, and uncorrupted. This is wealth. Not can I think of anything worth having which does not come under one or other of these heads. But think, I beseech you, of the product of England, the workshop of the world, and will you not be bewildered, as I am, at the thought of the mass of things which no sane man could desire, but which our useless toil makes – and sells?

Now further there is even a sadder industry yet, which is forced on many, very many, of our workers – the making of wares which are necessary to them and their brethren, because they are an inferior class. For is many men live without producing, nay, must live lives so empty and foolish that they force a great part of their workers to produce wares which no one needs, not even the rich, it follows that most men must be poor. And living as they do on wages from those whom they support, cannot get for their use the goods which men naturally desire, but must put up with miserable makeshifts for them, with coarse food that does not nourish, with rotten raiment which does not shelter, with wretched houses which may well make a town-dweller in civilization look back with regret to the tent of the nomad tribe, or the cave of the prehistoric savage.

(…)

For understand once for all that the ‘manufacturer’ aims primarily at producing, by all means of the labour he has stolen from others, not goods but profits, that is, the ‘wealth’ that is produced over and above the livelihood of his workmen, and the wear and tear of his machinery. Whether that ‘wealth’ us real or sham matters nothing to him. If it sells and yields him a ‘profit’ it is all right. I have said that, owing to there being rich people who have more money than they can spend reasonably, and that who therefore buy sham wealth, there is waste on that side; and also that, owing to there being poor people who cannot afford to buy things which are worth making, there is waste on that side.

Should Mr. William Morris be alive today, what would he think of what the world has become? A world where the concept of wealth is still corrupted, where a booming GDP per capita is considered an absolute success, a world where a surge in obesity and heart conditions is compensated if there’s a Fairtrade sticker on your pot of Nutella/Starbucks/Bio Spiruline Phyco+?