The Commodification of Social Justice

The world of social justice and commodities are becoming worryingly intertwined. Mega companies, which have no actual care for the causes of social justice, are consistently selling their image as a representation of “justice.” Companies are even popping up centered around the goal of “furthering” social justice, CHNGE for example. Nike using Colin Kaepernick, almost all companies using LGBTQ+ signification during pride month, companies like Starbucks even becoming associated with social justice. It is purely capitalist ideology. The world of commodities does not care about the world of justice. Companies manipulate the expression of justice for the furthering of profit. Our issue is, people buy them. It becomes popularized. Anti racism becomes pop culture. Like all mass produced goods, if anti-racism becomes packaged, bought, and sold it will lose all meaning and its aura. Anti-racism will no longer be represented by the civil rights movement, or human figures who push for justice, but the commodity itself. Causes for justice become disassociated from anything other than commodity production; for example Nike and the branded image of Colin Kaepernick have co-opted kneeling for the pledge. So long as this exists, we will not escape capitalism. When corporations take hold of social justice, they can control what is and what is not to be a protested issue. If police brutality becomes a thing to be exchanged, the ruling class maintains a profit incentive to maintain a broken policing system. It’s rather obvious companies do not care about people, and as profit is the final end to capitalist exchange, if companies can remain profitable from protesting issues of justice, issues of injustice will always remain. When issues of social justice become profitable and commoditized, the identifier of anti racism becomes a company, and therefore a capitalist MOP. The image one associates movements with would be overlapped by the capitalist class, thus a dependency on the capitalist class to maintain a push for justice is developed. Capitalists don’t push for change because they genuinely want it, they see a growing movement of angry people. This is the danger of capitalism, its ability to morph itself. Capitalism can co opt and fundamentally change any system or act for the consumer’s identity. Look at art and artistic expressions. Instead of taking actual risks in terms of expression, in fear of disrupting consumer society, artists are afraid to take creative risks in favor of reproducing the same art in different formats. Hollywood is a clear example of this in action. Movie companies, most specifically the companies that own just about everything, are incentivized to reboot, spinoff, recreate the same movies and reuse the same concepts time and time again to ensure the maximization from a product. Take the Avengers. Four main movies, with almost every character having multiple stand alones with multiple films, but with the same general plot. It is a reproduction of the same garbage, and irregardless of what the movies get in reviews they will ALWAYS make millions. There is no difference between a citizen in a totalitarian regime and a citizen of consumerism. The process of capitalism is an entirely inescapable subject for the modern day. Every hierarchy is interlooped to every other hierarchy. Again, the movies are a terrific example. Product placement is designed to subconsciously coerce purchasing, millions of toys produced to extend feelings of reality connectedness to the fictionalized movie, then a sequel and the process continues until its been run completely dry. There no longer exists a distinguishing factor between totalitarianism and consumer society. Propaganda is a multibillion dollar industry, we just call it advertisement. Labor camps are a massive industry, they’re just known as sweat shops. We are sold the image of a humanist capitalism, but the two are completely and utterly paradoxical. These are themes explored by Adorno and Horkheimer in “The Dialectics of Enlightenment,” through their concept of the Culture Industry. A usual line we hear from capitalist apologetics is “well in capitalism you are free to consume as you wish,” but one is never free to create as they wish, for one to have that privilege you require self-ownership. Now, the culture industry tries its very best to restrict the ability to freely choose by restricting leisure time into pre agreed contractual agreements and limiting entertainment into productions that will not accept generality. Now how does this all relate back to concepts of social justice. Well from a concept known as Catharsis. By buying commodities associated with social justice, we feel a sense of belongingness and participation when we show the emotions displayed by pop culture. Advertising displays social justice (Airbnb with “We accept” or P&G by “throwing out gender norms) and hence makes us feel like the consumption of those products is partaking in movements for social justice, even if the very genesis of those problems is the system maintained by those same companies. Capitalism takes the very movements we start for social justice, packages and sells them to us, so therefore when we consume those packaged goods we feel the pleasure of partaking in a revolutionary action, even if the action is just maintaining the problems we want to destroy.