How do you engineer a bland, depoliticized world, a consensus built around consumption and endless growth, a dream world of materialism and debt and atomization, in which all relations can be prefixed with a dollar sign, in which we cease to fight for change? Delegate your powers to companies whose profits depend on this model.
Power is shifting to places in which citizens have no voice or vote. National policies are forged by special advisers and spin doctors, by panels and advisory committees stuffed with lobbyists. The self-hating state withdraws its own authority to regulate and direct. Simultaneously, the democratic vacuum at the heart of global governance is being filled, without anything resembling consent, by international bureaucrats and corporate executives. The non-governmental organizations (NGOs) permitted — often as an afterthought — to join them intelligibly represent neither civil society nor electorates. (And please forget that guff about consumer democracy or shareholder democracy: In both cases some people have more votes than others and those with the most votes are the least inclined to press for change.)
The giant consumer goods company Unilever, with which I clashed over the issue of palm oil, symbolizes these shifting relationships. I can think of no entity that has done more to blur the lines between the role of the private sector and the role of the public sector. If you blotted out its name while reading its Web pages, you could mistake it for an agency of the UN.
Illustration: June Hsu
It seems to have representation almost everywhere. Its people inhabit the British government’s Ecosystem Markets Task Force and Scientific Advisory Committee on Nutrition, the Internaiontal Fund for Agricultural Development, the G8’s New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition, the World Food Program, the Global Green Growth Forum, the UN’s Scaling Up Nutrition program, its Sustainable Development Solutions Network, Global Compact and the UN High Level Panel on global development.
Sometimes Unilever uses this power well. Its efforts to reduce its own use of energy and water and its production of waste, and to project these changes beyond its own walls, look credible and impressive. Sometimes its initiatives look like self-serving bullshit.
Its “Dove self-esteem project,” for instance, claims to be “helping millions of young people to improve their self-esteem through educational programs.” One of its educational videos maintains that beauty “couldn’t be more critical to your happiness,” which is surely the belief that trashes young people’s self-esteem in the first place. However, you can recover it by plastering yourself with Dove-branded gloop: Unilever reports that 82 percent of women in Canada who are aware of its project “would be more likely to purchase Dove.”
Sometimes it seems to play both ends of the game. For instance, it says it is reducing the amount of salt, fat and sugar in its processed foods. However, it also hosted and chaired, before the UK’s last general election, the Conservative party’s public health commission, which was seen by health campaigners as an excuse for avoiding effective action on obesity, poor diets and alcohol abuse. This body helped to purge British government policy of such threats as further advertising restrictions and the compulsory traffic-light labeling of sugar, salt and fat levels in foods.
The commission then produced a “responsibility deal” between the British government and business, on the board of which Unilever still sits.
Under this deal, the usual relationship between lobbyists and government is reversed. The corporations draft British policy, which is then sent to civil servants for comment. Regulation is replaced by voluntarism. Unilever has been named as one of the companies that refused to sign the deal’s voluntary pledge on calorie reduction.
This is not to suggest that everything these panels and alliances and boards and forums propose is damaging. However, as development writer Lou Pingeot points out, their analysis of the world’s problems is partial and self-serving, casting corporations as the saviors of the world’s people, but never mentioning their role in causing many of the problems (such as financial crisis, land-grabbing, tax loss, obesity, malnutrition, climate change, habitat destruction, poverty, insecurity) they claim to address. Most of their proposed solutions either require passivity from governments (poverty will be solved by wealth trickling down through a growing economy) or the creation of a more friendly environment for business.
At their best, these corporate-dominated panels are mostly useless, essentially preening sessions in which chief executives exercise messiah complexes.
At their worst, they are a means by which global companies reshape politics in their own interests, universalizing — in the name of conquering want and exploitation — their exploitative business practices.
Almost every political agent — including some of the NGOs that once opposed them — is in danger of being loved to death by these companies. In February, the London-based Guardian signed a seven-figure deal with Unilever, which, the publisher claimed, is “centered on the shared values of sustainable living and open storytelling.”
The deal launched an initiative called Guardian Labs, which will help brands find “more engaging ways to tell their story.” The Guardian points out that it applies guidelines to such sponsorship deals to ensure editorial independence.
I recognize and regret the fact that all newspapers depend on corporate money (advertising and sponsorship probably account, in most cases, for about 70 percent of their income). However, this looks like another step down the primrose path.
As the environmental campaigner Peter Gerhardt puts it, companies like Unilever “try to stakeholderize every conflict.” By this, I think, he means that they embrace their critics, involving them in a dialogue that is open in the sense that a lobster pot is open, breaking down critical distance and identity until no one knows who they are any more.
Yes, it is preferable that companies behave more like Unilever rather than like Goldman Sachs, Cargill or Exxon, in that Unilever seems to have a keen sense of what a responsible company should do, even if it does not always do it.
However, it would be better still if governments and global bodies stopped delegating their powers to corporations. They do not represent citizens and they have no right to run our lives.
With the Year of the Snake reaching its conclusion on Monday next week, now is an opportune moment to reflect on the past year — a year marked by institutional strain and national resilience. For Taiwan, the Year of the Snake was a composite of political friction, economic momentum, social unease and strategic consolidation. In the political sphere, it was defined less by legislative productivity and more by partisan confrontation. The mass recall movement sought to remove 31 Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) legislators following the passage of controversial bills that expanded legislative powers and imposed sweeping budget cuts. While the effort
There is a story in India about a boy called Prahlad who was an ardent worshipper of Lord Narayana, whom his father considered an enemy. His son’s devotion vexed the father to the extent that he asked his sister, Holika, who could not be burned by fire, to sit with the boy in her lap and burn him to death. Prahlad knew about this evil plan, but sat in his aunt’s lap anyway. His faith won, as he remained unscathed by the fire, while his aunt was devoured by the flames. In some small way, Prahlad reminds me of Taiwan
When Hong Kong’s High Court sentenced newspaper owner Jimmy Lai (黎智英) to 20 years in prison this week, officials declared that his “heinous crimes” had long poisoned society and that his punishment represented justice restored. In their telling, Lai is the mastermind of Hong Kong’s unrest — the architect of a vast conspiracy that manipulated an otherwise contented population into defiance. They imply that removing him would lead to the return of stability. It is a politically convenient narrative — and a profoundly false one. Lai did not radicalize Hong Kong. He belonged to the same generation that fled from the Chinese
President William Lai (賴清德) on Sunday congratulated Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi and her Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) on their historic landslide victory in Japan’s general election. The LDP secured the largest single-party majority in post-World War II Japan, winning 316 seats. The win is expected to strengthen ties with Japan’s allies and potentially deter Chinese aggression in the region. American Institute in Taiwan Director Raymond Greene on Monday said that under Takaichi’s leadership, he anticipates deeper coordination among the US, Japan and Taiwan to promote regional stability and prosperity. US President Donald Trump has also shown his strong support for Takaichi,
RSS