No Ethical Advertising Under Capitalism

M.S.
M.S.
Sep 4, 2018 · 6 min read

You may have seen the recent ad that Nike released, using Colin Kaepernick’s face, and the phrase “Believe in something. Even if it means sacrificing everything.” I’m not going to link to the ad, because Nike doesn’t need my help generating views. It’s easy enough to find, and the ad itself isn’t really the crux of the biscuit of this piece.

Many excellent people I know draw different and conflicting conclusions from this piece of advertising. Some hate it, some like it. Most feel good that Kaep is getting paid, and that he is able to make use of another platform to promote his message (which is a good message, in my opinion).

I think it’s a fairly remarkable piece of advertising. Which is a sentence I hate writing, because I am, in most cases, a member of the Bill Hicks School of Thought on Advertising. I just wrote a little record review in another place about the song Television, by Idles, which is in part an indictment of how marketing pushes us to hate ourselves, and plays on our insecurities.

But the ad is fascinating. The message itself is more or less the same ol’ Nike: do the hard thing, strive for greatness, push yourself past what you thought you could do, Just Do It. The message to believe in something and sacrifice for it is so universal that even a Nazi could get behind it. But they took that very universal message, and they placed it over the face of a deeply divisive figure, one who has been engaged in an extended critique of our society, and who has pretty much lost their career because of that. They’ve used Kaep’s face to effectively transform their universal marketing pablum into something of a moral statement. With no obvious economic benefit. They already have enormous market penetration, and are the official manufacturer of many NFL goods. It’s not as if producing this ad will change their standing as global manufacturer of sporting wear. In fact, many people immediately took to Twitter in response to say that they would never buy another Nike product. Because America is an absurd, stupid place at the moment.

But the larger debate around this within some portions of my social circles is how we should feel about it. Nike took a side in a moral argument, seeming to come down on the side of Black Lives Matter and against the Man-Child in Chief, who has been relentlessly critical of the NFL for allowing any kind of on-field protest. And again, they did so for no obvious economic benefit.

Some people like the ad. Some people hate it, because they hate BLM and Kaep, or his “disrespectful protest”. Some people like that he’s getting paid and that Nike is spreading his message, but feel deeply conflicted, because they know that Nike, as a corporate entity, aren’t the “good guys”. And it’s true. They aren’t. I don’t know if it even makes sense to talk about a company on the scale of Nike in those terms.

Multinational corporations are enormous, amoral machines. They operate largely outside of the control of individual actors inside them. Occasionally, as in this case, small groups of (possibly) conscientious employees can nudge the machine to do something socially useful that isn’t directly related to the machine’s inputs or outputs. Other times, the machine is directed to do awful things, or continues to do them out of sheer inertia. It’s hardly news that Nike’s labor record isn’t exactly stellar.

Part of the discussion around this has of course involved the invocation of “No Ethical Consumption Under Capitalism”. And it has made me realize that I am pretty tired of that phrase. Not because it’s wrong. It’s accurate enough. Our global society is based on a system of economic exploitation and grotesquely destructive resource extraction, and we’ve done enormous harm to the ecosystems that support us. There’s a good chance that our unconstrained Global Capitalist Economy will result in the demise of a large portion of humanity, not to mention the eradication of a majority of Earth’s biodiversity above the level of microbes.

I think my problem with the phrase is that it suggests there’s some recent, or within-reach alternative where a thing called “ethical consumption” is possible. Presumably, in such a system no one is exploited, everyone is fairly compensated, the resource extraction needed to produce a given good is not ecologically problematic, and no one is compelled by the circumstances of their life to perform labor they’d rather not do. Such a system is, in a word, Utopian.

I am not a utopian. To me, invoking this unspoken alternative to Capitalism (of which I am not a great fan) is a sort of State of Nature argument. Wikipedia gives the summary of the State of Nature as the following: …a concept used in moral and political philosophy, religion, social contract theories and international law to denote the hypothetical conditions of what the lives of people might have been like before societies came into existence. To me the idea of a humanity without society is in itself fairly foolish, as many philosophers have argued. And of course the State of Nature can be employed to support an argument for any social arrangement one desires, simply by changing one’s assumption set about human nature.

The “No Ethical Consumption” argument seems to do precisely this. It suggests that the problem is that Capitalism makes people be bastards to each other. And to be fair, Capitalism does in fact often incentivize people to be total bastards to each other. Denying that is also foolish. But what evidence do we have of a system where something like “ethical consumption” is possible? What evidence is there that humans aren’t just kind of bastardy, especially once society gets big enough that you don’t personally know everyone directly? History shows no examples that I am aware of. There don’t appear to be any organized, large scale societies that are relatively egalitarian, don’t contain forced labor, have minimal ecological impact, or simply produced goods without impacting others.

One could argue that small, relatively self-contained, subsistence societies might meet something like this criteria. They are required by circumstances to be more or less sustainable (though they would likely still radically alter non-human systems to their benefit, which may or may not be ethical, depending on how one views the world). The distribution of wealth in them is often reasonably flat. People without resources often get by on communal goodwill and by doing what they can for their neighbors, and aren’t exactly an exploited class. But everyone is more or less stuck in their role, and compelled to work to stay alive. And such societies tend not to be big on deviating from social norms, free expression, free speech, etc. One might be able to find a way of beneficially employing their unique talents for the benefit of the community, or simply ways of expressing them. But also one might not.

All of which is to say that the “No Ethical Consumption” argument is a true, but not useful, criticism of how our society is structured. From my perspective, it doesn’t actually do much good to invoke this argument. It seems at most to be a kind of apology, a means of self-flagellating, and a half-hearted excuse for participating in the global economy. To look at these recent Nike ads with Colin Kaepernick and Serena Williams and think “I agree with these messages, and I am glad Nike is choosing to promote a message of equality and non-discrimination, because they don’t have to do so… but also feeling good about such a company doing this makes me feel bad, because there’s nothing that can’t be made into marketing and there’s no ethical consumption under capitalism” is understandable to me, to a certain extent.

But it also feels defeatist, and like yearning for a state of purity and goodness that — to me — history suggests is entirely hypothetical. My feeling is that we should take the win, recognize that doing this doesn’t absolve Nike of anything bad that it’s ever done, and continue doing whatever work we can do to improve our society without depending on them as a partner.

But I’m a somewhat odd man, with an unusual perspective shaped by being an ecological scientist, sponging up as much human history and anthropology as I can on the side, and trying to think on much longer time scales, rather than on those that drive normal life for most people. So, your mileage may vary, and my views are not inherently more valid than yours.

M.S.

Written by

M.S.

I'm an environmental scientist by training and employment. I’m also an artist, and practitioner of Chinese martial arts. I appear to have opinions.

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