A conscience is a consumer commodity

This is a post I have been meaning to write for a while now, and letting the concept settle in my brain.

The concept is that, in today's society, having a conscience is something that is sold to you. I was thinking along these lines before I saw this video on youtube, an animation using Slavoj Zizek's speech on consumer ethics and charity as part of "cultural capitalism": but the ideas that Slavoj Zizek talks about clearly are closely related to the ideas I have been contemplating (especially about 4:20 to 5:10):



I would very much like to shop ethically. Most particularly, I would like to buy meat that is not factory-farmed and I would like to buy "fairly-traded" produce where the workers have been given a decent living wage and a bigger proportion of the price of the produce as it is sold to us, the consumers. In terms of sustainability, I think it is a good idea to avoid where possible the use of pesticides and other toxic chemicals, and I think that there are serious sustainability risks to the use of GM (the threat posed by using monocultures is well-known, and modern farming does not only use GM monocultures). In short, I would like to buy "fair trade" items. I would like to buy free-range items. I would like to buy "organic" items.

NB: Quote marks used for "fair trade" because I do not believe any trade in capitalism can be fair, and used for "organic" because technically, anything animal or vegetable is "organic"; but the term is used to differentiate between certain kinds of human intervention that are perceived to be more "artificial", and those that are perceived to be "natural" - even though any farming involves artificial intervention by humans to encourage growth; an example is Archimedes' Screw, which IIRC was used to raise water to allow artificial irrigation of fields.

Right, where was I? Oh yes - I would like to buy organic, fair trade, free-range and all that "good", "ethical" produce. I would like to shop with my conscience, in other words.

As Slavoj Zizek mentioned, there is a catch to this: it costs more. I notice this a lot, because I am unemployed, and living on benefits: my Jobseekers Allowance is based on "what the law says you need to live", meaning I do not get a lot of spare money left over, and must look to cut any costs I can in order to make ends meet. I do not know what cuts might be foisted upon people in my situation in the future, either.

Going around the local supermarkets, the difference in price between the "artificial" items and the "organic", free-range and/or "fair trade" items is anywhere between 25% and 200% more for the "ethical" stuff, depending on what type of items you're trying to buy. Again, as Slavoj Zizek mentions, there is not really all that big a difference (at least, in the minds of a lot of consumers) between the "good" and the "evil" produce: the reason for the mark-up is that there is something else, extra, that you are buying. Namely, a good conscience. A sense of, "I am at least trying not to be part of the problem." But, obviously, you do not need a good conscience in order to live (although it makes it easier to live with yourself), so that price is not included in "what you need to live".

Of course, giving a bigger proportion of the retail price to the producers of items will mean that the labour costs are higher for the item, which will push the retail price upwards. When you don't factory-farm your animals, you need a lot more land to house them, which pushes up the land costs; there may be extra costs in terms of veterinary bills or feed for your animals, I don't really know. But it pushes up the price of the end product, anyway, when you make free-range instead of factory-farm produce. While organic farming can save costs on pesticides (and on paying Monsanto or whoever for the right to use their patented genetic material), it again takes more land to produce the same amount of crops, which pushes up the price. That's before we get into issues like farming subsidies and so on.

So, free-range, organic, fairly traded: it all costs a bit more. If there were no added benefit to be had from paying a bit more, then there would be no fair trade business; there would be no free-range farming; there would be no organic farming. We would all choose the cheaper option. The only reason why "ethical" goods can be sold at a higher price is because people are willing to pay more in order to have a good conscience. At the same time, this means that the poorest people are priced out of having a conscience. A conscience becomes not just something that you choose whether or not to buy; it becomes a luxury item that you can choose to buy only if you have the spare readies to do so.

In this way, the relative poor in the Western nations such as the UK, become adversaries against their will (that's if they have a will in the matter) of the poor in the developing world, because we are given no choice in the matter but to subsist by exploiting their poverty. And if those exploited people should win better pay and rights, then that will make life harder for people on low incomes here. (See also my post on the poverty-sink theory of capitalism.)



The bottom line is really that capitalism cannot help but make a conscience into a consumer commodity. Something that many people would say should be viewed as a matter of the heart and mind is in fact a matter of economics and privilege.