Removing the Veil?

Abstract

For Marx, commodity fetishism is the tendency of people to see the product of their labor in terms of relationships between things, rather than social relationships between people. In other words, people viewthe commodity only in terms of the characteristics of the final product while the process through which it was created remains obscured and, therefore, unconsidered. This has crucial implications for our collective ability to see and address the ongoing processes of social and environmental destruction under capitalism. This article examines one effort to lift the veil obscuring the relations and processes of commodity production. Fair trade attempts to make visible the social and environmental relations of production and exchange that lie behind the commodity. This assists producers in making a shift in the qualitative nature of production, particularly in terms of its impacts on producers and on the environment. The purpose of this article is to determine the extent to which fair trade can address the problem of commodity fetishism and to identify the barriers it encounters in attempting to do so.

Varieties of Alterity: Alternative Food Networks in the UK, Italy and China

“…Intriguingly, this sense of connection is both sensory and ecological («you've got to be able to walk around and see it growing») as well as temporal (the need to «cut out the un-seasonality that goes on»). For this participant, this emphasis on creating new food materialities opened up questions that the conventional food system would tend to hide behind the "veil" of commodity fetishism, namely the food processing chain (Hudson and Hudson, 2003).…”

The discourses of marketing and development: towards ‘critical transformative marketing research’

“…Accepting this, the idea that marketing or consumer research scholars should act as 'missionaries' for the marketing concept (Clark & Flaherty, 2003) or view themselves as modern day social engineers (Czinkota & Ronkainen, 2003;Wansink, 2012) is something we should seriously question. From our perspective, missionary zeal can make us apologists for a status quo that is no longer justifiable (Hudson & Hudson, 2003;Kilbourne et al, 1997) given the inequitable distribution of the benefits from globalisation and the on-going use of slavery, forced labour and violence (e.g. Bales, 2000;Banerjee & Linstead, 2001) to sustain our standard of living (Banerjee, 2003).…”

The Structural Contradictions and Constraints on Corporate Social Responsibility: Challenges for Corporate Social Irresponsibility

“…This is frequently expressed as a rather mechanistic concern that business operates within the law (Carroll 1979b); which is, itself the socially constructed codification of the social relations of capitalism. In an age of transnational production this has led to an extended concern, driven in part by consumer and shareholder activism, that the standards expected in one part of a business operation are upheld throughout, regardless of whether formal legal obligations assert this (Hudson and Hudson 2003;Hale 2008). Others draw attention to the importance of business producing the goods and services that society wants and sustaining this through profits (Carroll 1979a;Matten and Moon 2008), with still others suggesting that the prospect for diluting this makes CSR a "fundamentally subversive doctrine" (Friedman 1970).…”

“…Acting first to defend themselves from direct criticism, or the potential for it, several high profile MNCs adopted labour codes of conduct and other statements of CSR. Firms quickly realized that the value embedded in brand fetishism could be exploited by adopting and promoting their CSR credentials and therefore CSR became a part of the competitive strategies of an increasing number of corporations (Hudson and Hudson 2003;Yu 2008;Taylor 2011). …”