In October 2007, Clorox Company, the multi-billion dollar manufacturer of plastic bags, bathroom cleaners and laundry bleach, announced that it was acquiring natural cosmetics maker, Burt’s Bees for $925 million.
Of course, Burt’s Bees is no longer the tiny honey and beeswax candle business that Burt Shavitz and Roxanne Quimby founded in Maine in 1984. In fact, since 1993, the bearded Burt has not even owned the business that markets his face and his bees. More to the point, in 2004, 80% of Burt’s Bees was acquired by an investment group and by 2006 the company had grown into a professionally managed $250 million business selling lipstick, toothpaste and hand cream in grocery store chains throughout the United States and around the world. Thus, like the Cheshire Cat’s smile, the brand will survive the Clorox acquisition even though the small cottage industry Burt’s once was will have disappeared like so many honey bee colonies around the world.
I cannot really condemn Burt’s Bees for selling out. For $925 million I, too, might consider letting Clorox use my name to market Zbig-branded cosmetics. On second thought, make that 925 million euros, because if, Gisele Bündchen, one of the world’s best known fashion models, refuses any longer to be compensated in devalued US dollars, I see no reason why classy products like Zbig’s Zlipschtik should be valued for anything less.
* * *
Burt’s Bees is just the latest example of the typical fate of “alternative” local businesses that make the big time. Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream, once the Vermont poster child of all things good and natural, was purchased by Unilever, the multinational conglomerate, in 2000. In 2001, Coca Cola purchased the California fruit juice company, Odwalla, for $181 million. You simply cannot tell from the package who really profits when you buy what you think is a small, natural, local or organically produced product.
In fact, according to the research of Associate Professor Phillip H. Howard at Michigan State University, a vast number of (apparently) small brand name packaged products – including organic dairy products, chocolate, soup, vegetarian packaged foods, soy products, beverages, cereals, tea, soaps, and condiments – are owned, directly or through holding companies, by the likes of Coke, Pepsi-Cola, Dean Foods, Heinz, Kraft, Nestle, and General Mills. Notwithstanding the comforting names of Horizon, Health Valley, Cascadian Farm, Celestial Seasonings, Naked Juice, Bearitos, TofuTown and others that line the shelves of your local “natural” food stores, behind these brands might lurk some very large, very profit-oriented enterprises, some of whom, for social or political reasons, a person might not wish to patronize. Even “organic” farm produce is often now grown on an industrial scale using petroleum based technology, financed by the usual channels of capital, and shipped all over the world using petroleum based transport. There are, at the moment, just a handful of national independent organic food producers, such as the cooperative dairy Organic Valley, and the few truly local farmers who are constantly under financial pressure.
From news media predators like Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp, to the 800-pound computer software gorilla, Microsoft, to omnivorous grocery store chains like Whole Foods, the trend is for large companies to gobble small ones and for a few giant corporations eventually to control everything. More than a century ago, Marx described that as the natural monopolistic evolution of capital. Nevertheless, we are not yet at the tipping point of capitalism collapse disorder that Marx predicted. We are not there – yet – because Marx did not fully take into consideration the work value of hydro-carbon energy sources, as in the cheap petroleum that has, heretofore, permitted western civilization to flourish for the past couple hundred years. As natural energy sources diminish, however, the oft prophesied demise creeps closer, and more and more people are feeling the pain that results from economies in actual contraction that is camouflaged as “growth”.
But sitting back and just waiting for the collapse is no more an option than waiting for a left wing version of right wing Christian rapture. Pardon my skepticism, but Christians – especially the militant and materialistic flavor of Christians who spend their moral capital praying for their own personal salvation and the divine slaughter of everyone else – can no more expect to be vacuumed into their eternally boring lyre-strumming paradise in the sky than wistful liberals can expect capitalism to voluntarily transmute itself from a raptor into a chicken.
Capitalism was, and still is, very powerful. Although rooted in rather primitive motivations of greed, acquisition and domination, capitalism remains one of the most successful, innovative… and virulent systems of human socio-economic organization. Capitalism is based on strong, if evil theory. In a Darwinian sense, like America’s Republicans and Democrats who seek to strangle every viable third party that threatens their hegemony, capitalism attacks and kills every potential political-economic competitor as it fights to replicate itself and to remain the king of the hill.
Capitalism survives precisely because there is not yet an alternative system of socio-economic organization that can survive the bruising, no-holds-barred competition with it. Feudalism gave way to capitalism because, in a hydro-carbon world, agriculture yielded supremacy to technology. Organized religion cannot compete. Instead, religion always enters into its customary accommodation with the economic lords of state. Nationalism cannot compete. It eventually morphs into corporatism or fascism. Centralized state communism could not compete. It succumbed to the very organizational rigidity that it championed. General notions of pacifism, love, community, primitivism, individualism, populism and progressivism cannot compete (or have not yet successfully competed) because they, and the like, are abstractions and aspirations, one or two dimensional expressions of an idealized vision, not fully developed systems of organization in themselves.
Systems of alternative and benevolent organization abound. However, none can compete because they have either inadequate theoretical underpinnings or inadequate means of replication. Equally as important, most “alternative” systems of organization lack adequate means literally to defend themselves against, and repel, such a heavily militarized, aggressive, supremely deceptive, thuggish, unprincipled and merciless competitor as capitalism. Still, capitalism collapse disorder approaches unrelentingly. The central problem for us all is to conceive the more benevolent substitute to replace the current decrepit system of socio-political organization.
There is great urgency in this because, if history is our guide, when social and economic systems start to thrash, the natural human tendency is to become more totalitarian, not more democratic; more mean, not less; nastier and more violent, not less; more intolerant, more irrational, more vicious, not less.
Embryonic systems of self-organization, such as exist in the sub-currents of the almost anarchic international community of free and open software (FOSS), or the massively collaborative Wikipedia, offer some hope (which is precisely why the capitalistic, proprietary technology interests seek to squash them)… if only one knew whether and how these models could work with anything other than computer software. So, for now, these are just that – embryonic ideas, and something more mature is desperately needed.
These are the phenomena of our time: the rapidly alternating pumping up and deflating of stock or real estate bubbles; pyramid schemes of collateralized debt obligations; massive inflationary infusions of money into a system paralyzed by a loss of confidence in its own institutions; manic manipulation of interest rates to save the worlds interlocked stock markets; the danse macabre of banks, insurers, hedge funds and the financial services industry inextricably digitally tangled in the morass they made for themselves (thanks to the repeal of the Glass-Steagal Act under Alan Greenspan’s and Bill Clinton’s administration); and the intensifying reliance on military force to monopolize the last vestiges of a depleted world’s energy and natural resources. All of these phenomena signal a socio-economic system in deepening crisis.
In the absence of thinking through the details now of a new, probably hybridized, possibly mixed system of social and economic organization, life could get more brutish, rather than less so when capitalism collapse disorder finally occurs. One senses that time is short. Out of the ashes of collapse we could reap… ashes.
Burt’s Bees could not resist the capitalist system that swallowed it. Nor can anything or anyone resist for too long without a theory as powerful as the capitalism that would consume it. It is imperative to concentrate time and energy on the development of a new, viable, alternative theory of social and economic organization before capitalism collapse disorder occurs.