AN OUTSIDERS VIEW
Cool capitalism
By Ken Fuller
Last week, I took friendly issue with a column by Conrado de Quiros which asserted that capitalists don’t have to exploit their labor force in order to thrive. By providing an alternative, strictly economic, definition of the word “exploitation” we can see that exploitation — the creation of a value over and above that needed to recreate the worker’s labor power — is essential to capitalism. No surplus value, no capitalism.
Given the moral emphasis De Quiros places on the questions of outsourcing and “exploitation,” it comes as no surprise when he suggests for his alternative model of capitalism the enterprise called Human Nature, which he says is owned by Gawad Kalinga (GK), founded by Couples for Christ. One of GK’s aims was to rehouse members of the urban poor in 700,000 newly-built homes, establishing 7,000 GK communities. I know nothing about the economics of GK’s housing program and so I am unable to comment. According to Wikipedia, however, “the campaign failed miserably.” Nevertheless, GK has a number of environmental and social aims, and has set itself the target of lifting five million families out of poverty by 2024. GK and its founder Antonio “Tony” Meloto have been showered with honors, and GK has expanded to the USA and other countries.
Human Nature (sometimes referred to as Human Heart Nature), says De Quiros, produces “a whole line of products, including hair care, face and lip care, hand and foot care, and stuff for kids.” These products are made “by GK villages, from ingredients grown by GK villages,” with 30 percent being plowed back to those villages.
Human Nature is in fact owned by another GK, Gandang Kalikasan Inc., the president of which is Anna Meloto-Wilk, daughter of Tony Meloto. The stated aims of GK — the provision of decent wages, the use of natural Philippine ingredients, etc. — are commendable. But it would be a romantic delusion to believe that this company will be able to evade the laws of capitalist economics — even less so as the company grows.
It has a franchising operation, and there is now a Gandang Kalikasan USA, Inc., based in California. A glance at the company website tells us that it is (or was) seeking to fill nine head office positions, and that 15 such positions have already been filled. One job advertised is that of a head of Human Resources, an indication that this company may not be so very different from others. A college degree, along with experience in the appropriate field, is a requirement for each of these positions, so only in rare cases (if at all) would they be open to the poor beneficiaries in the “GK villages.”
Throughout history there have been various experiments in which companies have, often out of enlightened self-interest, treated their workers more like human beings than impersonal factors of production. Perhaps the most famous of these was the New Lanark cotton mills in Scotland between 1800 and 1820. This experiment was the brainchild of utopian socialist Robert Owen, widely acknowledged as the father of the British cooperative movement. Owen was motivated by the belief that human nature was not static but was molded by social conditions. According to A.L. Morton and George Tate (The British Labour Movement, 1956) Owen “proved beyond all question that he could pay higher wages for shorter hours than any of his competitors, provide lavish social services, and yet produce substantial profits. He proved also that by these improved conditions the character of the workers was transformed. Crime and misery vanished.”
And yet, of course, there was exploitation even here, hence the company’s profits. Moreover, the creation of surplus value is at the root of the “crises of overproduction” which periodically sweep capitalist economies, as workers as a whole can never afford to purchase the full amount of the goods they produce. And as Owen was at this stage merely a philanthropist, he could never resolve the problems for society as a whole; when he turned in this direction, he was shunned by those who had once lauded him. After falling out with his partners, Owen severed his connection with New Lanark in 1828. Similar experiments elsewhere in Britain and in the USA failed.
Similarly, there is (in our strictly-defined sense) exploitation in Gandang Kalikasan. The “highly competitive salaries” (that’s what it says on the website) of the head office staff, for example, to say nothing of the directors’ emoluments, come from the surplus value produced by the workers at the sharp end.
Another recent, but less positive, example of “cool” capitalism would be The Body Shop, in the same line of business as Human Nature. Although the British company projected itself as green, “natural” and ethical, the reality was different. When my union attempted to organize the workers at the company’s main base on the English south coast, we found that they certainly held the company in no great esteem and, in fact, they had several grievances. The company directors were not union-friendly, and in the USA it moved its headquarters and filling plant from New Jersey, which had union-friendly laws, to North Carolina, which did not. Here, it not only enjoyed lower labor costs but also employed many workers of a freelance basis, with few benefits.
A 1994 investigative article in Business Ethics magazine revealed that Body Shop founder Anita Roddick had appropriated the name, many product lines and store design from a store in Berkeley, California, that she had invented her story of circling the globe in search of ingredients, and that some “natural” products contained large volumes of artificial ingredients. The myth that The Body Shop made substantial donations to charity was shown to be false.
In 2006, The Body Shop was taken over by L’Oreal for £652.3 million, £130 million of which reportedly went to Anita and Gordon Roddick. Cool, eh?
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