Seeing Red
I realize that I’ve ragged on Bono more than once, but the advent of the Product (Red) line may have just pushed me over the edge. The point of Product (Red) — endorsed by Bono — is to get a bunch of existing brands to make (you guessed it) red things, which are then sold with the ostensible purpose of raising funds and awareness about people affected by HIV/AIDS in Africa.
I can’t even begin to express how many problems there are with this, but for starters, lines like the GAP are giving just 50% of profits from products to the World Fund. This means that if you buy a sweater produced for X, then retailed for three times X, then the GAP would be giving 1/3 X to the fund, though probably, actually much less, as the GAP has to pay for all those storefronts and employees and such. So, let’s say of your $50 sweater, the World Fund gets $12. You could have given more than that directly, and you wouldn’t have been contributing to a megacorps in the process. For-profit companies pushing for non-profit aims is always fishy. The manifesto nails it: “Red is not a charity. It is simply a business model.”
The manifesto further claims that as “first-world consumers” we have a great deal of power, and that by buying shit, we’re changing the world. This may be true, but only at a mass scale. Further, this model of political power disenfranchises people who are economically marginalized within “first-world” countries. “Responsible” products inevitably retail for much more than standard-issue items of the same quality, which means that consuming “ethically” is going to cost you, and inflating the cost of merchandise means that only people in power really have access to this allegedly political process.
(Red) seems like another step in the direction of breast cancer awareness chic, which has reached a level of market saturation that’s thoroughly sickening. Many of the pink products that get pushed given little to no money to research, but the fact that we’ve purchased something that advertises our awareness of the issue to the world lets us off the hook for actually doing anything. (Red) products are not “Designed to Help Eliminate AIDS in Africa” — they’re designed to sell.
Shopping is not a fucking revolution. Not shopping might be. AIDS is a crisis. A medical crisis. A human crisis. It is not a shoe crisis.