More Than Promote :: 125
From birth, our lives are “brought to you by” something. Ian MacKaye, frontman for the punk band Fugazzi, sums it up. “I am, of course, disgusted by mass marketing to children. You can imagine my horror when I discovered that it’s virtually impossible to buy a diaper—which is essentially a shit bag— without a goddamn corporate cartoon figure on it. It’s deeply disturbing.”21 Clothes, cars, computers, they are all extensions of our personal brands; a slippery slope to some odd breed of corporate sponsored socialism. As defined by Marx and Engles, socialism was where everyone would share on the benefits of an industrialized society. KFC provides road crew maintenance; Seventh Generation provides tampons. They are distributing social services, much like a political socialist system would. Let’s return to KFC’s concept of its advertising being, “an infrastructure renewal program.” It sounds remarkably like a government program that Fox News would call part of a socialist agenda. Perhaps this offers us a distinction. Which is better, government-run socialism or corporate-run socialism? A single system of power (the government or the corporation) providing social services is a close definition of communism. So the impact of some Cause-Related Marketing pro-
21 Dapier, Jarrett & Gantz, Jeremy. “The Margin Walker.” In These Times, December 5, 2008. http://inthesetimes.com/article/4073/ the_margin_walker