Ian Hudson

Removing the Veil?: Commodity Fetishism, Fair Trade, and the Environment

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.

With Friends Like These: The Corporate Response to Fair Trade Coffee

Capitalist agriculture is highly exploitative of both producers and the environment. Fair trade is a movement attempting to mitigate this exploitation, partly by baiting corporate actors into the arena of “ethical production.” In the coffee industry, major corporations are responding by discrediting fair trade and branding themselves as ethical. While falling well short of addressing the real demands of the movement, the proliferation of “ethical” labels resulting from this response threatens to destroy fair trades own ethical brand.

Bright Lights, Big City: Do Professional Sports Teams Increase Employment?

When professional sports teams lobby for public money, they inevitably claim that they act as an economic catalyst for the local region. The purpose of this article is to test the validity of this ...

Fair trade, sustainability, and social change

1. Things and What They Hide 2. Car Trunks to Shipping Containers 3. The Persistence of Poverty 4. Free Riding and the Fairness Frame 5. Power and Consumption: Corporate Countermovement and the Threat of Asymmetry 6. W(h)ither, Fair Trade? Afterword: Fair Trade in A Boom Market

The Profit Doctrine: Economists of the Neoliberal Era

Cover -- Contents -- List of Boxes, Figures and Tables -- List of Abbreviations -- Acknowledgements -- 1. Prophets and Profits -- 2. The Contest of Economic Ideas: Survival of the Richest -- 3. The Consequences of Economic Ideas -- 4. Milton Friedman: The Godfather of the Age of Instability and Inequality -- 5. The Deregulationists: Public Choice and Private Gain -- 6. The Great Vacation: Rational Expectations and Real Business Cycles -- 7. Bursting Bubbles: Finance, Crisis and the Efficient Market Hypothesis -- 8. Economists Go to Washington: Ideas in Action -- 9. Conclusion: Dissenters and Victors -- Bibliography.

Can Neoliberal Capitalism Affect Human Evolution

The connection between genes and health outcomes is significantly moderated by social factors. Health inequalities result from the differential accumulation of exposures and resource access rooted in class-based circumstances. In the neoliberal era in the United States, changed physical and socioeconomic conditions facing the poorer members of society have been characterized as traumatogenic (capable of producing a wound or injury). This paper will argue that research that points to the transgenerational influence of environmental impacts on health suggests 2 important reconsiderations of the link between the economy and health. First, an understanding of the health of any society requires an understanding not only of current but also past environmental conditions and the economy that produces those conditions. Second, it suggests that the way in which economic policy is analyzed needs to be reconsidered to incorporate the transgenerational impacts of environmental conditions produced by those policies.

Wine, cheese and building a gourmet territory: biocultural resource-based development strategies in Bolivia

ABSTRACT Products based on local biological and cultural diversity are sometimes seen as a sustainable development pathway. Questions persist, however, surrounding how mobilising collective biocultural heritage as resources to meet certain development objectives may shape regimes of resource use, access, benefit and social inclusion within a territory. We examine these questions through a case of gourmet product development analysed from ecological, economic and sociocultural perspectives. We conclude by identifying five biocultural design coordinates, or points of reflection, that may support communities, organisations and governments seeking to use biocultural resources while minimising risks of environmental harm, elite capture and exclusion.

Social murder and conservative economics

Abstract The hallmark of conservative economic theory is that firms should not be constrained by the state in their pursuit of profit. State intervention is not necessary because firms must obey the will of ‘the market’. Companies must please their consumers or they will not sell anything, and they must treat their workers well or they will have no labour force. Conservative economics assumes that decisions reflect individual preferences and free choice. In this world of voluntary actions, firms and individuals stand on pretty much equal footing; no one has any more power than anyone else.

To live and die in America: labor in the time of cholera and cancer.

A popular explanation of the epidemiological transition is that the germs that caused infectious disease mortality were defeated by the “magic bullets” of mainstream medicine over the course of the 20th century, permitting the population to get old enough to get the chronic diseases of heart disease and cancer. This explanation is false. The most important causes of infectious disease were the political and economic structures that favored capital at the expense of labor so blatantly that it left a large portion of the working population virtually at deaths door. This was remedied only when resistance by labor created a more livable workday, child labor laws, and a higher wage, resulting in improvements in nutrition and housing. Chronic disease increased as firms transformed the production process by introducing more mechanized and chemically intensive production processes. This has transformed our food, water, air, and work processes in unprecedented ways and created a historically unique chronic disease pattern.

The Persistence of Poverty

The most fundamental goal of fair trade is to improve the lives of developing-world producers. If it fails in this goal, the rest of the project is completely immaterial. In fact, if developed-world consumers were paying