Wednesday 23 May 2018
Beyond Feel Good - On Toronto's 2018 Buy Good Feel Good Expo
BOUGHT SOMETHING GOOD AND NOW FEELING BETTER?
The people in the pictures above are all of a certain age, chat happily, hold hands, scan an art display and likely will purchase some of the colourful gifts on display. Though multicultural, they are clearly not poor, or old, or visibly diseased, even if those they want to help may be. The imagery would not be out of place in a popular magazine. Which, in a way, is likely the point.This is a long post, bit stick with us. It's about the promise of an easy way to a good way.
Shopping as psycho-therapy was long ago advocated by ex U.S. President George
Bush, among others, as a cure for what ails us and,
like most placebos it works with some things… for a while. But shopping as a
cure for social ills is a more recent phenomenon. It was born as a reaction to a
long neo-liberal economic consensus in the mainstream, and its associated
constraints, most notably reduced, or removed, social support. The Buy Good Feel
Good [BGFG] expo organizers, whose event brought many passionate and sincere
entrepreneurs to Toronto in May must have long pondered an appropriate title
for the gathering, so the conjunction of consumerism and well-or better feeling could not have been an accident; it poses for all the need to think about a central issue: the roles, actual and potential, of business enterprise in society.
Milton Friedman, neo-liberal economic hero, argued that
the only role of business is to make a profit. By implication, this leaves it to the state, whatever is ideologically left to It, to
fix whatever ills arise from the single-minded pursuit of profit, of which ills history has seen many, and still does. A simple division of labour follows, we could then conclude: business creates the jobs and income to purchase whatever business
creates, while the state heals any wounds that the wealth creation process generates. But since neo-liberals oppose tax
increases and almost tax itself, in principle, society’s ability to perform such a role has significantly waned. And since, too, statist solutions, such as full employment, for the
ills of economic productivity, have been discarded after the fall of centralized
communism, a core challenge was posed for government: how to ensure
productivity, and public well-being without increased tax-funded public service
investment?
Enter at this point – a perfect option that offered social
benefits without taxation to fund it.
How about if business itself does the job by incorporating in its business
models social goals as well as its bottom line needs, including profit? BGFG
and TorontotheBetter are both committed to the potential of this model. And
since the birth of industrial capitalism there have been enterprises like Bourneville Chocolate, that have indeed incorporated moral,
religious or political values in their principles and practices. However successful such
enterprises may be, however, we believe that their advocates must explicitly
recognize what they cannot and will not do. The Buy Good Feel Good space offers
an opportunity for such to do that, but unfortunately there was little mention of
it to the knowledge of this observer.
TorontotheBetter is a non-profit set up to promote the use
and availability of socially progressive economic options. In this regard, then, there is common ground between the aims of TorontotheBetter, a non-profit enterprise, and the BGFG initiative. With the greater part of developed economies still in private
hands and with the goal of profit maximization leading, as always, to the
depletion of much human and environmental capacity, there is clearly growing
opportunity, and space, for what has
been called “business done differently.” Feelgood has become a pejorative
phrase in recent years because of its implicit recognition of the gap between
feeling and being, or aspiration and actuality. Scanning the range of goods and
services on display at BGFG we saw enterprises that do many things that benefit
various sufferers like the many impoverished peasants of Nepal and/or the environment
everywhere. The problem for TorontotheBetter then, is not the good that many
social enterprises do, but their relative silence about the much that they
can’t, or don’t do, even if they recognize that other institutions are required
for an adequate social fabric to be completed. The danger of a relentlessly positive
feelgood chorus is that it will encourage complacency about remaining problems
that remain un-served and, most importantly, about the causes of these and other societal
problems.
So, for future trade expos, whose object must be to
promote use of its sponsoring enterprises, we recommend a continuous parallel
narrative about the limits of the independent social enterprise sector on the one hand and the
critical importance of stable tax support for the provision of basic needs for
all by the public sector on the other. In addition to their relatively piecemeal coverage of
societal needs, and consequential high prices and associated class privilege of
social enterprise users (patrons seems a fitting word her, for once) – there seem to be few socially committed
engineering or mining companies, for instance – silence on the need for state
funding in key areas inevitably leaves them open to an accusation of more or less smug
complacency in the face of real societal stress.
We call on BGFG and other initiatives like them to be upfront about the benefits and the
limitations of what they do. They will gain in credibility and commitment if they do.
# posted by Taodhg @ 6:02 am 
