Reflections on writing for/about charity, day 28

I'm almost half way through the fundraising period. Gofundme.com only allow 60 days to raise your funds. The £500 target looks like something akin to a mountaintop peeking over a distant horizon. In the meantime, I've been thinking about things like ideological reproduction, complicity and epistemic violence. Great words, but what does it all mean?

During the documentary film Black Gold I wondered whether it was appropriate or not for me to have a coffee. On one level it seemed to be a blatant disregard for the messages in this film (which explores the injustices of the coffee trade). My coffee is not Fair Trade, after all. Am I not the very beacon of hypocrisy as I tut at the cruelty of the coffee trade while my slow roast arabica blend quietly brews on the table before me? Yet to righteously disavow coffee for the duration of the film only to inevitably have a cup later on anyway seemed doubly hypocritical. The answer is that it really doesn't matter. Both options are shrouded in a symbolism that only serves to justify my complicity. Yet these unspoken gestures of righteousness have a pretty big presence in our ideological stance towards the Other. Whereas recently the subject has been taken to be formed through ideology and discourse, in a manner relatively autonomous from the Marxist economically-determined construction of the subject (Althusser, Foucault, etc., etc.,), the developments of Fair Trade and human rights show that the economic has entered the realm of the ideological. 25 years ago Spivak was trying to address a refusal to acknowledge this in the intellectual academy which instead relied on a "'nationalist' view of 'productivity'" (In Other Worlds, 167) and a "'culuralism' that disavows the economic" (168). Nowadays, we are (on some problematic level) only too aware of how things are produced, and 'ethical consumption' is all the rage. It seems barmy to exclude this knowledge from the identities we have. Yet, the 'ghostly presence of labour' in the commodity (Marx) still seems obscured, and the nature of the economic relationship with the third world still seems impenetrable to the consumer who finds their knowledge in outbursts from charities and the haphazard guesswork of economists on Newsnight seeking a solution to the Euro crisis. What we can alleviate, however, is peace of mind. Perhaps Fair Trade, charity, or foregoing a coffee while I watch Black Gold, can do this. 

So considering the amount of ethical consumption we engage in, acts which hope to alleviate some undesireable by-products caused by big industry for the world (ecology) or the third world (poverty), then something is evidently working. It may not work to save the world from global warming or the pull the third world towards the first, but it's getting us westerners moving, doing stuff. How do we translate these plighti (plural of plight, made up by me just now) into values that allow us to express them through consumption?

To donate, see http://fallinginpublic.blogspot.co.uk/2012/06/writing-for-charitychangecoffee.html