Silver spoon merchant, Nick Hornby, has never cut a convincing figure and his books on football and music have elevated the word "overrated" to new heights. Who cares that Oxbridge man supports Arsenal? Is it of any relevance that, during his time at Cambridge University, he used to listen to Bob Marley and The Clash? How dire is that muso-poetry pretentious claptrap that he performs with some fourth tier rock band?
Being privileged, however, the man is able to network with the movers and shakers of what passes for British society which results in his already stretched abilities being granted new grounds on which to underperform. The two-part Channel 4 Dispatches programme, The Fake Trade, is his latest stupidity. The first 60 minutes of this nonsense was aired last Monday evening and we will not be wasting our time with the second half next week.
The privileged young, ungifted and white who explore "how the other half (sic) lives" are frequently provided with a public voice to demonstrate a koshered view of some societal reality or trend. It is far safer for the system to allow Hornby to moan on about Marley, Rastafarianism and racism than it would be to allow too much exposure for the likes of Benjamin Zephaniah, The Last Poets or Gil Scott Heron, to name but three, to perform likewise. The resulting pseudo-analysis might sit comfortably in Guardian-world but is entirely alien in the inner city ghettos. By middle age, of course, these cultural commentators always morph back into what they originally started out as - establishment voices maintaining establishment structures. And this brings us on to the incredibly blinkered Dispatches programme that was both written and directed by Hornby.
The Fake Trade had one purpose - to provide "arguments" against the "perpetrators" of the global counterfeit trade. It utterly fails in this aim due to Hornby's incredibly blinkered view of global realities - Third World counterfeiters = bad; globalised capitalism = good. Full stop.
Baudrillard versus Hornby on an intellectual basis is the equivalent of Barcelona versus Havant and Waterlooville on a football level and so it might seem unfair to batter Hornby's pitiful reasoning with such weight of argument. Yet, if some fool-fool ras-clot insists on defending the indefensible system, Baudrillard is always good for a mash up: "We might agree that the world itself is a perfect crime... it has in itself no motive, no equivalent, no alleged perpetrator so we may imagine that, from the very beginning, we are already in a criminal enterprise". In "The System Of Objects", Baudrillard describes a world in which material needs have given way to codified equivalences between commodities and personal identity. This is the branded consumerist reality that forms the bedrock of shareholder capitalism.
"Every object claims to be functional, just as every regime claims to be democratic" is my joint-favourite Frenchman's overview on the meaninglessness of consumption. But it is not just that we are being sold irrelevant branded objects whose "dysfunctionality... is governed by two parallel sets of determinants: the socio-economic system of production and the psychological system of projection", it is also that the strategies in place to maximise the profitability of this globalised scam create intensely warped and strained hierarchical structures.
The architects of globalisation decided to increase returns to shareholders by outsourcing production to Third World centres where workers rights, environmental standards and quality control ceased to be an expenditure item of any consequence. This obviously produces excessive profits eg a $300 I-Pod sold in the US returns exactly $4 to the Far East where these items are manufactured while Apple pockets a cool $160. And that $4 has to cover the wages, the profits for the outsourced factories and the nuts and bolts required to make the item. $4...
The world's major companies are systemically weak in the strategy department, and outsourcing was originally viewed as a win-win situation for the producers and their shareholders. Not so. If you are going to take the piss out of the owners and workers of the non-regulated factories and workhouses of South East Asia, there are two major issues. Firstly, the quality of the product suffers and, secondly, mimicry leads to the development of a counterfeit industry. Lets take each of these in turn.
I used to wear Merrell trainers and trekking footwear. Comfortable and reliable, these products lasted long enough to be regarded as value for money. Once production was outsourced around Asia, the quality plummeted. Indeed, there were even differences between the shoe sizes dependent on which particular factory had been in charge of the manufacture! Cheaper materials, lack of longevity of use and poor workmanship (why put any extra labour effort into the slavedriver's products?) became the new Merrell reality. The result? I no longer buy Merrell shoes. Easy...
It is the second area of concern that The Fake Trade chose to misrepresent extensively. Arbitrage is a core of any financial system. Traders around the world spend copious amounts of time developing quantitative analytical techniques which allow assets to be bought and sold instantaneously to take advantage of small price discrepancies in different marketplaces. Not only is this a core skill at hedge funds and investment banks but it is also "justified" in that such trading increases the efficiency of the financial system by eradicating "incorrect" prices.
The counterfeiters of the Far East are merely employing a similar strategy. Lets go back to our $300 I-Pod. If it is feasible to manufacture an I-Pod for $4 then a counterfeit I-Pod will be cheaper than this as short cuts may be employed by the manufacturer. By pitching a market price a mere fraction of the branded extortion offered by Apple, the counterfeiters are simply arbitraging the system of supply and demand. Of course, they are also abusing workers in this process (as correctly pointed out by Hornby). But, so are Apple in the first place so to utilise worker's rights as an argument solely against counterfeiting is frivilous and fallacious.
The First World companies were originally "happy" to turn a blind eye to counterfeiting as the extra profits more than offset the losses through product leakage. But mimicry has produced the momentum for many of the world's leading businesses to form a globaliser's association to confront the poor who are simply trying to grab a slice of the action. Backed by government and interpol, these First World bastions of capitalism are hiding behind protectionist patents to avoid any meaningful competition as this is a far preferable route for shareholders than reducing the price of the I-Pod to cut the counterfeiters out of the game. On The Fake Trade, some suit bemoaned that 20% of the cigarettes in Germany are now counterfeit. So what? Its a drug trade and battling for control of addicts is hardly likely to persuade impartial observers as to the authenticity of the globaliser's arguments. Competition is anathema to shareholder capitalism even though proponents of the system claim that such competition is at the core of its "validity" - music industry giants, for example, would rather takeover a new competitor and lose considerable money in the process than allow such an upstart to impinge on "their" territory.
Free markets are selective. They are only "free" for selected participants, not surprisingly these participants are always in the "developed" world. The system sells us products with a built in obsolescence at inflated prices and the model/series dynamic allows us all to define ourselves "uniquely" by the products that we choose/are able to purchase - think mobiles where the "marginal differences" of David Reisman are entirely evident. These products are cheaply and poorly made and the system has to brand these shoddy objects so that invalid and superfluous value may be added to the fundamental inconsequence of the objects. This branding process is "achieved" by advertising and we'll give Baudrillard the final word on the lack of validity of this particular area of corruption: "Advertising in its entirety constitutes a useless and unnecessary universe. It is pure connotation. It contributes nothing to production or to the direct practical application of things, yet it plays an integral part in the system of objects, not merely because it relates to consumption but also because it itself becomes an object to be consumed".
We would like to ask Mr Hornby, which trade is the fake trade?
© Football Is Fixed/Dietrological
