Culture Industry and the Marketing of Human Rights

How were the tactics of the burgeoning human rights movement shaped by the pressures of the market in the age of mass consumption? In the 1980s, following the institutionalization of human rights and the rise to popularity of human rights discourse, the global movement sought to grow its base of support and began to market itself to a broader audience utilizing tactics driven by economic forces of globalization. Consumer culture that had originated in the affluent societies of the post-war world deepened in the waning years of the Cold War due to the opening of markets in the developing world and the dissemination of neoliberal economic policies suited to benefit the West. This society of mass consumption dictated the strategies utilized by human rights organizations, specifically the connection of activism to popular consumption. In order to bring its message to the masses, human rights was commercialized to the extent that the movement communicated its message through patterns of consumption: donation, sponsorship, t-shirts, bumper stickers, concert tickets, and cause songs. While these tactics were successful in raising political consciousness around human rights issues and producing positive effects for human rights struggles, the relationship between the individual and the movement is forged in an alienated and reified manner. A constitutive component of human rights activism during this period was the focus on subsistence rights, namely famine and malnutrition, due to their marketability and the suggestion that an influx of economic resources would be sufficient to feed the hungry; therefore the more you give and buy, the more help you are providing. The decoupling of violations of subsistence rights from their political contexts obscured the causes of conflict and complicated humanitarian remedy. Deploying the critical theory approach of the Frankfurt School, this paper takes seriously the impact of benefit concerts, celebrity endorsement, and popular culture in general when it is placed in the service of human rights campaigns. This trend was initiated in the late 1970s with UK Amnesty International’s “Secret Policemen’s Ball” starring Monty Python’s Flying Circus, continuing through USA for Africa’s “We Are the World,” and is alive today in the activism of the SaveDarfur Coalition and the One.org global poverty project. While these approaches reach a broader audience than more targeted strategies, the politics of human rights is transmitted as entertainment; fact is blurred with fiction, reality is alienated as make believe. As Herbert Marcuse, Theodor Adorno, and others instruct, advanced industrial capitalism operates through sophisticated methods of social control in order to hijack subversive politics and mitigate critical perspectives. Mainstream culture is simply the product of the machine that generates false needs and repressive desublimation in its audience of consumers. To the extent that human rights is understood as a set of mechanisms through which individual human dignity is protected and arbitrary power checked, human rights indeed confronts the world as a threat to entrenched power. Therefore, hegemonic forces in the market and in geopolitics will seek to commodify and co-opt human rights, so as to undercut its efficacy. In essence, the commercialization of human rights made human rights susceptible to the pressures of the market and vulnerable to the dictates of the superficiality and short attention span of mass society.