Trade, Aid, & Social Justice for All
20100222, 080038 - No commentOver the weekend we observed the United Nations celebrating World Social Justice Day the event on the 20th of February now in its second year, and also the start of Fair Trade Fortnight.
Fair Trade is easy to understand and is widely supported, it is based on acknowledging that the capitalistic western world had been exploiting foreign lands, robbing them of produce, people and resources in such a manner and for so long that it is now impossible to stop but we do need to somehow help the exploited workers. We are seeing more and more products being sold as Fair Trade, this is to note that we will never stop exploiting the workers that produce our chocolate/tea/coffee/etc… But if we give them a fair price for their goods we can allow ourselves to feel a little better about the damage our exploitation causes.
Social Justice and aid are harder to understand despite the UN’s sponsorship. There is very little information about “Social Justice” available; this is due in part to the face that it is a neologism for the time dishonoured practise of the capitalistic western world forcing its capitalistic world view onto every nation it comes into contact with. The aim of World Social Justice as promoted by the United Nations to raise the people in other nations up from being people with resources and values into consumers, ripe to be exploited by the economies of the western world, the education that is offered is only to educate people into being consumers, the healthcare that is offered is offered only when it is cost effective to keep people alive either as consumers or producers, nothing is offered without the benefit going to the western bourgeois.
Personally I will continue drinking Fair Trade team and eating chocolate that the farmers have been paid a fairer price for, and feel slightly better about myself. But I will continue to be sceptical about World Social Justice for in my humble opinion it is only a stick, used to beat and mould the developing world into a market place for the gratification of the developed world’s bourgeois.