Make Richard Branson History. posted by Richard Seymour

Give us our colour back, you theiving bastards! Who the fuck entitled you to colour your 'philanthropic' PR operations red? Yes, Product Red is once more upon us. Bono explains his latest enterprise - a slim red mobile phone with an MP3 player on it that will divert a little bit of money to AIDS charities - thus: "We had the student campuses and the church halls but we didn't have the high street". The man couldn't be more of an upstanding pillock if he tried. How simple can it be? Getting the 'high street' means getting the companies who are raking it in off the exploitation, misery, oppression and deaths of the working masses on this planet. You want to tackle AIDS? Get the pharmaceutical companies off their backs. Stop sending Christian far right missionaries to preach 'abstinence' to the poor. How's that for a start? You want to help the poor? Instead of giving GAP some cheap PR, get them to stop using slave labour. Instead of giving American Express a new marketing scheme, how about fighting against the far right neoconservative ideology which they aggressively help promote through the American Enterprise Institute? How about tackling bio-piracy, privatisation (of water and anything else up for grabs), the destruction of welfare systems and labour protections and so on? Instead of encouraging rich Westerners to buy mobile phones, how about considering the way class cuts across from the 'developing' world to the 'developed' world - how can it be that the US is second highest in the world for newborn mortality? How can it be that New Orleans is allowed to be held to ransom by a corporation? How can it be that TB has been making a comeback in parts of the UK where levels of the disease are now higher than in China or India? Why does it fall to the elected leader of a poor country like Venezuela to help out poor Americans and Europeans? Oh, nothing but the usual - capital is the problem and no part of the solution.

You know, a couple of weeks ago, I had the misfortune of reading this interview with a rather typical 'cardigan capitalist', one of those 'nice guy' capitalists who expends his wealth behaving like a teenager and pursuing vanity projects. In the interview with a BBC sap, Mr Branson describes how guilty he feels about the plight of the poor in Africa and the terrible burden of having all his wealth while so many die. He says that "the necessary evil of capitalism" must be turned to good. Yeah, if capitalism somehow, inexplicably, mysteriously, ineluctably, enabled you to grab almost three billion pounds in personal wealth (how much in those offshore trust funds, I wonder?), you'd call it a necessary evil too. And you'd cry your little socks off about the terrible, terrible guilt. Simply terrible. Not that you'd have anything to be guilty about, you understand, it's just that the necessary eeeeevvviillll of capitalism made you some money.

So, we are to understand corporate philanthropy as expiation for the capitalist concerned, but also - as explained with abundant clarity by one of the marketing whizzes behind it on C4 News last night - a badge of honour for 'concerned consumers'. No one noticed, not even the news anchor, that what the man had said in his interview was that he had spotted those little wristbands some people were wearing last year that said 'Make Poverty History' - you know, the ones that were made in Chinese sweatshops? And so he thought it would be a nice little profit-spinner if he could make a product that acted as a little badge for customers to say "I care about, er, these people or, er, that cause or this thing" (he really was that vague about it). The news anchor went on to spin this, literally, as "so, the message is, buy a phone and change the world". No no no - the message is, openly, buy our phone for a mere £149 and enjoy the sensation of being part of our little philanthropic circle-jerk.

In The Picture of Dorian Gray, a clucking aristocrat mouths obsequies about the terrible problems in the East End. "The problem," replied Lord Henry Wotton, "is one of slavery. And we are trying to solve it by amusing the slaves." Times change - Bono and his greasy ilk are trying to solve it by amusing the masters.