Something remarkable about any true cause is how much people really like it, and are ready to do give whatever small time or resources they might have to help in it. But as activists themselves recognise this, and it proves to be a great source of energy and hope, so do the conniving grifters who seek to turn that appreciation of a cause into profit. This profit comes at the expense of activists and the victims of our oppressors' crimes, and the benefactors of this profit are always the grifters themselves and the system enabled by important causes becoming mere commodities.
It is my firm belief that the powers that be rejoice upon seeing our causes become commodified, for the commodification ensures that the gravity is sucked out of fierce struggles and that a fair amount of our resources are put back into the system we stand against. A brand exists primarily within the marketing sphere, as it is a way to identify and distinguish a product from others. While a brand may be symbolic and a convenient way to identify something, it is vital that we steer clear of the reduction of important causes into just brands. Marketing brands don't carry the significance that a cause actually has; they might come with a bandwagon, but will probably be lacking in passion and gravity. Liberation, resistance, even anonymity, these are powerful ideas and causes which grifters have used solely as brands with no substance. Even if there is activism to a name, what is behind some of these brands beyond gatekeeping and gaslighting to give themselves some supposed status in a movement? As humans become attached to powerful objectives, grifters will attempt to reduce them to a brand by attaching their own product and name to that movement. And as that brand becomes profitable, the same actors which perpetuated the destruction of the world will feel comfortable pretending to advocate for the cause by flaunting these co-opted aspects of movements. This is where social media comes into play as well, where genuine activism can somehow be abridged to influencers that use cute pictures with filters on them. Freedom fighting requires far more than cutesy filters and corporate sponsors, I hope that fact is more widely accepted than it seems at this moment.
(Just the pain of seeing Shell pretending to care about emancipation and the environment)
As one pretty obvious example, just take a look at this fool Talcum X, aka W.E.B DuFraud, aka Django Uncolored, aka Samuel L. NotBlackson, aka Chalkus Garvey, aka Martin Luther Keyboard, aka Fed Scampton, aka Shaun King. That email is from an attempt to profit off the death of Black Panther actor Chadwick Boseman, one of many attempts of his to gain personal profit in some way from black culture or black death. But he's not by far the only one, just perhaps one of the more apparent ones. In fact I'd consider it popular knowledge that Shaun King and his ilk are all stooges of the Democratic Party, serving the Washington political establishment. And on the American right? "Stop the Steal" really commodifies the noble cause of election integrity, and while it was refreshing to finally see swaths of people care somewhat about elections, the cause was co-opted from its inception. This was for several reasons, from the fact that it surrounded fighting for a political candidate to that it leaned into the entire op that is partisanship, but also because most of the funds were funneled into Donald Trump, the RNC, and Republican officials. Funding either side of the Washington political establishment is not going to help a cause, they are the same people which orchestrate and profit off of our oppression.
(Billionaire Beyonce allegedly paying "homage" to the Black Panthers while she also campaigned for Hillary Clinton, who referred to black men as "super predators" in pushing for the 1994 Crime Bill her husband signed into law, helped orchestrate bringing back slavery to Libya, and served as one of the butchers of Haiti through the Clinton Foundation to name just a few crimes.)
Along with establishment stooges and empire stenographers typical scam artists don't help causes either. There are unfortunately too many instances to name of people who profit off the collective struggle while never putting anything back into the cause. People will use powerful concepts such as liberation and dissent or people such as Martin Luther King and Julian Assange as a mere brand to sell products which might not even exist yet. Turning these people and struggles into a brand diverts resources away from the cause which needs them. It is one thing to survive off mutual aid or create art and transparent tools which can benefit activists and a cause, to properly honor such great objectives; it is another to latch onto a movement as a gatekeeper and profit off it with shallow brands or products that don't benefit the collective.
Ultimately with every good cause there will be people looking to profit off of it. It can be a testament to how meaningful a movement is, but it also serves as a way to delegitimise a cause through its commodification. It sucks the gravity out of these purposes and funnels the resources it takes away from movements back into the system the brand is marketing itself to be standing against. It will never cease to amaze and anger me how many people can only see money and fame in a struggle and commit to reducing significant struggles to just that. Freedom, life, death, love, nature, and so many other things cannot be commodified, so we must watch out for the efforts to commodify the fights for them.
This article is part of a series I'm doing on ways in which movements are delegitimised and factors which contribute to their eventual inability to enact meaningful change or action. You can read the previous part of this here if you wish: @zeroeclipsee/the-strategic-nullification-of-any-good-movement-expect-it-thoughts-on-civility