| Popis: |
This paper provides a comparative historical account of a contemporary phenomenon: the tendency to equate “ethical” goods with aesthetic quality. Studies of moral markets suggest that this equation of ethics and quality would reveal a process whereby these pre-existing moral sensibilities are conveyed through and fought over in the market. Yet this paper argues that we should also examine how markets forms can condition moral sensibilities in the process, not just convey or host them. Drawing on primary source archival materials from late eighteenth century abolitionists and turn-of-the-twentieth-century consumer activists, the author demonstrates that these activists participated in a recurring purity politics of consumption conditioned by the commodity form. This manifests in activists’ equation of: 1) the treatment of the laborers and 2) the quality of the labor with 3) the quality of the goods. To claim that goods were pure, in many instances, was also to claim that the laborers and the labor conditions behind those goods were as well. This purity politics, further, entails both public and private ways of arguing for the equation of ethics and quality, as well as distinct civic visions of ethical labor. It also opens up ways to explore certain racialized dimensions of the commodity form. |
