Last year, my colleague Kristian Niemietz coined the term “anti-producerism” to describe the rhetorical tactic of portraying restrictions on freedom as damaging to businesses rather than to consumers. You see a lot of this in public health where restrictions on what people are allowed to eat and drink are framed as a poke in the eye for Big Food and Big Alcohol and even the most draconian infringements on smokers’ rights are presented as an assault on Big Tobacco.
As a political strategy, anti-producerism has a long history. Nineteenth-century temperance campaigners in the USA portrayed themselves as fighting greedy saloon owners and the “liquor trust”, rather than individual drinkers. By portraying consumers as victims of businesses, the eternal paternalist can oppress people while pretending to protect them and shift the blame for the misuse of a product from ordinary individuals to faceless corporations.
This convenient fiction has been enshrined in the academic literature in the past decade under the umbrella of “the commercial determinants of health”, a phrase coined in 2012 by the German political scientist Ilona Kickbusch. Public health academics who once talked about the social — i.e. non-medical — determinants of health increasingly focus on how businesses supposedly affect our health. They started with the tobacco industry (of course) and quickly moved on to the booze and food industries. They have now decided that virtually every business, large and small, is a cause of “non-communicable disease”. A study published earlier this year claimed that UberEats is a “commercial determinant of health” because “evidence shows that consumers using these platforms commonly purchase foods and beverages shown to be harmful to health”. Facebook is similarly defined because it is “addictive” and because “health-harming industry actors, such as alcohol companies, use social media platforms to promote their products to defined groups”.
This has led to some exciting research into the mysterious world of “commercial entities”. In an article titled “An overview of the commercial determinants of health”, a prominent researcher in the field explains that: “Corporations seek to make a profit from their commodities”. And the revelations don’t end there. “They use ‘business practices’ to run their activities,” she reveals, “and ‘market practices’ to develop, produce and sell their commodities”. Who knew?
Academics who see disease spreading every time money changes hands tend to take a dim view of the market economy. As anti-corporate rhetoric ballooned into a blanket indictment of capitalism, many of them decided that the solution must lie in overthrowing the existing economic system. They urge the public to regard “neo-liberal capitalism as the fundamental cause of health harms” and call for “a fundamental restructure of the global political and socio- economic system”. During the pandemic, a former WHO advisor hailed China’s draconian COVID lockdowns for curbing economic activity and claimed that “switching off capitalism not only protects us from the virus, it protects us from ourselves.” Richard Horton, editor of The Lancet, has told Socialist Worker that “we need a mass movement of resistance” against “neoliberalism”. A WHO report published last year blamed “deregulated forms of capitalism”, “trade liberalization” and “the promotion of free markets” for poor health, and concluded that “the importance of addressing that political economic system, and rethinking capitalism, cannot be ignored”.
Anti-capitalism is now the sea in which the public health lobby swims
I have documented many other such cases in a paper for the IEA which was published this week. It will scarcely be news to you that many people in academia hold left-wing opinions, but anti-capitalism is now the sea in which the public health lobby swims. They openly view economic growth, consumerism and free trade as the problem and the fatuous nonsense of “doughnut economics” as the solution. Last year, dozens of them were asked how they would improve public health policy. They not only expressed strong support for “teaching corporations as structural causes of disease in public health curricula’” but also stressed the need to “challenge neoliberalism and gross domestic product (GDP) growth”. They said that world leaders would need to fundamentally change “global economic, financial, and banking systems” to make people abandon their “consumptogenic lifestyles”. They acknowledged that this could be tricky because “people may want to retain their lifestyles” and because politicians are “not incentivised to develop degrowth policies”, but they nevertheless considered such radical changes to be the best way forward.
Capitalism isn’t going to be overthrown by a few academics writing papers about the “commercial determinants of health”, even with the support of the WHO, but the public health lobby has more influence on government policy than the kind of sociologists who usually come out with this claptrap. You only have to go back to the pandemic to see how much power they can wield. Their policies have an uncanny appeal to Conservative and Labour politicians alike and purport to be evidence-based, but this isn’t epidemiology. It is economic theology, with “neoliberalism” as the original sin. It is remarkable that governments that want to see growth, investment and free trade are so susceptible to an extreme political movement that is antithetical to all three.
