Float Like a Butterfly, Sting Like a Bee: a political ecology of change

Capitalism hates horizontal immunity because it undermines the market in significant ways. Profitability in the food market is to be found in over-processed foods, centralized mass production and massive chemical inputs to improve shelf-life, yield and visual appeal. If sales for Burger King, snickers bars or Coca Cola show a decline, the corporate response is not to exult in people's healthier choices but to ramp up advertising.

Secondly, the capitalist market depends on people experiencing a myriad of particular, clearly identifiable dissatisfactions that lend themselves to specialized products. It is far better to market a thousand skin and hair products to address a thousand conditions than to face a population of healthy eaters whose skin takes care of itself.

Finally, raising the overall health of a population entails raising the social wage, the combination of social benefits that support the collective quality of life. When people have enough resources in their lives and under their control they are able to make healthier decisions for themselves and their communities. An increased social wage would naturally address a constellation of social problems associated with inequality, lack of control and poverty. It would significantly reduce homelessness, prostitution, chemical abuse, street crime and hunger for example. A greater social wage also leads to greater security among the broad population and therefore undermines the ability of corporations to dictate the conditions of work, environmental protection and land use. Public health surveys indicate that communities place a high value on preventing contamination of their environment, the workplace and the food supply and would protect them if they could.

Governments that are seen to "divert" too many resources to the horizontal immunity of their people are labeled "anti-western" and become targets for destabilization and overthrow by the former colonial powers that host the corporate headquarters. Investment flows naturally to places where labor, environmental and human rights advocates are kept in line by repressive regimes. The capitalist market, with its quiver of vertically oriented solutions, is not compatible with the horizontal improvement of social conditions that people everywhere favor when they get the chance to make the decisions for themselves.

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