![[tmbchr]™](/journal/popocculture-blog-logo.jpg){kind=logo}
Tom’s of Maine In Bed With Colgate
Somebody recently pointed out to me that natural product maker Tom’s of Maine was recently absorbed into the corporate collossus of Colgate. There’s an interesting section in a Boston.com article on it:
The company’s operations will stay in Maine, all departments will remain intact and no jobs will be eliminated, Chappell said. “Colgate said we do not want to see synergies at the cost of people,” he said.
Packaging of Tom’s of Maine products will not identify the company as a Colgate subsidiary, he said.
So, in essence, the packaging will lie. Whereas Tom’s of Maine built a brand around not putting certain things into their product, that same brand will now be supported by something which they don’t tell you is somewhere inside it’s essence.
But that’s not the bone I really want to pick here though. I like this corporate acquisition because I think it’s a vivid illustration of how our culture works. And of how it is propelled by advances in the counter-cultural realms, which are then absorbed back into the system. Here’s a similar example of this process occurring in the counter-culture. I found this yesterday while doing some research. It needs to be checked into in more depth, but if it proves to be true, then these two things taken together are solid evidence of a much larger phenomenon:
Thirty years ago when the radical student movement was gaining momentum in North America, the Rockefeller dynasty was surprisingly quick to offer funds. A student leader James Simon Kunen, in his book entitled The Strawberry Incident, tells about the 1968 Students for a Democratic Society convention in which, “men from Business International Roundtables,… tried to buy up a few radicals. These men are the world’s industrialists and they convene to decide how our lives are going to go. They offered to finance our demonstrations in Chicago. We were also offered ESSO (Rockefeller) money.”
The book seems to actually be called “The Strawberry Statement,” so that’s our first factual error. There may be others. I will investigate it further.
Either way though, the process it describes is surely tantalizing: one institution grows so large and set in its ways that it becomes unable to adapt. This opens room for smaller competitors who can adapt and innovate quickly, capitalizing on the holes left uncovered by the giant. But in sheer mass, the little guy just can’t grow as big, because the giant is taking up so much room. And the giant didn’t get so big by being stupid. So it does the smart thing and waits the little guy out, studies him, waits for him to reach a certain level and then offers to help him get one step further in his goals. Which ultimately means fusing with the giant, making the giant even bigger, and even more in control of the landscape. It seems to happen both in business and government and who knows what other areas of human endeavor. Maybe it’s a natural dialectical process inherent in the eternal patterns of change. Whatever it is, it opens up lots of interesting questions and ways of looking at how things split, morph and fuse over time like cells in a petri dish.
May 18th, 2006 at 4:27 am
I seriously knew it! Everytime I look at the wayward Tom’s tube I may have I think to myself: Oh yeah whatever. Colgate-Palmolive is behind it 100%.
In fact, couldn’t these little up and coming, movin’ and shakin’ companies who do things a little “differently” all have been started by corporate marketing seed money? Furthermore, isn’t it conceivable that all money across the board is corporate seed money? What other reason is there to start a business and make money but to be subsumed by the corporate Borg — which inherently controls the meaning of money?
I’m not fuckin’ around, but everybody who marinates long enough in this system does it for just that — unlimited access to easy street. Only one institution can grant access to this fabled shangri-la and these are the gatekeepers of “ALL THAT IS KNOWN”. The Internet makes things a little more fuzzy than they once were, but the artifact is catching up. Think about it. Everybody who wants to get rich wants to to be “free” of constraints. Yet the constraints only increase as you move “up”. As in responsibility to the system that got you there. Amazingly, people unknowingly buy their way into “rewarding” ways of life where success only equates out to less and less baseline freedom.
Hey I’m rich! Now I get to go to resorts in Malaysia/Mexico and Space Stations and Free Iraq’s amazing Green Zone entertainment district. As the empire goes, it is all an act of but being frozen in time as if time were a piece of amber.
May 18th, 2006 at 9:41 am
It reminds me of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream. I used to think of hippies, Vermont, and independent business when I thought of Ben and Jerry’s. So imagine my heartache, my despair, my agony when I found out they were bought by a huge conglomerate Unilever for 326.43 million dollars!
It also upset me when Converse sneakers were bought out by Nike. I saw Michael Moore’s movie the Big One— after that I had to say no to anything Nike.
May 18th, 2006 at 11:39 am
I think this bit from John Taylor Gatto couldn’t be more relevant:
http://www.noogenesis.com/malama/ignorance/Gatto.html
And another:
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/8n.htm
It just goes on and on like that. We’re now living in a system a hundred years after that.
May 18th, 2006 at 12:56 pm
The same thing has happened with the overwhelming majority of companies that produce “organic” or “natural” foods. Check out this graph:
http://bitscape.org/2006/03/16.html
Independence is an illusion. It’s all owned by the corporate state.
May 18th, 2006 at 1:36 pm
John Taylor Gatto’s book is fascinating.
Highly recommended, to anybody.
May 18th, 2006 at 1:45 pm
Yeah that guy is one of my all time favorites
May 18th, 2006 at 4:06 pm
Yeah, been noticing the trends. Actually kinda predicted them as huge conglomerates were sure to sooner or later notice the number of consumers opting for odwalla juices (now coca-cola), Annie’s box dinners, Ben and Jerry’s ( in which I have noticed the introduction of corn syrup and hydrogenated bullshit), Toms of Maine (damn, I use the stuff) and others. I guess I sort of naively thought that they might take it as a message of what their products could and should be. WRONG! (oh forgive me my innocence) It has simply become another brand line and we have identified with it..all those other toothpastes are itchy (thanks, substance M…)…what do you want to bet that soon they don’t even have to tell us what is in something because somehow it would undermine national security AND trade secrets I’m just about ready to go live on rice, beans,goat cheese and other slow foods. (In retrospect, I’ve forgiven myself for spending 20 years of my life cooking in fine food restaurants for mebbe 50 cents more an hour than the illegals working next to me…at least I can cook real food!) I’ll brush my damn teeth with plain baking soda, thank you! What I really regret is losing a cookbook I once owned that was published in the early 20th century which had recipies for soap, toothpaste, herbal medicines, etc etc. I think it might be time to pull out the old recipies (but not the ones for jello molds. They are still a little funky for my tastes
)… My dad grew up on a farm in Il which had no reliable eletricity until the ’50’s. In one generation’s time we are about to collapse in our own footprint. Yeah, I’m a little worried. Take care, guys, Juno
May 18th, 2006 at 5:01 pm
I’ve been gradually trying to wean myself off of bullshit products.
Unfortunately, I still use Tom’s toothpaste, since it has the least bullshit additives on the shelf (but is the most expensive!). Anybody know anything about using just baking soda to brush your teeth? Should you include anything else? Does it freshen breath also? What about the fluoride issue? I’m not so eager to put more fillings in my mouth.
What is a good substitute for aluminum-based antiperspirant? How about shampoo?
I might add that I’ve been trying to use less shampoo, but if I use too little I get horrible dandruff. I know Ran has a post about this, saying it took about a month for his body to adjust, but I can’t afford to bring snowstorms into meetings for the next month.
It is really difficult to live organically and healthy! And you usually end up paying quite a bit more for the efforts.
May 19th, 2006 at 7:41 am
My mom’s name was strawberry. Hehehe. It’s pronounced yagoda in my language. But she was named Yaga. Baba Yaga hahahaha.
May 19th, 2006 at 7:45 am
And I must be Mary the Black Cherry huh? But the last time I checked, I was shining at the core. So I can’t be that evil anymore. Just a minor burning off of surface impurities…I will be just fine!
May 19th, 2006 at 7:47 am
Hey! Marilyn did a commercial on Colgate in one of her movies….I think we’re bridging a link here somewhere…. hahahahahahaaa….
May 19th, 2006 at 7:49 am
Like in a Petri dish.
May 19th, 2006 at 7:54 am
A piece of AMBER, wow JK, do you know what the meaning of that is in the revelations? And I’m not talking about bugs.
May 29th, 2006 at 6:06 pm
[…] Another really interesting bit from that Eldridge Cleaver interview. This time, he is talking about how the black social movements got deconstructed or subverted when their leaders became politicized. Another very interesting look at how the opposition gets sucked up and assimilated (See this post for more): […] but we have a problem which is a political problem because when the laws were passed to open up the political arena for black people the most visible leaders and the ones who were able to get those jobs were our protest leaders so what they did, they took our protest machinery and transformed it into their personal political machinery to get them reelected which stripped the black community of any kind of organizational machinery and consequently it left us floundering and treading water in a miserable state. […]