DOW

In “The Professional-Managerial Class,” Barbara and John Ehrenreich cite a pamphlet handed out at a demonstration against DOW Chemical in 1967 at the University of Wisconsin. The pamphlet reads: “We pick this week to demonstrate against DOW (chemical corporation), against the university as a corporation and against the war because they are all one” (Ehrenreich 37). This is interesting to me because I wrote a paper for Prof. Wynn’s Rhetoric, Science, and the Public Sphere course last term on DOW Chemical’s latest (2006) ad campaign “The Human Element.” In particular I critiqued Story of Our Planet which is a one-minute video that can be found on Dow Chemical’s website, http://www.dow.com/hu/ under, “The HU Campaign” tab.

In researching this topic I was able to find a lot of material on DOW’s problematic past (the creators of napalm and agent orange) and protesters reactions, such as those on college campuses. Even though DOW has continued to operate with detrimental effects on humans and the environment, the publications reporting on DOW’s ad campaigns have shifted. When at one point a previous ad campaign by DOW was critiqued in the New York Times for trying to put a positive spin on this company, the only publications I could find about “The Human Element” were found in very specialized PR periodicals that praised the ad campaign.

I think “The Human Element” ad campaign and the lack of a critical reaction is what happens when there is too much separation between different professions, between ad agencies and the capitalist critiques found in Between Labor and Capital. I believe it is becoming increasingly important to take these critiques and put them to work, because if corporations like DOW are allowed to “re-image” themselves every other decade, then we will all continue to be “shocked” when the inevitable crises these corporations perpetuate continue to occur. I believe that putting these critiques to work is necessary in order to avoid the situation Sandy Carter describes: “Marxists have remained shackled to antiquated theory” (Carter 98-9). To experiment with this I’ve taken a passage from the introduction by Pat Walker that I found interesting but not entirely useful to my DOW topic, and altered it for my purposes. The original reads:

“One way certain technologies help the capitalist to keep the upper hand is by depriving workers of their understanding of the production process. By separating the conception of the work from its execution, the particular technology makes it seem natural that mental work is separated from and higher than manual work” (Walker XVI).

To revise this for my purposes:

“‘The Human Element’ ad campaign helps DOW Chemical, Draft FCB, and Gollin Harris keep the upper hand by depriving anyone watching television between 2006-today of an understanding of larger historical processes. By taking advantage of the common conception that advertising is separate from critical inquiry (the mindset that “It’s just a commercial”), Story of Our Planet relies on a separation and hierarchy of mental work in viewing the news or a documentary film as higher then an advertisement.”