Pepsi: 1, Activism: 0

by the Editors of Z Magazine

We were talking recently with our friends at South End Press about the frustrations in our line of work - trying to change the world. One SEPer told a story about her student days at UMass-Amherst. They had tried to raise consciousness around U.S. machinations in El Salvador. Lots of hard work, little response.

Then one day, the university administration decided to eliminate co-ed bathrooms. Instantly, students rallied, stormed buildings, occupied offices. Our friend at SEP had never seen such unified, militant activism. Meanwhile, the left debated whether to join.

We all have organizing stories, many of which cast doubt on our insight into what moves people to protest. Recent response to a Pepsi Cola screw-up in the Philippines is a classic case in point.

Last year, Pepsi splashed ads for weeks across the Philippine newspapers, radio and TV: "Today you could be a millionaire." There was to be a specially marked bottle cap. The owner would win a million pesos, about $40,000. Families began drinking Pepsi with every meal and snack, praying for a fated bottle cap. Each night, they would circle the TV to hear what number, etched in the cap, meant freedom from want.

Then one night, Pepsi announced on TV that anyone holding cap "349" was a winner. Only trouble was, as you probably know, it was the wrong number. As the Los Angeles Times reported: "Instead of a single 1 million peso winner, up to 800,000 bottle caps marked '349' had been printed. Tens of thousands of Filipinos soon began demanding billions of dollars that Pepsi refuses to pay."

Since then, according to the Times, "At least 32 delivery trucks have been stoned, torched or overturned. Armed men have thrown Molotov cocktails at Pepsi plants and offices. In the worst incident, police say a fragmentation grenade tossed at a parked Pepsi truck in a Manila suburb February bounced off and killed a 5-year-old girl and wounded six people."

Pepsi executives are inundated with death threats. They use round-the-clock bodyguards and vary when the hours they work and travel. Heavily armed guards ride shotgun on Pepsi trucks. Only two company employees remain in the country, one of whom has experience working in Beirut.

So far more than 22,000 people have filed civil suits seeking damages, and there have been more than 5,200 criminal complaints for fraud and deception. "Even more remarkable," notes a LA Times reporter, "in a country crippled by daily electric blackouts and endemic corruption and poverty, the only protests that regularly draw angry crowds into the streets are those against Pepsi."

Apparently thousands have joined anti-Pepsi organizations such as Coalition 349. One woman wilted in Manila's steam-bath heat during a recent anti-Pepsi protest. Her husband, she said, died of heart failure after a similar rally last year. She said she is prepared to do the same. "Even if I die here, my ghost will come to fight Pepsi," she told the Times. "It is their mistake. Not our mistake. And now they won't pay. That's why we are fighting."

The Filipino people live with a system that robs their labor, dignity and freedom every day. This systematic, unrelenting injustice yields, from most victims, no response. Pepsi makes a one-time mistake that precludes one individual from becoming rich and the error provokes bedlam.

Consider what would happen if the lottery in some U.S. state was revealed to have lied about prizes for the past year. They made up the names of the winners. Those people never existed, and the money was pocketed by government agencies and bureaucrats. Lottery ticket buyers never had a chance to win. We suspect there would be bedlam. Yet the fact that lottery ticket buyers are always being ripped off, collectively, doesn't phase anyone.

Like the UMass co-ed bathroom story, there is, somewhere in here, a message about why people persist in oppressed circumstances without rebelling, and why people periodically rebel, seemingly with no significant precipitate change in their conditions.

One reading is that the difference between the Pepsi mistake (people not getting what they hoped for), and the continuous affront of capitalism (people being endlessly, systematically robbed of their daily labor and potential) is that in the first case we can understand what the alternative is, whereas in the latter case, our state of pain seems to be an unavoidable fact of nature.

If that is the main difference, the implication for organizing is that until we see that every ad on TV, every message from the government, every job is no more promising than a Pepsi bottle cap and far more malicious, and until we can envision a real alternative, we are not going to make any significant changes.

This column from Z's Sept. 1993 edition, is reprinted with permission.

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Contents on this page were published in the October/November, 1993 edition of the Washington Free Press.
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