Do Consumer Boycotts Work?
I Abstained From Amazon, Please Clap!
The past few days, perhaps like some of you, I was sent emails and Instagram posts about a consumer boycott planned for Friday, February 28. The planned “economic blackout” asked people to avoid buying from big corporations—Amazon, Target, fast food chains, Shell—and urged us to “shop local” instead.
One of the most shared posts about the boycott said, “Economic boycotts are one of the most effective ways to send a message to those in power - if you do not do right by the working class, we will not invest in this economy. No gas. No fast food. No Target. No Amazon. None of it.”
As much as we may want this to be true, alas, it’s not. Economic boycotts are not one of the most effective ways to send a message to those in power, nor the way to do right by the working class. It doesn’t send a message at all, frankly, except perhaps to your followers and friends who can congratulate you–PLEASE CLAP–for posting about shopping locally for 24-hours instead of, uh, buying gas.
Perhaps like many of us who saw these visuals at a glance, it seemed innocuous. Well intentioned. Not to mention easy: abstain from buying at Amazon? I can do that from my couch. I can add an item from a small business (irrespective of their business practices, see cartoon below) to my cart instead. I am a savior. I have fixed democracy. I’m a Good Boy!
When we feel an abundant sense of wrongness and don’t know how to address it, these types of emotionally-meaningful-but materially-hollow “actions” seem to proliferate. The promise of mobilizing and taking part in something that stands up to those in power is meaningful—but to harness this genuine potential and point it in the wrong direction undermines the project before it can even start.
To focus on consumer power in lieu of worker power does little more than assuage individual ego, upholding a sense of personal righteousness and morality rather than addressing actual power relations. It is a fundamental misunderstanding of how the world works.
It is the basis of the good boy: the liberal impulse to focus more on how one appears as defined by a slop of slogans, memes, and other short-hands in the internet age. It becomes a self-congratulatory and masturbatory process by which one can continually participate in a circle jerk of “we did it!” whilst doing absolutely nothing.
It’s not hard to understand why this is appealing, however, and why these types of “calls to action” go viral. Things are wrong. Really wrong! And scary as hell. We don’t know where to turn. There are no “adults in the room” anymore. Oh no, what if there never were! Ack!
Someone shares a simple solution, it’s shared by people you know, some people you trust. Finally, a way to do something. You share. You abstain. You, perhaps, fall into a common fallacy that oozes into every pore of our internet-riddled existence: if we consume the right things, and can thus label ourselves as the Good Boys (I’m an ally according to my X profile, etc) if we remain chaste in how and where we shop, we will miraculously extricate ourselves from the corrupt systems we exist within.
A post about the failure of economic boycotts from the Democratic Socialists of America sums this up succinctly: “We don’t have power as consumers. Working people are always going to need to buy things. And even if a large portion of workers stopped buying everyday goods from Target or Starbucks, we’d still need to pay rent, pay the mortgage, pay utilities, and ultimately depend on a larger supply chain. You can’t “opt-out” of capitalism.”
On a material level, this attempted boycott didn’t even register as a blip for big business. A retail advisor in market research told the AP that by midday, “any retrenchment on the part of consumers wasn’t visible…it doesn’t look like anybody’s really pulling back…if you get 5% or 10% of the people that don’t shop, that could happen on any given day because of the rain.” The viral boycott request had around the same impact on sales as a rainy day would.
So, on a literal level this didn’t work. But on another very practical level, where did the idea for this boycott come from? CNN reports that the origin of this boycott came from “a self-described mindfulness and meditation facilitator” named John Schwarz who has no organizing experience. “Schwarz’s call rapidly spread online. His video has been shared more than 700,000 times on Instagram and viewed 8.5 million times. Celebrities such as Stephen King, Bette Midler and Mark Ruffalo have encouraged people to participate. Reporters wrote and aired TV pieces about the boycott, propelling it further.”
If your boycott is 1) disseminated by one dude making front-facing videos 2) getting reposts from Bette Midler and 3) has gone viral amidst algorithmic gatekeeping that suppresses genuinely radical content, it is time to question the efficacy of what we are being asked to do, and get honest about what this is, be it a well-intentioned publicity stunt, a band-aid on a gaping, profusely bleeding wound, a brand building exercise for small businesses. Etc.
In a 1970 speech by Peter Camejo, “Liberalism, ultra leftism or mass action,” Camejo calls for mass action, detailing the difference between these schools of thinking as well as the processes by which people are radicalized. It still rings extremely true today, and I recommend reading it in full.
Camejo underscores the liberal impulse to do something—anything—and how misguided this is. “Liberals reject the concept that there is a relationship of forces between classes,” he writes. The rejection of the material reality of the world and how it operates will always result in hollow, emotionally-laden actions that do little more than congratulate oneself for appearing to be on the right side of history (Nancy Pelosi in kente cloth, anyone?) while wholly failing to address the actual structures that lead to said inequality, and the violence required to uphold this status quo. It will lead, as Camejo spoke about, to people trying to find the “good democrats” within the ruling party, rather than seeking collective action amongst the masses. Members of the ruling class have more tools than ever to pretend they are not in control of the levers and cogs that spin our country into its cursed orbit.
Slogans like end racism and end male chauvinism are not only abstract in their political meaning, they are also abstract because the antiwar movement cannot organize the struggle to win them. The antiwar movement cannot replace or substitute for an independent Black liberation movement, or an independent women’s liberation movement, for instance. Black people and women — not the antiwar movement — must decide which concrete demands will best further their struggle and how best to organize around them.
Many students may agree with the slogan End Racism, but how many of them understand the right of Black people to self-determination, the need for an independent Black political party, and the demand for Black control of the Black community?
He continues,
If you have a program of a lot of reforms and abstractions, it means that you can go right back to the liberal wing of the ruling class, because that is just what their program is also. You can go right back to Senator Kennedy, who can get up, as he did in his speech accepting the Democratic Party nomination for Massachusetts senator, and come out against racism, repression, poverty and many other things.
To help frame it in today’s terms, that same DSA post writes: “Strikes don’t happen because someone made an Instagram post calling for it and then everyone thought it was a good idea. Strikes are the result of long-term organizing that builds tightly structured organization through a series of escalating actions that show the level of support for the union, which if successful, leaves workers confident and the boss afraid.”
Anyways, just a brief (somewhat, I’m a rambler! classically!) reflection on the past few days. More soon, xoxo shelby + clem
