No, it can’t. It’s an ultraliberal fiction about a self-correcting market we know for a fact doesn’t play out in reality.
This would require wealth to be roughly evenly divided, it would require enough supply to always have a supplier available who brands on whatever issue the consumer is trying to push on every market and it would require the consumer to research every issue and track it throughout the corporate ownership chain effectively.
It just doesn’t work like that. The way it works is I don’t like to pay Microsoft OR Google for their crappy office suites, but the open source alternatives are bad and the people I work with require using those for compatibility reasons, so I pay both.
What I can do, though, is set up a social democratic state where I don’t have to make an ethical or political statement with my choice of office software, I have a government in place that will fine the crap out of them for their infractions.
And if that’s not working, my action can be placed on pressuring the government, for which I have way fewer constraints and way more agency.
If it makes you feel funny to pay for a thing absolutely pay for something else. That’s all well and good. But don’t fool yourself and others by pretending it’s an effective form of political action or a moral responsibility. It’s neither.
So you’re saying that the 1965-1970 Delano Grape Strike and subsequent 10-year supermarket grape boycotts were useless and didn’t cause any real change? Or the Montgomery Bus Boycott?
Had to look up Delano, but I’m not surprised to find that it was apparently not a boycott, but a larger organized, ongoing labor conflict. I knew about Montgomery (which in itself is a crazy sign of cultural imperialism, because I have no business knowing that), and the same applies.
You can set up a genuine boycott of something as part of a larger set of organized actions, particularly in a local conflict. You can’t rely on consumers worldwide spontaneously abandoning a global oligopoly as a way to enact any meaningful change. At most you’ll get a PR response. At most.
But the boycott is still an important part of the social movement, isn’t it? Even if, as in the Delano Grape Strike, it takes a decade or more to force change, with plenty of activists disappearing, arrested, tortured, or killed.
No, it can’t. It’s an ultraliberal fiction about a self-correcting market we know for a fact doesn’t play out in reality.
This would require wealth to be roughly evenly divided, it would require enough supply to always have a supplier available who brands on whatever issue the consumer is trying to push on every market and it would require the consumer to research every issue and track it throughout the corporate ownership chain effectively.
It just doesn’t work like that. The way it works is I don’t like to pay Microsoft OR Google for their crappy office suites, but the open source alternatives are bad and the people I work with require using those for compatibility reasons, so I pay both.
What I can do, though, is set up a social democratic state where I don’t have to make an ethical or political statement with my choice of office software, I have a government in place that will fine the crap out of them for their infractions.
And if that’s not working, my action can be placed on pressuring the government, for which I have way fewer constraints and way more agency.
If it makes you feel funny to pay for a thing absolutely pay for something else. That’s all well and good. But don’t fool yourself and others by pretending it’s an effective form of political action or a moral responsibility. It’s neither.
So you’re saying that the 1965-1970 Delano Grape Strike and subsequent 10-year supermarket grape boycotts were useless and didn’t cause any real change? Or the Montgomery Bus Boycott?
Had to look up Delano, but I’m not surprised to find that it was apparently not a boycott, but a larger organized, ongoing labor conflict. I knew about Montgomery (which in itself is a crazy sign of cultural imperialism, because I have no business knowing that), and the same applies.
You can set up a genuine boycott of something as part of a larger set of organized actions, particularly in a local conflict. You can’t rely on consumers worldwide spontaneously abandoning a global oligopoly as a way to enact any meaningful change. At most you’ll get a PR response. At most.
But the boycott is still an important part of the social movement, isn’t it? Even if, as in the Delano Grape Strike, it takes a decade or more to force change, with plenty of activists disappearing, arrested, tortured, or killed.