The idea that boycotting is not participating in society could not be more perversely incorrect. Boycotting prioritizes society above yourself. Neglecting to boycott is the selfish act of putting your own personal benefit above all else and abandoning one of the few tools we have to improve things while feeding harms of society. Both kinds of consumption are “participation” but if you choose to feed the baddies then your participation is detrimental.
It’s really perverse to refer to boycotters as non-participants when they are actively taking on the burden of informing themselves of who the bad players are, tracking supply chains to brands, and sacrificing selfish benefits in order to participate in the least destructive way for the purpose of improving society.
Convenience zombies who just grab whatever they want may choose poorly, or not. But it’s worse than a coin toss whether the outcome is detrimental because the most harmful suppliers have the advantage of not being burdened by ethics. Scrapping ethics enables them to offer the most value for the money and undercut the more ethical choices. So if you simply neglect ethics in your consumer decision, you are only looking at value for the money and statistically expected to choose a more socially detrimental option.
It harms everyone because the lesser of evils gets driven out and the worst suppliers prevail. The US saw this with printers when Oki pulled out of the US marketplace. Now the least detrimental option tends to be Brother, which still exposes people to shenanigans. We lost the most ethical option while HP dominates.
I would like to add that boycott can be very effective in applying pressure. So much so that the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement
BDS is a Palestinian-led movement for freedom, justice and equality. BDS upholds the simple principle that Palestinians are entitled to the same rights as the rest of humanity
is illegal in several places. Most of states in the US, Canada, France, Germany, UK are some of them - the traditional colonialists.
Indeed they would not have made the cost and effort to ban BDS if it had no effect. From your link:
The states that have passed legislation making it illegal for state agencies to work with companies that boycott Israel include Texas, Ohio, Illinois, Indiana, Florida, Arizona, Georgia, Iowa, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Arkansas, Minnesota, Nevada, South Carolina, Tennessee, Alabama, Rhode Island, New Jersey, Oklahoma, Kansas, North Carolina, Utah, Missouri, Idaho, West Virginia, Colorado, Mississippi and New Hampshire.
Irony hi-lighted. Especially Michigan.
I sometimes take into account this list of the worst of the worst pro-forced-birth states when deciding on regional boycotts:
pro-forced-birth¹ states
- Alabama
- Arkansas
- Georgia
- Kentucky
- Louisiana
- Mississippi
- Missouri
- North Dakota
Ohio(fixed in 2023)
Regional boycotts are blunt, high-effort, and low effect. But if I need to break a tie between otherwise ethically similar market choices the regional boycotts come into play. For each of those states I look at the top 10-15 biggest corporations in those states and target them. That’s an old list though (pre-R/v/W overturn) and I think abortion law changed a bit after the overturn. But in any case maybe the intersection of pro-forced birth states with the anti-BDS states would be a relatively meaningful and managable to boycott. Result would be:
- Alabama
- Arkansas
- Georgia
- Mississippi
- Missouri
Ohio(abortion policy fixed in 2023)
I probably need to update my pro-forced-birth list though. The end game is that revenue to businesses in that state feed state tax which then feeds the scumbag politicians there. So it’s a very round about way of indirectly defunding lousy policy makers.
¹ I say pro-forced-birth instead of pro-life for accuracy, because these states generally: oppose gun control, support death penalties, oppose welfare, oppose public healthcare, etc… nothing about them is really pro-life.
Correction: Ohio added abortion rights to its constitution in 2023
Thanks for the update!
I’m onboard. My whole life people around me have treated the economy and the environment as two abstract concepts that give us things, eternally opposed to one another - insisting that we need to make sacrifices to protect the economy (giving up a minimum wage, long-lasting infrastructure, and - most importantly - huge swaths of the world around us). After all, the economy gives us jobs and cheap cheap products. You won’t be able to visit a national park or spend much time outside in general but you can buy a bigger TV every year so it’s all worth it right?
I was already buying as little as possible for more general environment reasons. Producing less waste, reducing the need for new manufacture and shipping ever so slightly (and the need for extraction along with them). I put a lot of work into sheparding items around so they wouldn’t end up in the landfill.
But now I’m doubling down on those actions and the motive is spite rather than worry for my world (and though it doesn’t say great things about me, that’s definitely the stronger and more effective emotional state).
I’m going to do my best to sit here like a tiny black hole in the economy, taking in my wage and spending out as little as possible, and helping others do the same. I can make and fix a lot of things for others and help them get lots of stuff for free that would otherwise be thrown away. They’ve complained for years about millennials and now zoomers killing industries because we don’t buy enough. Buddy that wasn’t even deliberate; you ain’t seen nothing yet.
