those demons love free market capitalism right? It’d be a shame if some people got together to do a bit of praxis…
You create lists of companies based in or operating heavily in Texas, create lists of their products, and select a few that you expect to have the highest impact.
create lists of companies based in or operating heavily in Texas
i got bad news for everyone in the united states
It’s going to be a very large number, for sure - though that was also the case for SA and Israel.
Or even slave-made goods, where it was sometimes very difficult to avoid slave-made cotton (though former slaves managed to do so more often than everyone else). Even when participation is piecemeal, inadequate, or close to impossible, it’s a valuable recruiting tool and it does bring attention and public pressure.
I’m more interested in the mobilization aspect of it. How do we get enough mobilization to boycott an entire state within the country that those same people live? I’m all on board with the idea, and it seems to me that what the courts are doing are enough to validate something like a boycott, but how do you convince these libs?
You pick out a few, possibly rotating targets to boycott at a time. BDS is targeted at the entire state of Israel, which manufactures all kinds of crap - so they picked out a small subset that they believed had a good balance between impact and being actionable.
There is currently a boycott campaign against Nabisco while the factory workers are on strike for safe conditions, better pay, and maintaining their healthcare benefits. While the call is to boycott the company’s products, as part of a megacorp there are too many to actually tell people about in a normal conversation, so you tell them that there are a bunch, tell them where they can find a list, and mention the big ones like Oreos.
In both cases, the boycott isn’t going to destroy the problem in question, not does anyone organizing for it expect it to do so. It is primarily about bringing awareness to them through the primary public social activity in the imperial core: buying shit at a store. And when a boycott actually does get attention from the targets and has some form of positive change (or at least PR), it feeds into the movement and is a valuable recruiting tool.
Tons of libs are happy to do this kind of stuff as well. Their activism usually starts and ends at voting and consumer choices, after all. We can’t expect full radicalization from not eating an Oreo, but every bit helps: oh Nabisco is trying to fuck over their workers who just want very reasonable things, oh wow that’s a huge corporation screwing over th little guy, oh hey [socialist organization] is pushing for this good thing, what are they about?" I’ve had lots of conversations with people who didn’t know about any of the local socialist orgs but were very positive about our work.
Ok, so this is more about messaging than any end goals. There could be some minimal impact, like BDS in relation to Israel, but it is more about creating awareness. I suppose it’s not the worst end goal, but I think you could’ve been clearer about that initially.
The Nabisco example is interesting, but I’m not sure how relevant it is to BDS for Texas, specifically in regards to the recent legislation. The Nabisco strike will end soon, that much is guaranteed. Mondelez has distribution capability all across North America, so production certainly wasn’t hurt. Some plants were already closed or outsourced elsewhere, so most likely it means they can throw a bone to their current workers in the US, and not see their bottom line get hurt at all.
