those demons love free market capitalism right? It’d be a shame if some people got together to do a bit of praxis…
And how do we do this in a concrete fashion champ
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.
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.
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.
Boycotts bring wider attention and support because under capitalism, purchases make up a significant component of daily life/entertainment. They are also a metric of that support.
By running in-person tabling in boycotts, you create a means by which to build connections and movements, particularly if you do so under the banner of a socialist organization. You may be surprised at how unaware most people are, yet open to talking about it. The core organizing issue is why the boycott is being called for. The anti-apartheid movement succeeded in moving the dial in the imperial core through this tactic.
its one thing to try this with a country which has state opponents to organise & support movements against it.
national borders and customshouses make it somewhat feasible to avoid an israeli product; good luck doing that with texas when they’re doing the lions share of petroleum work
cant even get to the damn store without economically supporting them lmao
#BoycottDivestSanction Virgil Texas
BDS
B ullet
D irect to
S kull
