those demons love free market capitalism right? It’d be a shame if some people got together to do a bit of praxis…
BDS
B ullet
D irect to
S kull
Now, what goal would a BDS re:Texas hope to accomplish?
There are no calls for material gains for the working class, sure there is racism, sexism, and settler-colonialism there, but that is not much more pronounced there compared to other, say, Southern States, or even really any states. The calls here are on the basis of ideological difference between liberals and populist reactionaries.
Perhaps you think that BDS re:Texas will provide a way to build anti-capitalism in the state of Texas. Surely, with along side a BDS movement there is an army of fellow comrades with sufficiently developed mutual aid networks capable of securing material needs to be secretly transported into Texas to help the comrades there build grow their membership and education programs? No? There isn’t? The support would be seized immediately?
Then what? You hope to see the comrades there build relationships with the bourgeois? Is that what is needed in the present moment in North America’s historical development? At the behest of not being “sectarian” I won’t go into my opinions on why this strategy is a losing one, but that is not the point. The point is, at present, the development of the reactionary efforts has taken on a more populist flavor than ever in the United States. These reactionaries are actively recruiting disaffected members to do terrorism and target minorities and comrades in this state (see El Paso) and as their populism grows, so too will their aid networks, so too will their businesses which will remain free to move into Texas and aid their fellow reactionaries there, while targeting comrades.
The socialist program in America is not sufficiently developed, especially not in the South, and I won’t hear liberals advocate for the turning into martyrs of our comrades, to have to answer to these agitated-reactionaries, as their lives degrade through a BDS, while not being able to provide them the means of doing so, during a period of time where the preservation of, and development of a socialist program there is of paramount importance.
No, there is no “boycotts only hurt the working class and make them reactionary” rule. This does not follow from history nor a material analysis.
damn i guess there arent 2 other fucking words there like “divest” and “sanction”. convenient for a liberal to just shoehorn the discussion away from whats being implied to obfuscate the meaning of some other liberals point.
edit to rail against this liberal harder: “wow wouldn’t it be fucking PRAXIS if we used bourgeois state violence against an entire group of people based off some fucking imaginary lines???”
I think you need to take a little break from toxic R*dditor brain. We are all comrades here and you’re having a bit of a moment rather than communicating with comrades.
My point stands if you make it full BDS re: Texas. The SA boycott movement was also BDS, which you should already know if you’re feeling so comfortable loudly shitting on others about it.
Speaking of deflection and liberalism, your point is still not based on a historical or material analysis and is actually the line of The Economist.
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.
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.
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.
