Boycott actually works really well though, but only when targeted and coordinated.
That’s why the official BDS movement focuses on a small list of targets. In order for boycott to be effective, it has to be organized and mass scale, to go beyond individual consumer choices. They had some success with this tactic, that’s why BDS is so antagonized / criminalized in the imperial core.
People of conscience around the world are rightfully shattered, enraged, and sometimes feeling powerless about Israel’s Gaza genocide, armed, funded, and shielded from accountability by the colonial West, led by the US. Many feel compelled to boycott all products and services of companies tied in any way to Israel. The question is how to make boycotts most effective and impactful in holding corporations accountable for their complicity in the suffering of Palestinians.
The BDS movement uses the historically successful method of targeted boycotts, inspired by the South African anti-apartheid movement, the US Civil Rights movement, and the Indian and Irish anti-colonial struggles, among others worldwide.
We must strategically focus on a relatively smaller number of carefully selected companies and products for maximum impact. We need to target companies that play a clear and direct role in Israel’s crimes against Palestinians, as well as in violating the rights of other peoples/communities, and where there is real potential for winning. This is how the BDS movement has successfully forced companies like G4S, Veolia, Orange, Puma, and Pillsbury, among others, to end their complicity in Israel’s grave human rights violations and crimes.
Compelling large complicit companies, through strategic and context-sensitive boycott and divestment campaigns as well as well-thought-out shareholder strategies, to end their complicity in Israeli apartheid and war crimes against Palestinians sends a compelling message to hundreds of other complicit companies that “your time will come, so get out before it’s too late!”
The fact that Israel’s economy has been in steady, at times drastic, decline also helps in showing that business with Israel is not only unethical and illegal but also financially irresponsible. Israel is quickly turning into what the BDS movement calls a #ShutDownNation, with the dramatic flight of capital, severe brain drain, drying foreign direct investments in high tech, and a generally unsafe, unstable, and “collapsing” economy. Ethics and international law aside, this should help us mobilize most shareholders to oppose any investment in Israel.
That very much depends on what the measured outcome is. For a radlib the restriction of certain capital movement maybe considered a win but we are several years into a genocide after decades of ethnic cleansing.
BDS is actually better as a minimum litmus test within the constraints of bourgeoise conceptions of empancipation.
Put it another way: there’s really only one primary thing slowing down the genocide and ethnic cleansing and that’s the resistance fighters on the ground. BDS works best as an advertisement for that.
I tend to agree and I think the core of what bugs me about boycott strategies is the level of abstraction they operate on. The line “bourgeoisie conceptions of emancipation” I think elucidates this somewhat for me. It is often too much within this point of view that you can “reform the system from within via public pressure” without actually challenging power itself. Which makes me think boycott tends to be, at its best, a form of short-term harm reduction, but it’s little better than bourgeoisie electoral reform if there’s no comprehensive strategy beyond that. Even if you whittle away over time, the dominant power is going to work to reassert itself and if you didn’t wrest control over anything, then gains can very easily be lost. As seen in the US with the FDR-era reforms degrading into what the US is today.
I would venture to say people were taught wrong about power on purpose. Taught that improvements to society came through prolonged protest, essentially, rather than violent struggle. And when they operate on the belief that protesting an unjust system for long enough will fix it, that positions them to spin their wheels on action that never seriously challenges power. Never risks actual skirmishes, but instead acts merely like participants of the system who are a bit bothered with how it’s run.
Yes, of course. If you’re in the imperial core, it’s not enough to just sit back and cheer on the resistance online. We have to organize IRL and on a public site, we can only tell people how to do that legally. And BDS is already at the edge of that in Europe. I think we need more communities here about how to organize offline and about tactics that work, sharing useful skills and so on. How to support comrades in prison, how (not) to talk to police, how to build and coordinate affinity groups, how to do good opsec, all that stuff. Just complaining about the lack of revolution is easy. We have to build one.
this is what really frustrated me during this time. americans were turning it into an individualistic morality thing rather than collectively organizing. a boycott isnt abstinence, it’s supposed to be targeted restraint from buying from a company with a clear motivation so that the company stops something they were doing
idiotic question but couldn’t you argue that avoiding supporting imperialism is avoiding “sin” though since imperialism is objectively and morally wrong? wouldn’t it be correct then to hold oneself to such moralistic standards while doing the boycott? that’s how i do it anyways
Boycott actually works really well though, but only when targeted and coordinated.
That’s why the official BDS movement focuses on a small list of targets. In order for boycott to be effective, it has to be organized and mass scale, to go beyond individual consumer choices. They had some success with this tactic, that’s why BDS is so antagonized / criminalized in the imperial core.
That very much depends on what the measured outcome is. For a radlib the restriction of certain capital movement maybe considered a win but we are several years into a genocide after decades of ethnic cleansing.
BDS is actually better as a minimum litmus test within the constraints of bourgeoise conceptions of empancipation.
Put it another way: there’s really only one primary thing slowing down the genocide and ethnic cleansing and that’s the resistance fighters on the ground. BDS works best as an advertisement for that.
I tend to agree and I think the core of what bugs me about boycott strategies is the level of abstraction they operate on. The line “bourgeoisie conceptions of emancipation” I think elucidates this somewhat for me. It is often too much within this point of view that you can “reform the system from within via public pressure” without actually challenging power itself. Which makes me think boycott tends to be, at its best, a form of short-term harm reduction, but it’s little better than bourgeoisie electoral reform if there’s no comprehensive strategy beyond that. Even if you whittle away over time, the dominant power is going to work to reassert itself and if you didn’t wrest control over anything, then gains can very easily be lost. As seen in the US with the FDR-era reforms degrading into what the US is today.
I would venture to say people were taught wrong about power on purpose. Taught that improvements to society came through prolonged protest, essentially, rather than violent struggle. And when they operate on the belief that protesting an unjust system for long enough will fix it, that positions them to spin their wheels on action that never seriously challenges power. Never risks actual skirmishes, but instead acts merely like participants of the system who are a bit bothered with how it’s run.
Yes, of course. If you’re in the imperial core, it’s not enough to just sit back and cheer on the resistance online. We have to organize IRL and on a public site, we can only tell people how to do that legally. And BDS is already at the edge of that in Europe. I think we need more communities here about how to organize offline and about tactics that work, sharing useful skills and so on. How to support comrades in prison, how (not) to talk to police, how to build and coordinate affinity groups, how to do good opsec, all that stuff. Just complaining about the lack of revolution is easy. We have to build one.
this is what really frustrated me during this time. americans were turning it into an individualistic morality thing rather than collectively organizing. a boycott isnt abstinence, it’s supposed to be targeted restraint from buying from a company with a clear motivation so that the company stops something they were doing
idiotic question but couldn’t you argue that avoiding supporting imperialism is avoiding “sin” though since imperialism is objectively and morally wrong? wouldn’t it be correct then to hold oneself to such moralistic standards while doing the boycott? that’s how i do it anyways
https://lemmygrad.ml/post/12837245/8737236