slashmarks:

galacticwiseguy:

toloveviceforitself:

normanbates:

saying “there is no ethical consumption under late capitalism” is a platitude. if you don’t want to at least try to make the world better for workers until “full communism” is established, by keeping an eye on human rights breaches, strikes, and other news, and avoiding the worst of the worst products if you have the ability to do so, it’s hard to believe that you really care about workers.

there is no activism in which doing nothing is the best option. that’s all.

The point isn’t that there’s nothing to be done for it, the point is that pretending you can fix it by *consuming correctly* is a distraction method meant to stop you from ever actually changing it, and it’s a distraction pushed by the exact people who want these sorts of systems to keep going.

The people who want to charge you double for their “ethical” products don’t want the “unethical” version to stop existing. They’d lose half their brand if it did. And they’d also lose their consumers’ classist distaste for the *other* consumers who can’t afford anything *but* the “unethical version”. That distaste keeps people buying their product just as much as any kind of actual ethics.

The unethical version is always cheaper, and so it will always exist as long as it’s *allowed* to exist. You can never boycott it out of existence because there will always be someone priced into buying it anyway.

But they know that we have a finite amount of money, energy, and attention, and that if they keep us busy policing each other for the purity of our purchasing choices, they can exhaust all three and keep us from going after actual solutions like just straight up outlawing sweatshop labor, or raising the minimum wage, or whatever. They can cause movements toward those small, incremental goals to fall apart as everyone involved purity tests each other to death over something that was never going to matter anyway. They can get us to devour each other and never bother them again.

“There is no ethical consumption” is another way of saying “nice try, but we still see you”.

tldr:

it never meant “buy whatever, give up.”

it meant “buy whatever while you do something ACTUALLY useful instead of meaningless ‘voting with your wallet.’”

Also: boycotts can work, but they don’t work via people trying to avoid all “unethical” products at once.

They work when they’re targeted campaigns with PR and media support and large amounts of people; and they work when they exist for a limited duration of time; and they work when they are accompanied by clear demands, that companies can meet, and end the boycott by meeting; and when applicable, they work via the organizers providing alternative vital services or food sources for the duration of the boycott for people who can’t afford to just go without or buy other brands.

There’s a really, really big difference between a boycott campaign in support of striking workers that significantly dips company products below the expected target for that quarter, and people avoiding certain products because they associate them with “unethical” brands.