Your Individual Boycotts Aren’t Helping
Boycotts against corporations can be powerful tools. But they have to be waged as part of larger collective struggles with real plans to win — not simply as acts for frustrated individuals to take on their own.
Widescale popular involvement in a struggle generally requires not only a widely and deeply felt demand but a clear path to victory. (Michael Nigro / Pacific Press / LightRocket via Getty Images)
An Instagram post of mine about Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) top corporate collaborators went viral a few weeks ago. The fact that it got over four million views and more than 35,000 shares suggests that people are starting to grasp the central role private businesses play in enabling Donald Trump’s paramilitary thugs. But I was puzzled and a bit frustrated by most people’s reactions. I explicitly underscored that I wasn’t making yet another online-based call for individuals to stop shopping at bad companies:
We don’t need vague calls to stop shopping at these places or one-off rallies — we need sit-ins, pressure campaigns, *organized* boycotts, employee and consumer petitions, sickouts, demands from elected officials, and non-violent disruption to force these companies to immediately break from ICE.
Yet to my surprise, almost every reply treated my post as a push for individual consumption changes. Here’s a representative sample of comments:
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