this post was submitted on 02 May 2026
74 points (96.2% liked)
Slop.
846 readers
381 users here now
For posting all the anonymous reactionary bullshit that you can't post anywhere else.
Rule 1: All posts must include links to the subject matter, and no identifying information should be redacted.
Rule 2: If your source is a reactionary website, please use archive.is instead of linking directly.
Rule 3: No sectarianism.
Rule 4: TERF/SWERFs Not Welcome
Rule 5: No bigotry of any kind, including ironic bigotry.
Rule 6: Do not post fellow hexbears.
Rule 7: Do not individually target federated instances' admins or moderators.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
The research is pretty clear on this that personal boycotts have zero impact on businesses. Boycotts that have worked in the past have worked not because they made a material dent in profits but because they were public relations disasters and brought social and ultimately legal attention to the behavior that was being resisted. Which means that, materially, even if sales didn't change at all a loud PR disaster would be more effective than a person choosing not to buy something and telling their friends.
Your econ 101 assessment is about macro trends and it always breaks down when you try to apply it in the micro. That's why we study theory. You won't find anything in Das Kapital, or the writings of any theorist or practical revolutionary that says "you are a bad person if you consume something that was made by exploitation and the way to salvation is by not consuming those things".
Moralizing is how we break solidarity.
This is exactly how I know you're looking at this from a privileged and chauvanistic perspective.
If you were actually interested in global solidarity then you'd see that supporting companies with particularly exploitative practices like child labor break solidarity much more strongly with the people being exploited. Your position is 100% correct if and only if you write those people off and only preoccupy yourself with not alienating other Westerners.
What you're arguing right now is that "Please consider not supporting child labor" is more of a breach of solidarity than supporting child labor is!
You gave us an out of context comment. The comment says that not purchasing the chocolate does not change the fact that a child laborers for it. The comment also states that, for the sake of argument, the theoretical consumer in question doesn't have access to ethically sources chocolate. The comment comes to the conclusion that choosing not to buy has no material effect on the victims. And it is correct.
You seem to think that this means they are trying to absolve someone of their responsibility. I disagree with you. You also seem to think that purchasing the chocolate breaks solidarity with the victims. I disagree with you.
First off, the company that sells the chocolate is the retailer. They have already purchased the chocolate candy from the chocolate candy distributor. The chocolate candy distributor may or may not have already paid the chocolate candy producer. The chocolate candy producer has definitely already paid the cocoa distributor. The cocoa distributor has already paid the cocoa producer. A person buying chocolate from a corner store has not actually given any of their money to the company engaged in child labor. The money that goes to the company engaged in child labor is spent months before the choice of the individual is made, and the amount of money is based on large-scale global aggregate trends, not based on the individual morality of consumers. If we have a moral responsibility, it's to raise awareness of the practices, which companies are engaged in it, and, if you're not going to engage in revolutionary liberation, then at least pursue reforms that can actually have an impact on the practice instead of saying "I have met my moral responsibility through self-denial."
As for breaking solidarity with the child laborer, I question how you think that happens. The child laborer has no idea which chocolate candy products contain their labor. The child laborer has no relationship with the chocolate candy consumers. There is no means by which solidarity can even be formed here such that it could be broken by the act of purchasing a chocolate candy, unless you are positing some psychic karmic cosmic framework of morality. This is partly why visibility is critical. Activists who seek to raise consciousness on these topics often use photos or videos of actual children and then associate them with specific brands and trademarks in an attempt to create the conditions for solidarity to begin.
The problem is that you (and other commenters here) are inverting the base and superstructure. You don't free the workers through convincing people of the morality of it, you convince the people of the morality of it by freeing the workers. Ideas are determined by our material conditions. Yes, ideas then influence our material conditions, but they do not determine it. We must actually change the material conditions to change the way people think fundamentally, and the evidence is against the idea that private consumer boycotts can be that material change.
Nowhere do I ever claim that boycotts or ethical consumption produce sufficient change. "the evidence is against the idea that private consumer boycotts can be that material change," yeah and I never said anything like that.
This means literally nothing, except that it displays your ignorance of economics and price signals.
Ah, I see. So really it should just be, like, "Workers of America, unite!" Or perhaps "White workers, unite!" See, I got confused, because I thought it was, "Workers of the world, unite!" I thought the whole thing was supposed to be about recognizing common interests along class lines regardless of nationality. I guess if someone is distant and exploited enough, it's fine to take part in that exploitation yourself. They'll probably never even find out!
But, I do wonder, while you're in this organization doing all this work showing the horrible crimes and abuses conducted by a particular chocolate company, should you lie about the fact that you yourself won't give up those chocolate bars to your fellow activists, or just to the press?
You like to keep your goalposts mobile I see. Sure, you personally never said that personal boycotts have material effect. You just think that people should adhere to a moral code because the moral code has a material effect. Or something. It's hard to tell what your actual position is.
Yes, liberation is a global project. But as we have seen, global projects compromise local projects. You must first organize your neighbors. If you cannot organize your neighbors, you cannot organize with people across an ocean (unless you move). You literally cannot be meaningfully "in solidarity" with someone you don't know, can't locate, can't communicate with, and can't have any effect on. You can be psychically in solidarity with them, and believe that praying or self-denial is a form of solidarity, but materially, it's just emotional self-soothing.
If you want to be in solidarity with those child laborers you actually need to do something that puts help them. Researching their stories is not even enough, but it's the first step to being able to tell their stories. Telling their stories to others is the bare minimum step in solidarity with others at a distance. If you're telling stories about consumers failing the moral standard, but can't tell the stories of specific peoples in specific places and specific times, you're attacking your neighbors and defending no one. This is not solidarity.
Why are you sitting on your ass commenting from devices and exchanging data with servers hosted in data centers so that others get dopamine hits from staying engaged on their devices that exchange data with servers hosted in data centers? Is that fine? Is it fine that you are taking part in that exploitation yourself? Your position is contradictory because you are allowing idealism to supersede materialism.
This is the right place for moral reasoning! If you are organizing against something, actually building solidarity instead of just thinking good thoughts about things, then the moral quality of your behavior and disciplines actually have material effects - on the people you are in relations with. When you are a lone consumer with no relationships to anyone organizing to bring about change, your choices have no effect except on your own self image. But when you enter into relations on a basis of, for example, ending a specific practice, then establishing ethical norms for behavior that signal commitment, at a minimum, is actually quite materially valuable. And even those people who organize against child labor for chocolate have to wear shoes and clothes (and there is child labor in those supply chains), walk streets (and prison slave laborers make the signs), use the internet (and the millions of devices produced with materials that are unethically sources), and live on stolen indigenous land.
It can't be global solidarity with all struggles simultaneously and everyone adhering to moral codes of total self-denial and disengagement. We create our own history, but we do not do so under circumstances of our choosing. We inherit our place in history from the past, and we must make the most effective choices we can to bring about the world we wish to see.
And telling individual people that they are personally morally failing and thus unwelcome and impure because they purchase a few dollars worth of chocolates a month from the retail end of a global supply chain that was built up over several centuries might not be the most effective path to bringing about that world.
Have you ever tried asking? Or is pontificating your only mode?
Great, we've reached "sent from your iPhone" discourse.
You do what is reasonable and practical. Having a phone is a pretty essential requirement to participating in society, it would require a significant amount of effort to give it up and would interfere with my ability to share and promote ideas and to communicate and organize with people. The same is not true of a Hershey bar.
This strikes me as just deceptive and opportunistic. You're trying to make other people care about something that you only care about as an excuse.
And telling people that they are personally morally failing for actually caring instead of pretending to care and thus "idealist" and "moralizing" and unwelcome probably isn't the most effective path to that either.
I am not telling you that you are morally failing. I am telling you that you are materially failing. If you put moral valence on that, that's on you. I don't think you're a bad person. I think you're good person with ineffective behaviors and incorrect ideas. Do you think I am a good person with ineffective behaviors and incorrect ideas, or do you think I am a bad person?
Them: we should improve society somewhat You: why are you moralizing at me?
We get it. We need to meet people where they are, we can't just go in guns blazing. This does not absolve us of our responsibility to move the masses towards global solidarity. To think otherwise is tailism.
Them: "You must stop buying chocolates that have child labor in their supply chain and if you don't you are literally supporting child labor."
Me: "Not only is this communication not effective and convincing a person, even if it was effective the results would not improve society because you are addressing the wrong leverage point and moving a single person every time to browbeat someone will never result in liberation"
We of course need to move the masses towards global solidarity. That comes from putting in real effort to build relationships, not attack the moral character of strangers.
At what point did anyone in this thread attack the moral character of strangers?
I have no idea whether you're a good or bad person. I think you are promoting ineffective behaviors and incorrect ideas.
Fair and well met.
In every single response you've attacked this person for disagreeing with you and only weakly if at all engaged with the arguments being made.
Maybe you'd like to answer for them then?
I don't think it's a complicated question. Should you not lie to the press and public about it? Just openly munch down on a chocolate bar while playing a video of the kids behind you?
Help me understand how this works in y'all's minds.
From the sidelines it looked like they were arguing based on system level thinking and you're arguing based on the premise that individual participation of any level makes you fully culpable.
I don't think individual action makes any meaningful difference and that's what's being argued. It seems pretty clear you believe the opposite and at a purely abstract level I guess there's validity to this but at that point I could make an argument that you are just as personally culpable for all injustice in the world for not doing an adventurism as they are for buying a chocolate bar
That's not really an answer to my question.
Y'all keep assuming I'm coming at this from some kind of position of ethical capitalism, which I've clarified several times is not the case.
Do you see how it could undermine a publicity campaign against a particular product if the people promoting it refused to give it up, especially if it's something that's purely a treat, like a chocolate bar?
Even the chuds get this. Liberals are the only ones who don't.
The point is not to be perfect but to do better and to encourage those around you to do the same. People aren't bad for existing under capitalism and we all indulge in the exploitation of others to some degree but that's utterly irrelevant to the point at hand. We can be better.
There is inherent value in cultivating moral virtue because people are moral actors who must practice moral acts lest they falter or be derelict in their moral duty when faced with a moral dilemma. People don't have time to read tl;dr philosophical works and people will be faced with novel moral dilemmas that don't have tl;dr philosophical works written about them yet. Thus, they must have the tools developed to fly solo.
To use an overly used hypothetical, whether one decides pulling the lever is the morally correct choice is a very different question from asking what steps must be taken to make sure that the lever actually gets pulled when the trolley is about to cross the track. Writing paragraphs upon paragraphs about how you should pull the lever means nothing if you abandon your moral duty to pull the lever when the time comes. Only virtue ethics seems to at least see this as a very practical problem (their solutions admittedly leaves much to be desired).
The question should be whether abstaining from certain commodities constitutes a form of moral cultivation that's useful as far as cultivating moral agents who can automatically perform morally good acts is concerned. I do believe it is useful in that regard. You say that boycotts only work within an organizational context, but how would the org even stick to the boycott if no one in it has practical experience with abstaining and every one within it does not see its material value? For the org to even vote on the boycott, there must be members of the org who have already privately abstained from the commodities in question.
To use chocolate as an example, the members of the org won't vote to boycott chocolate unless there's already a critical mass of members who have already privately abstained from chocolate or a similar commodity like meat and who can then use their critical mass as leverage to convince the rest of the org that boycotting chocolate is the right tactical thing to do. Without practical experience, the boycott would most likely fail because individual members lack experience to flexibly adapt their daily lifestyle to a new normal nor have the tools equipped to face mounting social pressure, things that they would have if they actually have experience privately abstaining.
Firstly, I'm not sure if that's true. But assuming it is for argument, then clearly what would be called "idealist liberal moralizing" has actually worked historically. More so than first-world "I can do anything I want because I've labelled myself proletarian, it's every other class who's morally compromised." Which is why you people switch from "morality doesn't exist" to "it's immoral to make '1st world workers' (actually you) not eat slave chocolate."
And you'll say, actually socialism is more effective at improving working conditions than boycotts, but it'll be based on a bad implication that boycotts hinder the advancement of socialism and can't be done at the same time.
This is sophistry. What has worked in organizing around a moral cause, expressing one's own moral convictions, and inviting others to join them. This is fundamentally different behavior than telling people they are bad/immoral people who are supporting the suffering of others (i.e. demonizing them).
False dichotomy / strawman that no one in this thread has actually put forth.
Way to out yourself. No one proposed it was immoral to make 1st world workers not eat slave chocolate. In fact, that's the only thing that would work short of revolutionary liberation - organize a group of people with shared moral conviction and get a reform in place to structurally prevent access to these products, either through law or through "voluntary" capital allocation, both of which require interest convergence.
You can stop othering me any time you want.