That doesn’t justify buying it. “No ethical consumption under capitalism” is not a “get out of responsibility” card that you can use to justify whatever you feel like, which is exactly how they’re using it.
You’re making an idealist argument that somehow, despite your choice having literally no material impact that the choice still matters. That’s pure moralizing.
I know we’re all raised to believe in morality like this, but it’s quite useless. I was not immoral for being raised in America on stolen land, nor were my parents, or their parents. We shouldn’t have been in that situation, and we should have been dispossessed of our property and made to participate in reconciliation and reparations to the people we displaced, but that wasn’t an option because our historical context does not allow for that to be an individual choice. I can’t fix that problem with my choice to live or not live in a home on stolen land. In fact, I can do a lot more good living on stolen land and using my privilege to collaborate with the indigenous peoples and first nations to bring about the conditions of their liberation than I can by living under a bridge or self-deporting.
You say “get out of responsibility” like somehow consuming chocolate where the original cacao was harvested by child laborers is literally something one can respond to by making purchasing choices. But the point is that one does not have responsibility of this sort. The responsibility is towards the child, not the transaction, and the transaction does not help nor harm the child, as articulated by that poster. The child is no better off simply because one feels guilt or shame at their purchases, and no better off simply because some people who consume something get shamed or harassed by others. The child will be better off when the system of unequal exchange is shutdown in that particular sector, and we all have a responsibility to shut that system down. Not buying candy doesn’t have any effect on that. Private boycotts do not have material consequences. Big loud public ones sometimes do. But if one actually cares about child labor in the cacao industry, one’s personal moral choices about consumpitare not universalizable and one’s personal responsibility is almost entirely orthogonal to one’s personal consumption habits.
I’m not engaging further in this argument. I am not open to having my mind changed that lines of logic like, “I personally oppose the institution of slavery, but freeing my own slaves won’t do anything to fix the systemic problem so I’m not going to do it” have any validity whatsoever. You and them are both dead wrong, likely because of chauvanism and privilege.
Your position would be correct even under a capitalist / austrian-economics lens.
The invisible hand of the free market wouldshould signal to cocoa producers that fair trade / non-child labor labelling gets more sales despite the premium, and in turn more companies would begin to migrate to the more ethical option with enough push back.
This specific scenario is literally how Econ-101 is taught in even the most conservative institutions, LOL.
Wild how we’ve become so treat-pilled that even “progressives” think they have no impact on a system.
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”.
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.
First off, the company that sells the chocolate is the retailer. They have already purchased the chocolate candy from the chocolate candy distributor.
This means literally nothing, except that it displays your ignorance of economics and price signals.
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.
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.
I guess if someone is distant and exploited enough, it’s fine to take part in that exploitation yourself.
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.
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?
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.
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 behaviour that was being resisted.
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.
But assuming it is for argument, then clearly what would be called “idealist liberal moralizing” has actually worked historically.
This is sophistry. What has worked is 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).
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.”
False dichotomy / strawman that no one in this thread has actually put forth.
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.”
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.
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.
How do you propose that we cause those interests to converge shy of convincing people to share those interests with us? A revolution is also a convergence of interests.
Capitalists respond to legitimate threats to profit. Organizing a loud boycott that demonstrates the ability to move a concentrated amount of people in a condensed timeline at numbers large enough to be noticed statistically creates interest convergence, because the capitalist interest of preserving profit becomes threatened if they continue to do the behavior that the boycotters are protesting.
Thia is reformism though, and there’s a major problem with reformism, which is that the boycotter boycotting chocolate candy due to child labor in the supply chain will only succeed in getting a specific candy bar company to choose to buy it’s cocoa from somewhere else. This will not end child labor, and in fact, since it reduces the demand for child labor on cacao, it reduces the price of using that child labor for something else. In fact, given that most of the thousand food brands are actually owned by only 8 companies, they’ll just shift the child labor pool to a different product line under the same company.
The research is pretty clear on this that personal boycotts have zero impact on businesses.
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.
Even a capital-backed idealistic ideology supports an idealist argument? That’s like saying even Marx criticised capitalism.
There’s a moral argument in favour of these boycotts, but that’s all it is. Even if one holds comrades to such moral standards, and I’d agree with that, it’s still not a real version of combating capital. Idealists would have us believe the political economy is simple enough that a fraction of a fraction (people who hold to a boycott, among people informed enough to know about the wrongdoing sufficiently) of their consumer base refraining can compel companies.
Snowflake in an avalanche type of arguments only hold up from high potential, in a manner of speaking changes that are inevitable anyway. Improving conditions against capital requires building up potential, uphill. This can be done by organising and educating, not as an [expected] accumulation of individual actions and browbeating people for not engaging in just that.
I mean I think the boycotts have been working to an extent thus far. “israeli” foods are being renamed / their origins are being hidden. I was at a store yesterday and a significant number of products that are under the cocacola brand now no longer have ANY labeling related to cocacola, even though they did previously have a mention of it somewhere on the label.
Starbucks shit down dozens of locations in my city alone, although I’m sure the financial situation in amerikkka plays a big role in part of this, I also do attribute it to the boycotts. There have been plenty of Yemeni / saudi (🤮) owned coffee shops popping up around where I live that are booming in business while Starbucks is faltering.
I don’t buy anything that has a relation to the zionist entity, and if I’m out with more liberal acquaintances from work / sports teams, I’ll organically offer an alternative location by calling it trash coffee / burgers / pizza / etc., and they always oblige with my request without me having to call them nazis for even considering those locations.
You could call this an organized boycott, but a lot of the places / food items aren’t on the actual BDS list, it’s just individuals collectively deciding they don’t want to spend money on bloodshed.
You’re going to have a hard time forming a coherent political position if you can’t distinguish between owning slaves (and the responsibility of emancipating them) and buying dollar-store chocolate (and the “responsibility” of not buying it).
I have a very coherent political position, you’re just treat-brained and I just got done arguing with someone equally treat-brained and I’m not interested in continuing. Like I’m said, I’m sure you can find someone else around here to explain how you’re wrong.
You’re limiting the impact purchases have to only companies choosing to adopt more ethical labor practices. This ignores that the scale of the industry matters, and is affected by consumption. If consumers quietly started buying 50% less chocolate, companies would continue to exploit child laborers, but the amount of unethical labor that the industry could bear would be reduced.
You’re claiming to have the materialist position, but you’re ignoring that the commodities embody child labor. The idea of “voting with your wallet” is capitalist bullshit, and market trends will not transmit ethics to ceos. But there is an unbreakable link between the consumption of commodities and the labor used to make them. It doesn’t matter whether the consumers are organized, what their intent is, or if the companies are even aware of what’s happening.
Whatever buying a chocolate bar does or doesn’t say about a person’s morals, you can’t claim that it’s disconnected from the people who produced it. There are plenty of reasons why the relationship is not one to one, but you can’t make a materialist argument that raw cacao has nothing to do with finished chocolate products.
This ignores that the scale of the industry matters, and is affected by consumption. If consumers quietly started buying 50% less chocolate, companies would continue to exploit child laborers, but the amount of unethical labor that the industry could bear would be reduced.
This is literally impossible based on individual consumer choice. The chocolate industry has been developed over centuries of colonial exploitation. There are entire bodies of law governing just chocolate. Whether I or you or my neighbor is browbeat into not buying specific brands of chocolate could never reach even a 10% impact on the industry. That’s never how boycotts have been effective. They are effective because they are publicly organized, very loud, and do serious reputational harm to brands and to politicians. That is to say, people had to organize to make the consequences of staying the course worse than changing course. Quiet personal morality doesn’t rise to that standard.
there is an unbreakable link between the consumption of commodities and the labor used to make them. It doesn’t matter whether the consumers are organized, what their intent is, or if the companies are even aware of what’s happening.
But now you are ignoring scale. You are correct that the link is there. But you fail to recognize that even if you managed to get an entire village to stop buying those chocolates, if you didn’t propagate the ideas and create a movement, your village would not even factor into the economics. There are entire counties where certain chocolates have not yet managed to establish market penetration. Losing a village of 10,000 consumers wouldn’t be noticed, unless someone realized that there was some propaganda that was effective in shutting down purchasing behavior and became worried about that propaganda spreading to other locations and creating large scale problems in the future.
This is why loud boycotts sometimes win. Not because they actually hit the bottom line but because they create interest convergence whereby the people who have both the financial incentive to use child labor and the power to choose otherwise become aware that choosing otherwise has become more inline with their financial incentives. This does not happen because half the world just stops buying chocolate because of a personal moral code. It happens because a successful propaganda campaign was demonstrated to be highly effective in a small context which creates the threat of becoming highly effective in a larger context. Capitalism behaves in such a way that it will never need to reach 50% of buying behavior because by the time you have demonstrated you have an effective propaganda campaign the investors are already reallocating capital to maintain their profits.
And we’ve seen what doesn’t work - atomizing people, ostracizing them, browbeating strangers with whom we have no relations, etc. These are the tools of oppressors. These are the tools of religious missionaries in a colonial project. We can directly moralize with people we have existing relationships with. With people we don’t have relationships with, it’s almost always counter productive. Instead, building relationships with more people is how we get to the position where we can engage in moral discourse with more people. Connect first, then educate, then make demands. Not the other way around.
you can’t make a materialist argument that raw cacao has nothing to do with finished chocolate products.
I never did. I simply said that the choices of an individual consumer cannot impact child labor practices and that moralizing about it won’t do it either and that there is evidence spanning over a century that supports this position and also evidence that illuminates what does work and why.
I agree with you that pressuring people to change individual purchasing decisions is not a good strategy, or a good use of someone’s time, and that there are better approaches to reach the same goal. My point is that you’re taking the factors that limit a person’s ability to exert their consumer choices, and making a leap to say that the consumer has no material impact on the world. That doesn’t make much difference for the moral implications of this issue, but it’s anti-materialist, and it gets in the way of understanding how the world operates.
The chocolate industry has built a machine of cruelty that controls governments, and has continued for hundreds of years despite all the people it has immiserated and motivated to fight against it. No one is going to take it down by putting a candy bar back on the shelf at the grocery store. And yet, the industry is the size that it is, and no larger. If the capitalists had their way, it would be ten times bigger, and then ten times bigger next year. It’s limited by material factors, including the fact that people will only buy so much of the finished product. Marketing, lobbying, mercenaries, etc. are all tools that companies use to push against those limits, but the fact is even someone who doesn’t give a shit about labor practices, and puts five cases of chocolate bars in their cart before deciding they only really need four, is participating in limiting how many child laborers cacao companies are capable of exploiting.
The impact that any one person, or the handful of people one person could recruit, can have on overall consumption is very small compared to the global population, but those minuscule changes do propagate through the system of production and exchanges. You can’t be a communist and not believe that tiny contributions can add up to meaningful change. Organizing and coordinating those contributions is far more important than any one individual, and it’s good to emphasize that and redirect to it, but that can’t be done by dismissing that the small changes matter at all.
You make a good case for why the focus shouldn’t be on moralizing specific consumer choices, and why the products someone buys says little about them in comparison to the impact they could have in other areas. You’re going to have to rely on the strength of those arguments because, while it would be nice if we could fully absolve ourselves by saying that the commodities we buy have exactly zero impact on the world, it isn’t true.
You’re right. It’s too strong a claim to say that individual consumption has zero effect on the economics. The better claim is that an individual choosing to stop consuming something has no material effect on child labor. It has a material effect on a specific quantity of product purchased in specific location during a specific time period. That quantity is not directly tied to the amount of child labor consumed. The economic system has layers upon layers of buffers between the consumer and the child laborer and the individual choices would need to build to point where they can have a material impact on the first buffer before they can have an impact anywhere else.
This is why the actual effective boycotts are about demonstrating power, not about actually causing a mass quantitative change through changes in consumption. The ability to do it deliberately and in a focused way demonstrates effective organizing that could be used at a mass scale, and thus the capitalists are required to meet the demands of the boycotters in order to prevent them from actually wielding that power to do mass economic damage.
It’s NOT the individual choices that make this change, though individual choice has a role to play as discussed elsewhere. It’s the ability to organize and demonstrate the power of the organization that makes this change. It has nothing to do with the actual loses of profit and everything to do with the risk of future losses of profit.
You’re still making a distinction where there isn’t one. The capitalist system has enough layers, buffers, and complexities that trying to quantitatively study the impact of any one transaction becomes impossible after a few steps, but that doesn’t mean its impact is zero. Individual choices need to build up to a certain point to have enough impact on a layer to be measured statistically if you’re looking to write a paper about it, but there is no actual threshold that prevents small changes from being passed down the production chain. The layers of the economy are not static objects held in place by friction unless shoved by a big enough force. They are an ongoing response that aggregates all of the interactions that feed in to them. They often don’t respond efficiently, effectively, or ethically like the propaganda says they should, but they are responsive. The global economy is made up of all the individual transactions, it’s not a separate entity that is insulated from all but the biggest market trends.
The chain connecting consumers to child exploitation involves many individual decisions that are generally too big to be affected by one chocolate bar purchase. Hersey’s decision of how many tons of ingredients to buy from their suppliers will be rounded to some whole number, so the amount they buy next year is unlikely to be changed by a slight difference in sales numbers this year. But there necessarily has to be some tipping point where any more loss of sales will cause them to cut their order. Although rare, a small number of specific purchases will have a hugely exaggerated effect. For this purpose, the vast scale of the global economy compared to an individual provides a very high number of avenues where a small change can potentially have a unexpectedly large outcome. The bigger the market, the more avenues, and the more transparent the layers are to propagating the impact of the transaction.
Buying one chocolate bar statistically has a direct impact on the extent of child labor in the world. There’s no way to know which specific chocolate bars may trigger small tipping points in companies along the line choosing to adjust their production up or down slightly, but every single chocolate bar purchase plays a role in maintaining the child labor used by the industry.
None of this means that buying chocolate is morally equivalent to owning child slaves. The impact of buying a chocolate bar on child labor is incredibly small, and almost any political activism a person does would be far more meaningful, but there is no material basis to say that the end products are disconnected from the workers who made them. The only reason to double down on claiming that is out of moral discomfort.
That’s just not how the math works. The reality is that the choices of individual consumers is indistinguishable from statistical noise in the data. A single error in a spreadsheet formula has more impact than an individual’s choices. No, as systems get bigger and more complex it does not mean that the avenues for individual choices become more numerous. It means that individual choices get averaged out. Again, more consumption patterns are changed by people dying then people making private ethical choices.
Buying one chocolate bar statistically has a direct impact on the extent of child labor in the world. There’s no way to know which specific chocolate bars may trigger small tipping points in companies along the line choosing to adjust their production up or down slightly, but every single chocolate bar purchase plays a role in maintaining the child labor used by the industry.
No. It doesn’t not. This is a ridiculous claim. The very first thing that will happen if sales lag because of your choices is that retailers will shift to places where the demand is more reliable. The bars easily transported and they are shelf stable. They can be moved to wherever demand for chocolate is increasing. The larger the system, the more easily it can absorb tiny temporary blips in consumption patterns. This is why what is required is organization, because you have to be capable of bringing the movement into a sufficient number of markets such that moving the product around would not avoid the hit to sales.
The impact of buying a chocolate bar on child labor is incredibly small
Again, it’s literally non-existent. Children don’t make chocolate bars. They harvest and process cacao. Their product is fungible. If the bars sell less, they just move the product of the child labor down market. But even that scenario is ridiculous because your personal choices are indistinguishable from random noise in consumption data. The larger the market, the more organized you need to be to cross the threshold of random noise.
there is no material basis to say that the end products are disconnected from the workers who made them
No one is claiming this. My claim is that this connection is insufficient to be used as leverage by simply choosing to not buy the chocolate bars in private. The labor was already paid for, the bars were already paid for. Your choices have to rise to the quantity required to be noticed statistically in a data set of large scale consumption, and unless you’re buying 100x more than a normal person, your choices won’t be noticed in the data.
The only reason to double down on claiming that is out of moral discomfort
No one is making the claim in the first place let alone doubling down on it
Industries grow and shrink as a result of changes in consumption. The change in outcome is a sum of all the changes in the conditions. All changes, whether we have the tools to measure and distinguish them or not.
You’re inventing a mechanism where a change being too small to be considered important means its effects are erased from reality. An organized boycott is still composed of many individual immeasurable purchase decisions. If the small actions had no way to exert their effects, they couldn’t make up for that with numbers. Capitalists would be able to will a boycott out of existence just by refusing to see it as a trend. You could will away a dune based on the impossibility of following a single grain of sand.
Again, industries are not boulders that sit static until given a big enough shove. They are dynamic processes that continually fluctuate as a result of all the transactions that did or did not happen at each stage of production and distribution. The friction of whether or not to make a change is already always being overcome by other market forces.
Industries are governed by thousands of people making endless small adjustments to the operation of the node they manage in response to the changes made by the managers of the nodes they interact with. At no point is the manager who decides by how many children the cacao company can expand its workforce going to hear about a movement becoming organized enough to be considered a boycott. They will make their decision as a result of the decisions of their nearest organizational neighbors. The layers and layers of decision makers aggregate and obfuscate the decisions made leading all the way back to the consumer(s). In the same way that it’s impossible to trace the impact of a single purchase forward from a store, it’s also impossible for the person hiring the children to trace back and selectively be influenced only by coordinated efforts, but not by silent individuals. If it is possible for a boycott to succeed, it is only because the individuals who participated each had a small impact.
You can say that it’s a negligible effect, you can say it’s unimportant when compared to the effect of [X], but your claim was “an individual choosing to stop consuming something has no material effect on child labor”. That is not true. It’s a tempting simplification that offers comforting reassurance morally. In many cases it’s close enough to true to accept as a premise. But if you take it to be literally true, then you’ve necessarily buried some magical thinking into your understanding of the world.
This is literally impossible based on individual consumer choice.
Boycotts are by definition not about individual consumer choice, but rather encouraging collective action to reduce consumption in a measurable way. They are one of many tools in our toolkit that cannot simply be discarded because that alone will solve the issue. Diversity of tactics is necessary.
Private boycotts do not have material consequences. Big loud public ones sometimes do.
In other words private boycotts DO have material consequences, as long as they’re mediated through collective action, I’d like to see how you organize these collective boycotts without the individual actions of private boycotters and the appropriate moral character that brings light to the suffering of child laborers. Is there a psychic beacon that magically convinces everyone big boycotts are worthwhile, or maybe it has to start somewhere?
This is why egoist arguments like yours are incoherent at scale, instead of merely viewing morality as a religious phenomenon, you should view it in part as a powerful signaling mechanism that can solidify an underlying collective energy, which serves as the catalyst for the material transformation you seemingly care about
It’s a distinction without a difference in the first instance, whether solo or collectively; at the end of the day it’s still your wallet that’s the leverage point, unless you got a joint personal bank account with your local org?
nah it’s the mass action that makes it do literally anything. otherwise i’m boycotting every company i happen to not buy anything from, which on most days is all of them.
I personally do view morality in that light. My assessment is that OP does not and instead believes that we have a moral responsibility to not eat chocolates if we think that child labor was found in the supply chain, which ignores pretty much everything about everything else, including the device used to post the content, host it, and share it. I know for a fact that the phone in my hand used exploitation, unequal exchange, and ecosystem destruction. I wouldn’t be surprised if there was both child labor and slave labor in the supply chain to produce this phone.
The same is true for the public transportation I ride. The same is true for the jobs I work and the materials I have to used. The same is true for hospitals and medicine manufactories. We can’t just decide that we’re going to pick a single commodity and say that you have a moral responsibility to abstain from consumption and if you don’t then you’re an enemy of the struggle.
Some commodities are more vulnerable to collective pressure than others; recognizing the distinctions in production among commodities is not hypocrisy. For example, boycotting chocolate is simpler than boycotting oil, and moral responsibility varies based on the circumstances that gave rise to that commodity and whether or not those circumstances can be addressed socially
When we boycott one thing but not another, morality as a signaling mechanism takes on a tactical character; similarly, when you’re laying siege, you aim for the paths of least resistance before storming the keep. Building upon one victory after another, gaining confidence and cohesion as you go
You can’t climb every wall simultaneously, so it’s pointless and counterproductive to use that impossibility as an excuse to not do something, even individually, which is just the component cell of collective action
100% until the conclusion of the last sentence. We have fundamentally and thoroughly demonstrated that individual consumer choice has almost no impact on the externalities. Recycling is probably the most egregious example of this. What fixed the CFC problem was cap and trade regulation, not consumer choice. These problem were never caused by individual consumer choice so making individual consumers choices will never be the solution. Not purchasing candy is not a component cell of collective action. A component cell of collective action would be showing up to the meetings every week and holding the discipline agreed to within the group based on material analysis of the system you are trying to change. If we don’t have groups that have meetings, then choosing not to buy chocolate is going to be about as effective as praying for the child laborers. Because that’s what these private individual consumer choices ultimately are - a way to self-soothe while standing on a pile of corpses. Are we going to sit here and argue that even though that group over there may be fascists organizating to maintain a white supremacist aociety, at least they’re recycling?
Action must be grounded in theory, theory must be grounded in material analysis. Material analysis must be grounded in action. We have seen this loop for personal consumer boycotts in the Global North and the result has been no material change in the conditions of the workers. We have also seen how this form of moralizing works against organizing and recruitment because it actively destroys relationships. And of course it does, it’s literally the same type of proselytizing that Abrahamic religions use to divide populations against each other. When we look towards other models of communicating morality, we see that it is entirely possible to integrate with people who are behaving immorally (up to a point) and that the outcomes in the short and long term are substantially better.
Don’t let quixotic liberal marketing campaigns lead you into reactionary traps; of course what people decide (or are induced) to send their money on matters to any cohesive material analysis of the circuit of capital, disruptions of the realization phase of the circuit requires boycotts as an available tool, consumption is not merely personal, it’s also structural and leveraging that structure requires convincing quite alot of people to INDIVIDUALLY withhold money from a firm
So again, unless you have a magic psychic beacon, the convincing part requires a moral narrative as a component of the necessary organizing. Because the logistics of boycott organizing still requires individual initiative, integrity, and discipline to work
Not purchasing candy is not a component cell of collective action. A component cell of collective action would be showing up to the meetings every week and holding the discipline agreed to within the group based on material analysis of the system you are trying to change
If the component cell of collective action requires showing up to meetings every week to convince people not to purchase candy, then I hate to break it to you, but yes not purchasing candy in that instance does become a component cell of collective action
I think you and I are on the same page here, for the most part anyway. The problem I am trying to illuminate is not that boycotts require not purchasing, but rather that not purchasing is not the effective part of a boycott. The effective part of a boycott is the organizing, the not buying is a result of the boycott not a cause. You cannot create a boycott by not buying. You can only create a boycott by organizing. And as you say, once you are organizing to create a boycott, your personal choices suddenly start to matter - not because of their economic impact but because of their propagandistic impact.
This is critical to understand. The effect of even 10k people not buying is totally unnoticeable. 10k people stop buying specific things every day whether through death, illness, preference, or economic hardship. But the effect of 10k people all connected to the same movement, or all physically located in a single place, or all doing it deliberately at the same time? That’s noticeable. Again, not in the bottom line, but in the expression of power and the tabling of a threat of future impact to the bottom line. That’s what moves capitalists.
We’re all on the same(ish) page here. We’re just comrades engaged in the dialectical process of improving our commitment to global solidarity, after all 💚
That doesn’t justify buying it. “No ethical consumption under capitalism” is not a “get out of responsibility” card that you can use to justify whatever you feel like, which is exactly how they’re using it.
You’re making an idealist argument that somehow, despite your choice having literally no material impact that the choice still matters. That’s pure moralizing.
I know we’re all raised to believe in morality like this, but it’s quite useless. I was not immoral for being raised in America on stolen land, nor were my parents, or their parents. We shouldn’t have been in that situation, and we should have been dispossessed of our property and made to participate in reconciliation and reparations to the people we displaced, but that wasn’t an option because our historical context does not allow for that to be an individual choice. I can’t fix that problem with my choice to live or not live in a home on stolen land. In fact, I can do a lot more good living on stolen land and using my privilege to collaborate with the indigenous peoples and first nations to bring about the conditions of their liberation than I can by living under a bridge or self-deporting.
You say “get out of responsibility” like somehow consuming chocolate where the original cacao was harvested by child laborers is literally something one can respond to by making purchasing choices. But the point is that one does not have responsibility of this sort. The responsibility is towards the child, not the transaction, and the transaction does not help nor harm the child, as articulated by that poster. The child is no better off simply because one feels guilt or shame at their purchases, and no better off simply because some people who consume something get shamed or harassed by others. The child will be better off when the system of unequal exchange is shutdown in that particular sector, and we all have a responsibility to shut that system down. Not buying candy doesn’t have any effect on that. Private boycotts do not have material consequences. Big loud public ones sometimes do. But if one actually cares about child labor in the cacao industry, one’s personal moral choices about consumpitare not universalizable and one’s personal responsibility is almost entirely orthogonal to one’s personal consumption habits.
I’m not engaging further in this argument. I am not open to having my mind changed that lines of logic like, “I personally oppose the institution of slavery, but freeing my own slaves won’t do anything to fix the systemic problem so I’m not going to do it” have any validity whatsoever. You and them are both dead wrong, likely because of chauvanism and privilege.
Tell it to someone else.
Your position would be correct even under a capitalist / austrian-economics lens.
The invisible hand of the free market
wouldshould signal to cocoa producers that fair trade / non-child labor labelling gets more sales despite the premium, and in turn more companies would begin to migrate to the more ethical option with enough push back.This specific scenario is literally how Econ-101 is taught in even the most conservative institutions, LOL.
Wild how we’ve become so treat-pilled that even “progressives” think they have no impact on a system.
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.
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.
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 is 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.
How do you propose that we cause those interests to converge shy of convincing people to share those interests with us? A revolution is also a convergence of interests.
Capitalists respond to legitimate threats to profit. Organizing a loud boycott that demonstrates the ability to move a concentrated amount of people in a condensed timeline at numbers large enough to be noticed statistically creates interest convergence, because the capitalist interest of preserving profit becomes threatened if they continue to do the behavior that the boycotters are protesting.
Thia is reformism though, and there’s a major problem with reformism, which is that the boycotter boycotting chocolate candy due to child labor in the supply chain will only succeed in getting a specific candy bar company to choose to buy it’s cocoa from somewhere else. This will not end child labor, and in fact, since it reduces the demand for child labor on cacao, it reduces the price of using that child labor for something else. In fact, given that most of the thousand food brands are actually owned by only 8 companies, they’ll just shift the child labor pool to a different product line under the same company.
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.
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Even a capital-backed idealistic ideology supports an idealist argument? That’s like saying even Marx criticised capitalism.
There’s a moral argument in favour of these boycotts, but that’s all it is. Even if one holds comrades to such moral standards, and I’d agree with that, it’s still not a real version of combating capital. Idealists would have us believe the political economy is simple enough that a fraction of a fraction (people who hold to a boycott, among people informed enough to know about the wrongdoing sufficiently) of their consumer base refraining can compel companies.
Snowflake in an avalanche type of arguments only hold up from high potential, in a manner of speaking changes that are inevitable anyway. Improving conditions against capital requires building up potential, uphill. This can be done by organising and educating, not as an [expected] accumulation of individual actions and browbeating people for not engaging in just that.
I mean I think the boycotts have been working to an extent thus far. “israeli” foods are being renamed / their origins are being hidden. I was at a store yesterday and a significant number of products that are under the cocacola brand now no longer have ANY labeling related to cocacola, even though they did previously have a mention of it somewhere on the label.
Starbucks shit down dozens of locations in my city alone, although I’m sure the financial situation in amerikkka plays a big role in part of this, I also do attribute it to the boycotts. There have been plenty of Yemeni / saudi (🤮) owned coffee shops popping up around where I live that are booming in business while Starbucks is faltering.
I don’t buy anything that has a relation to the zionist entity, and if I’m out with more liberal acquaintances from work / sports teams, I’ll organically offer an alternative location by calling it trash coffee / burgers / pizza / etc., and they always oblige with my request without me having to call them nazis for even considering those locations.
You could call this an organized boycott, but a lot of the places / food items aren’t on the actual BDS list, it’s just individuals collectively deciding they don’t want to spend money on bloodshed.
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You’re going to have a hard time forming a coherent political position if you can’t distinguish between owning slaves (and the responsibility of emancipating them) and buying dollar-store chocolate (and the “responsibility” of not buying it).
I have a very coherent political position, you’re just treat-brained and I just got done arguing with someone equally treat-brained and I’m not interested in continuing. Like I’m said, I’m sure you can find someone else around here to explain how you’re wrong.
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You’re limiting the impact purchases have to only companies choosing to adopt more ethical labor practices. This ignores that the scale of the industry matters, and is affected by consumption. If consumers quietly started buying 50% less chocolate, companies would continue to exploit child laborers, but the amount of unethical labor that the industry could bear would be reduced.
You’re claiming to have the materialist position, but you’re ignoring that the commodities embody child labor. The idea of “voting with your wallet” is capitalist bullshit, and market trends will not transmit ethics to ceos. But there is an unbreakable link between the consumption of commodities and the labor used to make them. It doesn’t matter whether the consumers are organized, what their intent is, or if the companies are even aware of what’s happening.
Whatever buying a chocolate bar does or doesn’t say about a person’s morals, you can’t claim that it’s disconnected from the people who produced it. There are plenty of reasons why the relationship is not one to one, but you can’t make a materialist argument that raw cacao has nothing to do with finished chocolate products.
This is literally impossible based on individual consumer choice. The chocolate industry has been developed over centuries of colonial exploitation. There are entire bodies of law governing just chocolate. Whether I or you or my neighbor is browbeat into not buying specific brands of chocolate could never reach even a 10% impact on the industry. That’s never how boycotts have been effective. They are effective because they are publicly organized, very loud, and do serious reputational harm to brands and to politicians. That is to say, people had to organize to make the consequences of staying the course worse than changing course. Quiet personal morality doesn’t rise to that standard.
But now you are ignoring scale. You are correct that the link is there. But you fail to recognize that even if you managed to get an entire village to stop buying those chocolates, if you didn’t propagate the ideas and create a movement, your village would not even factor into the economics. There are entire counties where certain chocolates have not yet managed to establish market penetration. Losing a village of 10,000 consumers wouldn’t be noticed, unless someone realized that there was some propaganda that was effective in shutting down purchasing behavior and became worried about that propaganda spreading to other locations and creating large scale problems in the future.
This is why loud boycotts sometimes win. Not because they actually hit the bottom line but because they create interest convergence whereby the people who have both the financial incentive to use child labor and the power to choose otherwise become aware that choosing otherwise has become more inline with their financial incentives. This does not happen because half the world just stops buying chocolate because of a personal moral code. It happens because a successful propaganda campaign was demonstrated to be highly effective in a small context which creates the threat of becoming highly effective in a larger context. Capitalism behaves in such a way that it will never need to reach 50% of buying behavior because by the time you have demonstrated you have an effective propaganda campaign the investors are already reallocating capital to maintain their profits.
And we’ve seen what doesn’t work - atomizing people, ostracizing them, browbeating strangers with whom we have no relations, etc. These are the tools of oppressors. These are the tools of religious missionaries in a colonial project. We can directly moralize with people we have existing relationships with. With people we don’t have relationships with, it’s almost always counter productive. Instead, building relationships with more people is how we get to the position where we can engage in moral discourse with more people. Connect first, then educate, then make demands. Not the other way around.
I never did. I simply said that the choices of an individual consumer cannot impact child labor practices and that moralizing about it won’t do it either and that there is evidence spanning over a century that supports this position and also evidence that illuminates what does work and why.
I agree with you that pressuring people to change individual purchasing decisions is not a good strategy, or a good use of someone’s time, and that there are better approaches to reach the same goal. My point is that you’re taking the factors that limit a person’s ability to exert their consumer choices, and making a leap to say that the consumer has no material impact on the world. That doesn’t make much difference for the moral implications of this issue, but it’s anti-materialist, and it gets in the way of understanding how the world operates.
The chocolate industry has built a machine of cruelty that controls governments, and has continued for hundreds of years despite all the people it has immiserated and motivated to fight against it. No one is going to take it down by putting a candy bar back on the shelf at the grocery store. And yet, the industry is the size that it is, and no larger. If the capitalists had their way, it would be ten times bigger, and then ten times bigger next year. It’s limited by material factors, including the fact that people will only buy so much of the finished product. Marketing, lobbying, mercenaries, etc. are all tools that companies use to push against those limits, but the fact is even someone who doesn’t give a shit about labor practices, and puts five cases of chocolate bars in their cart before deciding they only really need four, is participating in limiting how many child laborers cacao companies are capable of exploiting.
The impact that any one person, or the handful of people one person could recruit, can have on overall consumption is very small compared to the global population, but those minuscule changes do propagate through the system of production and exchanges. You can’t be a communist and not believe that tiny contributions can add up to meaningful change. Organizing and coordinating those contributions is far more important than any one individual, and it’s good to emphasize that and redirect to it, but that can’t be done by dismissing that the small changes matter at all.
You make a good case for why the focus shouldn’t be on moralizing specific consumer choices, and why the products someone buys says little about them in comparison to the impact they could have in other areas. You’re going to have to rely on the strength of those arguments because, while it would be nice if we could fully absolve ourselves by saying that the commodities we buy have exactly zero impact on the world, it isn’t true.
You’re right. It’s too strong a claim to say that individual consumption has zero effect on the economics. The better claim is that an individual choosing to stop consuming something has no material effect on child labor. It has a material effect on a specific quantity of product purchased in specific location during a specific time period. That quantity is not directly tied to the amount of child labor consumed. The economic system has layers upon layers of buffers between the consumer and the child laborer and the individual choices would need to build to point where they can have a material impact on the first buffer before they can have an impact anywhere else.
This is why the actual effective boycotts are about demonstrating power, not about actually causing a mass quantitative change through changes in consumption. The ability to do it deliberately and in a focused way demonstrates effective organizing that could be used at a mass scale, and thus the capitalists are required to meet the demands of the boycotters in order to prevent them from actually wielding that power to do mass economic damage.
It’s NOT the individual choices that make this change, though individual choice has a role to play as discussed elsewhere. It’s the ability to organize and demonstrate the power of the organization that makes this change. It has nothing to do with the actual loses of profit and everything to do with the risk of future losses of profit.
You’re still making a distinction where there isn’t one. The capitalist system has enough layers, buffers, and complexities that trying to quantitatively study the impact of any one transaction becomes impossible after a few steps, but that doesn’t mean its impact is zero. Individual choices need to build up to a certain point to have enough impact on a layer to be measured statistically if you’re looking to write a paper about it, but there is no actual threshold that prevents small changes from being passed down the production chain. The layers of the economy are not static objects held in place by friction unless shoved by a big enough force. They are an ongoing response that aggregates all of the interactions that feed in to them. They often don’t respond efficiently, effectively, or ethically like the propaganda says they should, but they are responsive. The global economy is made up of all the individual transactions, it’s not a separate entity that is insulated from all but the biggest market trends.
The chain connecting consumers to child exploitation involves many individual decisions that are generally too big to be affected by one chocolate bar purchase. Hersey’s decision of how many tons of ingredients to buy from their suppliers will be rounded to some whole number, so the amount they buy next year is unlikely to be changed by a slight difference in sales numbers this year. But there necessarily has to be some tipping point where any more loss of sales will cause them to cut their order. Although rare, a small number of specific purchases will have a hugely exaggerated effect. For this purpose, the vast scale of the global economy compared to an individual provides a very high number of avenues where a small change can potentially have a unexpectedly large outcome. The bigger the market, the more avenues, and the more transparent the layers are to propagating the impact of the transaction.
Buying one chocolate bar statistically has a direct impact on the extent of child labor in the world. There’s no way to know which specific chocolate bars may trigger small tipping points in companies along the line choosing to adjust their production up or down slightly, but every single chocolate bar purchase plays a role in maintaining the child labor used by the industry.
None of this means that buying chocolate is morally equivalent to owning child slaves. The impact of buying a chocolate bar on child labor is incredibly small, and almost any political activism a person does would be far more meaningful, but there is no material basis to say that the end products are disconnected from the workers who made them. The only reason to double down on claiming that is out of moral discomfort.
That’s just not how the math works. The reality is that the choices of individual consumers is indistinguishable from statistical noise in the data. A single error in a spreadsheet formula has more impact than an individual’s choices. No, as systems get bigger and more complex it does not mean that the avenues for individual choices become more numerous. It means that individual choices get averaged out. Again, more consumption patterns are changed by people dying then people making private ethical choices.
No. It doesn’t not. This is a ridiculous claim. The very first thing that will happen if sales lag because of your choices is that retailers will shift to places where the demand is more reliable. The bars easily transported and they are shelf stable. They can be moved to wherever demand for chocolate is increasing. The larger the system, the more easily it can absorb tiny temporary blips in consumption patterns. This is why what is required is organization, because you have to be capable of bringing the movement into a sufficient number of markets such that moving the product around would not avoid the hit to sales.
Again, it’s literally non-existent. Children don’t make chocolate bars. They harvest and process cacao. Their product is fungible. If the bars sell less, they just move the product of the child labor down market. But even that scenario is ridiculous because your personal choices are indistinguishable from random noise in consumption data. The larger the market, the more organized you need to be to cross the threshold of random noise.
No one is claiming this. My claim is that this connection is insufficient to be used as leverage by simply choosing to not buy the chocolate bars in private. The labor was already paid for, the bars were already paid for. Your choices have to rise to the quantity required to be noticed statistically in a data set of large scale consumption, and unless you’re buying 100x more than a normal person, your choices won’t be noticed in the data.
No one is making the claim in the first place let alone doubling down on it
Industries grow and shrink as a result of changes in consumption. The change in outcome is a sum of all the changes in the conditions. All changes, whether we have the tools to measure and distinguish them or not.
You’re inventing a mechanism where a change being too small to be considered important means its effects are erased from reality. An organized boycott is still composed of many individual immeasurable purchase decisions. If the small actions had no way to exert their effects, they couldn’t make up for that with numbers. Capitalists would be able to will a boycott out of existence just by refusing to see it as a trend. You could will away a dune based on the impossibility of following a single grain of sand.
Again, industries are not boulders that sit static until given a big enough shove. They are dynamic processes that continually fluctuate as a result of all the transactions that did or did not happen at each stage of production and distribution. The friction of whether or not to make a change is already always being overcome by other market forces.
Industries are governed by thousands of people making endless small adjustments to the operation of the node they manage in response to the changes made by the managers of the nodes they interact with. At no point is the manager who decides by how many children the cacao company can expand its workforce going to hear about a movement becoming organized enough to be considered a boycott. They will make their decision as a result of the decisions of their nearest organizational neighbors. The layers and layers of decision makers aggregate and obfuscate the decisions made leading all the way back to the consumer(s). In the same way that it’s impossible to trace the impact of a single purchase forward from a store, it’s also impossible for the person hiring the children to trace back and selectively be influenced only by coordinated efforts, but not by silent individuals. If it is possible for a boycott to succeed, it is only because the individuals who participated each had a small impact.
You can say that it’s a negligible effect, you can say it’s unimportant when compared to the effect of [X], but your claim was “an individual choosing to stop consuming something has no material effect on child labor”. That is not true. It’s a tempting simplification that offers comforting reassurance morally. In many cases it’s close enough to true to accept as a premise. But if you take it to be literally true, then you’ve necessarily buried some magical thinking into your understanding of the world.
Based and systems-pilled.
Boycotts are by definition not about individual consumer choice, but rather encouraging collective action to reduce consumption in a measurable way. They are one of many tools in our toolkit that cannot simply be discarded because that alone will solve the issue. Diversity of tactics is necessary.
In other words private boycotts DO have material consequences, as long as they’re mediated through collective action, I’d like to see how you organize these collective boycotts without the individual actions of private boycotters and the appropriate moral character that brings light to the suffering of child laborers. Is there a psychic beacon that magically convinces everyone big boycotts are worthwhile, or maybe it has to start somewhere?
This is why egoist arguments like yours are incoherent at scale, instead of merely viewing morality as a religious phenomenon, you should view it in part as a powerful signaling mechanism that can solidify an underlying collective energy, which serves as the catalyst for the material transformation you seemingly care about
that’s not a private boycott anymore. like the terms are useless if you want to use them that way.
It’s a distinction without a difference in the first instance, whether solo or collectively; at the end of the day it’s still your wallet that’s the leverage point, unless you got a joint personal bank account with your local org?
nah it’s the mass action that makes it do literally anything. otherwise i’m boycotting every company i happen to not buy anything from, which on most days is all of them.
I personally do view morality in that light. My assessment is that OP does not and instead believes that we have a moral responsibility to not eat chocolates if we think that child labor was found in the supply chain, which ignores pretty much everything about everything else, including the device used to post the content, host it, and share it. I know for a fact that the phone in my hand used exploitation, unequal exchange, and ecosystem destruction. I wouldn’t be surprised if there was both child labor and slave labor in the supply chain to produce this phone.
The same is true for the public transportation I ride. The same is true for the jobs I work and the materials I have to used. The same is true for hospitals and medicine manufactories. We can’t just decide that we’re going to pick a single commodity and say that you have a moral responsibility to abstain from consumption and if you don’t then you’re an enemy of the struggle.
Some commodities are more vulnerable to collective pressure than others; recognizing the distinctions in production among commodities is not hypocrisy. For example, boycotting chocolate is simpler than boycotting oil, and moral responsibility varies based on the circumstances that gave rise to that commodity and whether or not those circumstances can be addressed socially
When we boycott one thing but not another, morality as a signaling mechanism takes on a tactical character; similarly, when you’re laying siege, you aim for the paths of least resistance before storming the keep. Building upon one victory after another, gaining confidence and cohesion as you go
You can’t climb every wall simultaneously, so it’s pointless and counterproductive to use that impossibility as an excuse to not do something, even individually, which is just the component cell of collective action
100% until the conclusion of the last sentence. We have fundamentally and thoroughly demonstrated that individual consumer choice has almost no impact on the externalities. Recycling is probably the most egregious example of this. What fixed the CFC problem was cap and trade regulation, not consumer choice. These problem were never caused by individual consumer choice so making individual consumers choices will never be the solution. Not purchasing candy is not a component cell of collective action. A component cell of collective action would be showing up to the meetings every week and holding the discipline agreed to within the group based on material analysis of the system you are trying to change. If we don’t have groups that have meetings, then choosing not to buy chocolate is going to be about as effective as praying for the child laborers. Because that’s what these private individual consumer choices ultimately are - a way to self-soothe while standing on a pile of corpses. Are we going to sit here and argue that even though that group over there may be fascists organizating to maintain a white supremacist aociety, at least they’re recycling?
Action must be grounded in theory, theory must be grounded in material analysis. Material analysis must be grounded in action. We have seen this loop for personal consumer boycotts in the Global North and the result has been no material change in the conditions of the workers. We have also seen how this form of moralizing works against organizing and recruitment because it actively destroys relationships. And of course it does, it’s literally the same type of proselytizing that Abrahamic religions use to divide populations against each other. When we look towards other models of communicating morality, we see that it is entirely possible to integrate with people who are behaving immorally (up to a point) and that the outcomes in the short and long term are substantially better.
Don’t let quixotic liberal marketing campaigns lead you into reactionary traps; of course what people decide (or are induced) to send their money on matters to any cohesive material analysis of the circuit of capital, disruptions of the realization phase of the circuit requires boycotts as an available tool, consumption is not merely personal, it’s also structural and leveraging that structure requires convincing quite alot of people to INDIVIDUALLY withhold money from a firm
So again, unless you have a magic psychic beacon, the convincing part requires a moral narrative as a component of the necessary organizing. Because the logistics of boycott organizing still requires individual initiative, integrity, and discipline to work
If the component cell of collective action requires showing up to meetings every week to convince people not to purchase candy, then I hate to break it to you, but yes not purchasing candy in that instance does become a component cell of collective action
I think you and I are on the same page here, for the most part anyway. The problem I am trying to illuminate is not that boycotts require not purchasing, but rather that not purchasing is not the effective part of a boycott. The effective part of a boycott is the organizing, the not buying is a result of the boycott not a cause. You cannot create a boycott by not buying. You can only create a boycott by organizing. And as you say, once you are organizing to create a boycott, your personal choices suddenly start to matter - not because of their economic impact but because of their propagandistic impact.
This is critical to understand. The effect of even 10k people not buying is totally unnoticeable. 10k people stop buying specific things every day whether through death, illness, preference, or economic hardship. But the effect of 10k people all connected to the same movement, or all physically located in a single place, or all doing it deliberately at the same time? That’s noticeable. Again, not in the bottom line, but in the expression of power and the tabling of a threat of future impact to the bottom line. That’s what moves capitalists.
We’re all on the same(ish) page here. We’re just comrades engaged in the dialectical process of improving our commitment to global solidarity, after all 💚
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yea but you don’t need to justify stealing it