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Boycotting
My general attitude toward boycotting is that while it has been effective on a few rare occasions, the bourgeoisie has become too powerful for the practice of boycotting against them to do any serious harm. It's just one of the non-confrontational tactics promoted by liberals to make themselves feel better, and maybe even encouraged or perpetuated by the bourgeoisie because they know how ineffective it is. Similarly, the idea of "voting with your dollars" is a way to maintain proletarians' faith in the system.
Unfortunately I don't have a lot of hard evidence to back this up. What are some statistics or examples? Can we mathematically prove that the amount of wealth that is hoarded by the bourgeoisie will not be hurt by boycotting?
"I'm anti-Republican and Democratic / if they self destruct that's anti-climactic"
Boycotting is nothing more than a reformist shell game. Instead of buying my sneakers from Nike I buy Adidas. Nothing has changed, the means of production are still owned by a small group and most people are exploited.
Even if we magically drive Nike out of business, a new group takes their place. You can't boycott all the things.
[FONT=Arial]“Whoever labours becomes a proprietor... And when I say proprietor, I do not mean simply (as do our hypocritical economists) proprietor of his allowance, his salary, his wages, – I mean proprietor of the value he creates, and by which the master alone profits... The labourer retains, even after he has received his wages, a natural right in the thing he has produced.”[/FONT]-Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, What is Property?, pg. 123-4
It's a tactic. Effective boycotts for social justice work because they are a part of a broader struggle.
Way back in the day, it was said that the proletarians tools for immediate, sectional economic struggle were labour strikes and boycotts. Both have become ineffective except in more refined applications (like bus drivers and rail conductors refusing to collect fares because they're on strike). New tools are needed, tools which necessitate waging non-labour economic struggles (like rent strikes, housing occupations, and so on) and broader political struggles (like civil disobedience and mass spoilage campaigns), but none of them involve riots, as opposed to what some of the more lumpen-ized posters here have said.
Last edited by Die Neue Zeit; 3rd September 2011 at 22:27.
"A new centrist project does not have to repeat these mistakes. Nobody in this topic is advocating a carbon copy of the Second International (which again was only partly centrist)." (Tjis, class-struggle anarchist)
"A centrist strategy is based on patience, and building a movement or party or party-movement through deploying various instruments, which I think should include: workplace organising, housing struggles [...] and social services [...] and a range of other activities such as sports and culture. These are recruitment and retention tools that allow for a platform for political education." (Tim Cornelis, left-communist)
