On the Soapbox: John Sinha Says “Build, Don’t Boycott”

Consumer boycotts have a long and honourable history in social movements: The bus boycott of the US Civil Rights Movement succeeded in desegregating buses in the South; the campus-based boycott of Barclays Bank was a successful campaign of the Anti-Apartheid movement and a factor in helping to isolate Apartheid South Africa.

But these were very specific campaigns with very specific and limited objectives. The question today is whether consumer boycotts can help to bring about a more fundamental change: A society which works for the 99%. Take a look at the Common Statement agreed to by the General Assembly in the first weeks of the London occupation: We need alternatives to the current system. But does targeting corporations through anti-consumerism boycotts offer us strategies to bring about the sort of change we want to see?

One needs to distinguish very carefully between consumer boycotts and boycotting consumerism. The former can work as a tactic while the latter does not offer us a viable strategy. Consumerism is the symptom, rather than the cause, of the problems we are seeking to address. Consumerism has no purpose without an economic system which encourages the focus on perpetual growth regardless of our needs and of the consequences for the planet. After all, the debt-fueled consumer booms of the past three decades have been exposed as unsustainable. If we focus our energies on attacking consumerism, we are approaching the problem from the wrong end. Consumer boycotts can still be a good tactic in specific cases – but boycotting consumerism is not a good strategy.

There are other problems as well. A focus on consumerism discourages inclusive forms of protest: Not all consumers are equal. Some consumers are the poor struggling to make ends meet. Are we really suggesting that pensioners or a family suffering from fuel poverty should cut down the energy usage? How are we going to persuade the richest 0.01% from boycotting the use of their private jets? At a time when austerity is causing a decline in living standards for many, what sort of message do we send out to the 99% if we are targeting their Christmas shopping? At Occupy LSX, we tried to celebrate Christmas positively without sending an anti-consumerist message.

The other problem is which companies would be targeted. The problems we are facing a too multifaceted to be reduced to a few companies, issues or products. Is it labour standards, disparities in corporate pay, or environmental destruction? Agreeing on a single issue to focus on would not be easy.

The boycott tactic is based on the idea that the only form of power we have is the power of being consumers. But we are not just consumers, many of us are producers too. The massive public sector strike on N30 showed what effect we can have when we withdraw our labour. The next step for the Occupy movement might thus be to bring our message into the workplace and spread the model of democratic deliberation and decision-making that marks our General Assemblies. If we were to have real democracy in the workplace, it would lead to a radically different economic system.

Not all of us have jobs, some of us are students, unemployed or retired – but we could apply the same idea to occupying our job centre, university or old peoples’ day centre. Our Common Statement explicitly mentions support for the N30 strike, and we were as good as our word when we organised a large and colourful feeder march from the steps of St Paul’s on that day. We need to strengthen and deepen that commitment. Instead of focusing on boycotts, our strategy must be one of building alliances within the workplace.

By John Sinha