Boycottage Industries
Years ago, when I was less aware of my nutritional needs and consequently more of a nutjob than I am today, my head full of constant brainstorms, I first came across the idea of a blog. Back then I had as many ideas as I do today, but if anything, flitted from one project to another even more than I do today, and completed nothing. Still, I set up a free blog called boycottage industries.
The idea was that for years it had irritated me that people who knew some of my opinions on things would consider it impingent on me to boycott so and so company and avoid such and such a brand and such and such a product. What irritated me was that often it wasn’t clear what the alternative was. One day I shall write about the absurdity of a trip I made one time to London with my Amnesty group at uni, staying on the floor of a Quaker Meeting House in sleeping bags and eating vegan food, where we were toldabout the evils of one company after another, one such being GEC, only to travel back on a train made by the very same firm. Most of us live our lives after all like Keanu Reeves drives in Speed, thinking everything will go crazy if we slow down for a moment, and sometimes being absolutely right since its not only us who determine the pace but society around us. We don’t have time to research every purchasing decision, and certainly don’t have the money to put that premium on ethical living most of us would love to do. We are time poor, and often financially so. Indeed, those of us who don’t buy into the values of our time tend to be poorer than most.
So, the idea was that I would keep a directory of companies that deserve to be boycotted, but also of companies that deserve to be supported in their place, perhaps cottge industries and small companies. I had no idea how to set up such a directory, and as soon as I set it up, I forgot about it and moved on to something else which in its turn was forgotten about. Such was life. Still is to a large extent and I shouldn’t bookmark this page expecting the consistency you deserve and which I fully expect I cannot deliver - as I say to doctors and friends and family in reverie after reverie, “if I had the organisational capacity to live by this diet, I wouldn’t bloody need it, would I?” I still don’t know how to set up such a thing, but if I am going to get this thing off the ground at least a little further than the last then I should at least make a stab at it, and perhaps pass the baton on to others capable of more consistency than myself.
I would welcome any feedback as to how such a thing should be arranged. And, of course, what deserves to be included.
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There are of course plenty of sites which offer lists of companies to boycott. The following is just one I have found.
http://www.ethicalconsumer.org/boycotts/boycotts_list.htm
The problem is that the logic behind these boycotts is equally as problematic as many of the state practices, such as imprisonment and capital punishment, and, more directly, the economic sanctions and embargoes placed on Cuba and Iraq, say, that became leftist causes. Let’s look at this.
Before the second outbreak of war in the Gulf, many commentators, including those I respect such as John Pilger, who can be dogmatic but is a tireless and resourceful journalist, were anti sanctions. These, they said, were hitting the people of Iraq, not the government itself. Similarly, the long standing trade embargo the US imposes on Cuba is said to hurt the people of Cuba rather than the regime itself, which indeed uses it in propaganda, as did Saddam Hussein, turning their people (more or less successfully) against America, and, by extension, the West. This raises the question of to what extent boycotts are analogous to trade embargoes, an interesting question given that one of the boycotts listed (though, like all the others in the list, not endorsed, on the Ethical Consumer site) is Bacardi, for proclaiming and using its Cuban origins in advertising, despite the fact that the company is “active in anti-Cuba lobby groups in the US”*
I wonder how many boycotts actually change the policies of these companies. The long standing nature of many of the boycotts I am aware of seems to suggest they do not. And if they do not, who actually loses out in these campaigns? Is it a substantial minority, or even a majority of the people who are so desperate to be ethical that they go out of their way to avoid certain companies desperate not to be involved in some iniquitous chain of events, making their lives more difficult and more stressful in the process by worrying about one more thing in an over-complex world? Is it the employees of these companies who have no more say in the policies of these huge corporations than the citizens/subjects/inhabitants of Cuba and Iraq have in the decisions of their rulers? Because if the policies do not change and Esso continue to campaign against legislation to tackle climate change and Adidas continue to make football boots out of Kangaroo leather and ASDA/Wal-Mart continue to donate to the Republican party, then surely somebody is losing out from the people withholding their purchase power?
Or maybe not. Ultimately, what it is needful to understand is that Wal-Mart donate to the Republican party because they believe they can then expect favourable legislation. ESSO campaign against climate change legislation because they believe they can in this way forestall the negative impact this would have on their ability to turn over a huge profit. In both cases they are probably right, and in both cases the effects of pursuing this course undoubtedly affects their outcomes magnitudes more than the fraction of one per cent of their potential consumer base turning their backs on them, especially given that they know in many cases their market share limits many of these people’s options.
Because if the point of these boycotts is to change the policies of these companies then the majority of these boycotts are quixotic. What bothers me about boycotts in general is the fact that consumers who take boycotts seriously and are consistent with them are a consistently small demographic that companies could usually painlessly choose to ignore. For Bacardi, for example, that small group of rum drinking boycotters so marginally swell that far larger demographic of people who simply prefer wine or beer, whisky or vodka to rum that I very much doubt the issue arrises. After all, the ideal market consists of people who, when they see some good looking Cuban women shaking their booty, think “oh, I think I would like to try some white rum this weekend, I haven’t tried that for a while” or, on seeing a man in black abseiling from a helicopter think “oh, I’d love to try some chocolates that come in an attractively shaped box;” if a group of individuals is much more high maintenance than this then they can often be disregarded by more successful companies - their money would be a bonus, but it cannot be relied upon.
This part of the argument is very much an echo of the issue of whether prison is intended to be a deterrence, to reform or merely to punish, an argument that in most nations was discussed seriously for many years in the early days of this relatively humane punishment, but which then settled down in the majority of cases with little more than a shrug and the reality of prison as an expedient. The difference is that with boycotts, the behaviour in question can continue unabated throughout the punishment.
Scanning the list of boycotts, I see too another one which has struck me as ineffective, and that is a boycott of Peugeot for “moving production from the UK to France and low-wage Slovakia.” Now, I think it is understandable for anyone involved in job losses to not want to drive around in a Peugeot, but I don’t see the need to widen the net here. Ultimately, every car manufacturer will make decisions based on cost effectiveness and skilled labour. Furthermore, the potential of exceptional loyalty from native markets is a boon that should not be overlooked, especially in a country so big as L’Hexagon. This is simple economic sense in the economic system that we live in and whilst it is entirely appropriate that every individual should have a right to express their opinion as to the type of economic system they live under, and protest against the current system should they find it unjust, expressing such sentiments through that very same economic system seems a little silly, rather like protesting against the visual pollution and erosion in St Mark’s Square by a petition sent by carrier pigeon (though, admittedly this would be quite amusing, and have an irony and visual power that boycotts lack).
This last example is a particularly good example of employing the wrong forum for protests, because, whatever reasons companies must give for such decisions, the fact of the matter is that Britain has, for the last twenty to thirty years, no longer had the driven and skilled workforce it once did, and if it does at all now in sectors such as engineering and manufacturing, it is in no large part due to immigration from Eastern Europe. Perhaps we should militate for a boycott of British goods to pursuade the government to stop running down the industrial base which once made this country great!
That brings us on to those boycotts which most resemble the sanctions against Iraq and the embargo against Cuba, the most fatuous boycotts of them all: boycotts of entire countries. Ok, so of those listed on the Ethical Consumer website some make more sense than others. China, being a controlled economy, is in a different category here to Japan and Israel, and indeed, the rationale for a boycott of China makes a great deal more sense than for that of Japan, given that the elites who have it in their power to do something about China’s occupation of Tibet and its human rights record also control the economy.
The boycott of Israel is one I have followed more closely than the others, though I don’t know as much about it as I would like. I am an opponent of many aspects of Israel’s foreign policy, considering it self-defeating, unreflectively macho and brutal, but I cannot support a boycott which could only result in the nation becoming more, not less inward-looking, which results in restrictions on the academic freedom and cooperation which I believe to be one of the requisites of internationalism and which results in the arbitary punishment of uninvolved individuals. As a case in point, read about the sacking of Dr Schlesinger in this Guardian article about an academic boycott of Israeli institutions.
The first job for anyone who would be interested in making boycotts coherent and trenchant then, is to maintain a set of criteria that must be fulfilled for a boycott to be listed and endorsed. High up the list of these must be a behaviour or policy which could be reversed and which is a result not of the economic system as a whole but the company in question. An example of this is the longstanding boycott of Nestle products due to their promotion of baby milk, a policy which has been plausibly linked to infant deaths. Boycotts which seem to many people more trivial than this, which are only likely to encourage “right on” individuals who are easy to mock, and which are less likely to garner the support of masses of people who are willing to make a committment to change their habits in the long term, which are, in short, less likely to be effectual, not to mention those boycotts which may take a modish but wrongheaded or controversial political stance (”Viva Fidel, or Raoul or however he is!”) or which, like the Israel boycott, may lead to perverse outcomes, can only have the effect of giving boycotts, and “ethical consumers” a bad name, further delimiting the demographic who are likely to take into consideration boycotts as well as all the health scares and or preferences, fads and aversions of sons and daughters, wives, husbands and girlfriends when doing the shopping.
Important for me, too, would be that the site not only penalises the company at fault, but rewards a company that is making an effort. Even those boycotts which have no hope of changing some mega-corporation’s policy would be having a positive result if, instead of that tiny percentage of Megacorp’s humungous budget being distributed willy nilly to become a tiny percentage of sundry borderline-benign or marginally less inethical companies, it was channelled to a company that was trying hard to be ethical. Suddenly the whole thing would feel less negative, less like hair shirt liberalism and far more progressive. If the company in question was a small company, or even a number of small companies in particular areas, then the share of Megacorp’s market would be more beneficial, and the whole thing would be much more human.
A site which could do this could take many forms. One that I have been considering this morning could be one where individual subscribers sign up with their details, such as to what degree they are willing to go out of their way, their personal political persuasions - some people will never care as much about the welfare of wales as they do about people, and may even then be more concerned about, say, the treatment of ethnic minorities or homosexuals, or women, than they are about other groups. Subvertorials, which could be submitted by individual subscribers, could then be tailored to particular subscribers and clicking through them could give either a rationale or open up a list of alternative suppliers in the local area, or even click right through to a website if there were only one. Every click could be logged to keep a record of the number of interested consumers.
Ideally, the website would not be one which simply lists boycotts. Perhaps it could be a system whereby blogs and personal websites could install a Boycottage Industries plugin or Boycottage industries could take feeds of websites subscribers are interested in reading about. The number of people who would click through to the site might otherwise be too small.
There is scope out there for such a website I think. Maybe, who knows, one already exists. Let me know the closest you know of if so. Otherwise, if you would like to try and set up such a website, good luck!
* This boycott it seems to me is also emblematic of the questionable logic and potential hypocrisy in the rationale behind many high-profile boycotts. It seems to me that the boycott here conflates Cuban society and the Cuban political elites in exactly the same way that leftists rightly suggested the mainstream media did with respect to the second Gulf War. Bacardi advertising does indeed proclaim the free spirit and the musical culture of Cuba, something that seems to bear little relation to the Cuban government and its policies and so, that the company opposes the current Cuban regime is not the evidence of deviousness organisers of this boycott suggest. To illustrate the point, let us imagine a Tibetan product marketed with all the positive associations Tibetan culture has to offer by a company that opposes Chinese rule, or Skoda before the Velvet Revolution selling their cars with an animation based on the illustrations of Josef Lada and funding dissident movements or the Underground University. To boycott Bacardi because you do not agree that the exemplary healthcare system and education system in Cuba is more than outweighed by the restrictions on freedom of speech and the lack of transparency and accountability might be consistent, but to punish them for proclaiming the virtues of Cuban culture when they might believe this to be repressed rather than furthered by the socialist government is not.
The link on the site, incidentally, does not fill me with hope that this is a progressive, still more an effective boycott that should be embraced by ethical consumers. Talk of 5 US political prisoners is all well and good, but what of the political prisoners in Cuba?
