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  • See, this isn't viable.

    This is the "ban plastic straws" of late stage capitalism. Overrepresenting individual action to distract from the need of structural reform.

    Stop voting with your wallet, it's pointless. Consumption is not expressing support. Vote with your votes, if you're in a place where you have a chance to do so, find other ways to organize collective action if you don't.

    • The two are not mutually exclusive...

      People can take direct action

      People can organized and act as a group in solidarity.

      Stop voting with your wallet, it's pointless.

      Yes... consume like a brain dead idiot, esp follow shiti marketing campaigns online, deff make sure you buy that trash 🤡

      And remember... "voting" is how we got here in the first place.

      Americans don't understand what going into proper opposition means. hint, it aint voting for the "other" guy

    • Naw sorry, I tried that this last election and got embarrassed. Went hardcore Democrat, Coconut-pilled, blah blah blah.

      I genuinely tried to believe in it, voted early, got friends and family to show up and vote too. Not only did the dems lose, they lost worse than they have in decades.

      And to make matters worse, the Democratic party largely has completely missed why they lost so badly to the most pathetic excuse for a president in American history.

      It's too late for large scale positive structural change with the current political parties in the USA. The Dems must be torn apart and re-shaped into a populist left-wing party to have any chance of meaningful change. Until that happens, voting with your dollar is the only kind of vote that will be taken seriously.

      Extremely local elections, sure, vote for a leftist candidate that might actually win some small office. But unless it's that, vote with your dollar and engage in direct action to serve your community and build genuine solidarity.

    • If you're in a country with a two party system then voting has even less impact that than giving your money to a more worthwhile company.

      Consumption is not expressing support.

      You may not support them with your words but giving them money is literally support. Like giving a horse an apple and then saying you're not feeding it.

      • No, it's like giving the horse a sugar cube where you own exactly one of the grains of sugar, taking your grain of sugar away and pretending you've made a difference.

        Or, you know, banning plastic straws.

        You're absolutely wrong about two party systems in any case, even those have tons of elected roles in different layers of governance where changes matter. And that's also where the collective action comes in. Your feel-good token choices of companies and services to avoid haven't done anything in the past thirty years and aren't going to start now.

        • A lot of people own a gram of sugar and make up a lot of sugar cubes. Informing them and motivating boycotts can have an accumulating effect.

          But I'd say vote with both anyway. Your democratic vote and your money.

          • No, it can't. It's an ultraliberal fiction about a self-correcting market we know for a fact doesn't play out in reality.

            This would require wealth to be roughly evenly divided, it would require enough supply to always have a supplier available who brands on whatever issue the consumer is trying to push on every market and it would require the consumer to research every issue and track it throughout the corporate ownership chain effectively.

            It just doesn't work like that. The way it works is I don't like to pay Microsoft OR Google for their crappy office suites, but the open source alternatives are bad and the people I work with require using those for compatibility reasons, so I pay both.

            What I can do, though, is set up a social democratic state where I don't have to make an ethical or political statement with my choice of office software, I have a government in place that will fine the crap out of them for their infractions.

            And if that's not working, my action can be placed on pressuring the government, for which I have way fewer constraints and way more agency.

            If it makes you feel funny to pay for a thing absolutely pay for something else. That's all well and good. But don't fool yourself and others by pretending it's an effective form of political action or a moral responsibility. It's neither.

        • Now apply that logic to voting. Your vote is a grain of sugar, yet it somehow does have an effect, doesn't it?

          • Yep. Because your vote is not based on how much capital you have, but assigned (more or less) equally across the population.

            I did the math. The average US-ian's vote counts as much as Elon Musk's (if they live in the same state). On average their "wallet vote" counts 0.00002% as much as Musk's. Even before he bought the presidency, by the way, just as a matter of purchasing power.

            Where do you think you have more of an effect?

            Again, voting with your wallet has exactly zero value. Your money is a rounding error compared to your vote and your direct political action.

        • Individually we do not make much of a difference in anything but that's an excuse to avoid searching for a better company and often tolerating a worse offer (e.g. a fair trade product that costs more, or lacks modern features).

          Change in politics certainly matters but your individual support of a political party in terms of one vote has practically no affect on the result in a winner-take-all/first-past-the-post voting system. Your individual "vote" in support of a company is at least a non-zero value, and sometimes is multiple "votes" per year.

          People often say it would be better if just more people voted, but that's only helpful for them because they imagine they would vote for the main party they like the most. I doubt that's the case. The most important structural reform imo is to increase the representation of the public in government - and it's not a main party's self interests to do that. Voting is unlikely to change that.

          • Yes it is. What other company for payment management will you find? It's an extremely narrow oligopoly, and that's even counting the credit card agencies that suck just as much as PayPal.

            You have zero agency as an economic player. Exactly zero.

            You won't impact PayPal getting richer by researching a different coupon provider than Honey. That's not how this is going to play out at any point in time.

            You don't enact change by leveraging the breadcrumbs of an income you have as a salaried worker. You do so by leveraging real collective power in an organized, effective manner. As a player in government (by voting or holding office, because running is also part of democracy) or as a non-government organization. Those are your options. Anything else is whatever the equivalent of greenwashing is for activism.

            • There are no good options sometimes. I place my hope in GNU Taler as a means to send and accept payment in the future (it's anonymous for the buyer but the seller is identifiable for tax reasons).

              We'll have to agree to disagree on the effectiveness of voting with wallets.

              What would you call an example of 'real collective power'?

              • We don't have to agree to disagree, it's measurable. You just don't have enough capital to make a dent before large numbers and market forces make it impossible to have an effect. That's why we have governments and regulations in the first place. "Vote with your wallet" is part of the anarchocapitalist fiction that free markets self-regulate by way of the public acting on them through their consumption choices affecting supply and demand. It just doesn't happen, demonstrably.

                Real collective power is, ideally, enacted through those regulations under a rule of law. Governments made of people and acting on their behalf get to coerce rich assholes into following rules. It's also collective action, like collective bargaining through unions enforced by a right to strike protected by the government.

                If your republic has failed to do these things it gets trickier and you get into the territory of forcing reform through protest, mass disobedience or general strike. And yes, in extreme cases eventually revolution, but man, people online sure like to misrepresent how quickly or effectively through revolution because waiting for revolution is easier than actually doing the work.

                I find Americans in particular are surprinsingly reticent to acknowledging this for a place that sacralizes both their foundational moment and several key historical landmarks, all enacted through these means. Nobody ever remembers the Great Burker King Boycott of 1972 or whatever. How is this even a debate.

73 comments