Boycotts as a weapon

Boycotting can be an effective weapon, or a completely ineffectual one.  It's necessary to learn from experience what works and what doesn't.

A textbook case of an ineffectual boycott was provided by "Economic Blackout Day" last Friday.  I haven't seen any hard data on the impact, but the lack of reporting, in itself, suggests that there was nothing notable to report.  What information we have shows shopping behavior pretty much unchanged.  Amazon even saw a slight increase in sales.  I happened to be out driving that day, and even here in the left-leaning Portland OR area, parking lots at supermarkets and other big retail locations I drove past seemed as full as they normally are.  The boycott was too unfocused, vague in its goals, targeting all retailers regardless of whether they had any connection with whatever those goals were.  What good would it do to deprive some struggling small business or immigrant-owned restaurant of a day's worth of revenue?  It was announced on short notice, so when the date came most people who might have participated probably didn't know about it.  And a one-day boycott intimidates no one -- even if sales had fallen somewhat on that day, it would be likely that most people were just shifting purchases to other dates, resulting in a net impact of zero.

If anything, such a brief action is worse than useless.  While doing no harm to the oligarchy at all, it gives participants the feeling of having taken action, likely diminishing the sense of urgency to do anything that would genuinely accomplish something -- that is, its value as an act of economic warfare is actually negative.

To be effective, a boycott should choose a target that has a clear and substantial link to its goals.  It should be long-term, aiming at inflicting permanent economic harm on the target.  And it should be linked to a specific cause with widespread support, not something vague and general, or so exotic that too few people care much about it to have a real impact.

In recent years there have been two major boycotts that have been really effective:  Bud Light and Tesla.  Both met the criteria I noted above.  Bud Light had inextricably linked itself with trans ideology, which is increasingly repugnant and bizarre to the general public as more and more people discover what it's really about.  There was also the staggeringly clueless, woke, out-of-touch, and arrogant attitude of Bud Light's VP of marketing, who in just that one-minute video gave a masterclass in how to antagonize customers.  As far as I know, there wasn't even a major organization calling for the boycott -- it happened organically as millions of people heard about the brand's change in direction and were turned off.  It surely helped that brand-switching was easy -- there are plenty of other light beers similar in quality and price to Bud Light.

In less than two years Bud Light has fallen from being the most popular beer in the US to being only the third most popular, and the stock price of its parent company AB InBev has dropped from $66 to $49.  There is every sign that the damage is permanent, despite the brand's recent efforts to win back the customers it insulted.

Tesla became an issue more recently, due to its association with owner Elon Musk.  Musk is not only the richest person in the world but also famously arrogant, callous, and notorious for his crackpot obsessions like colonizing Mars.  He's a perfect personification of the oligarchical billionaire parasite class that dominates and vampirizes the whole US economy.  Tesla has become a high-profile brand with the introduction of the ugly and crappily-engineered Cybertruck.  And, of course, Musk is now running the DOGE campaign of blundering through the federal government randomly smashing things he doesn't understand.  If he's not the most hated man in America yet, he must be getting there.

Again, as far as I know, the boycott didn't even start with some major organization campaigning for it -- it simply happened organically as people were turned off.  Sales have plunged not only in the US but in Europe (more stats here) and China, even though electric vehicles are growing in popularity in those places.  In France, the fight has even escalated to violence.  Musk's net worth has decreased by more than a hundred billion dollars since December due to the drop in Tesla's stock price.  Now there is a Tesla Takedown website organizing pickets at dealerships, and giving information about Musk's DOGE activities and how to fight him economically.  As with Bud Light, it helps that there are plenty of other electric vehicles out there, so it's easy to just choose a competing brand.

These two examples show how effective boycotts work.  They're both broadly popular, essentially leaderless, with highly specific targets whose offenses are widely known and easily understood, and aimed not at empty symbolism but at inflicting serious economic damage for the sake of punishment and revenge, and of deterring similar behavior in the future by the offenders or others.  Both have succeeded in doing permanent harm to their targets, with no end in sight.

Smaller-scale boycotts can also be effective, so long as they are targeted and long-term rather than general and brief.  An example would be a policy of no longer buying from companies that support the oligarchy or the anti-democracy forces in the political sphere.  The Shop Blue list I recently linked is a useful tool to this end.  If millions of consumers stop buying from company A, which donates to Trump or pursues some other noxious policy, and instead take their business to rival company B which does not, then they can have a real impact, provided that the change in shopping habits is permanent and not just temporary.

Amazon is a special case, one which I view as a kind of litmus test.  It is notorious for abusive treatment of its workers, and has cut a swath of utter devastation through the economy, destroying countless small businesses in its quest for universal monopoly.  And it fuels the growth in wealth of one of the most bloated oligarchs of them all, Jeff Bezos, who among other things is now turning the Washington Post into a utensil of the oligarchy's interests.  If someone can't even permanently stop buying from a company as toxic as Amazon, that person will be useless in the class struggle and the general fight for economic justice, and can't be taken seriously.

Boycotts can be a powerful economic weapon, but only if we use them as a weapon, to inflict real damage, and not just as an empty symbol.