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snowdriftissue

@ snowdriftissue @lemmy.world

Posts
5
Comments
106
Joined
2 mo. ago

  • Vote with your dollar/ethical consumerism is not effective at bringing political or economic change

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  • Sadly the alternative is accelerating everything bad. So it's up to those of us awake to the issue to do whatever we can.

    I guess I just don't think the only alternative is "ethical consumerism" and I don't think that will it ever create any significant change given how difficult it is to do well (if such a thing is even possible) and how few people realistically will ever engage with it to begin with. There are lots of methods of resistance, many of which have been shown to create real systemic change in the past and in my opinion are far more worth your time money and effort, including:

    • Participating in boycotts that are well-organized with specific actionable demands
    • Labor movements/union power
    • Donating to political orgs fighting for systemic change
    • Voting for direct democratic initiatives that push policy forward
    • Moving from for profit solutions to community built ones, buy nothing groups, mutual aid, etc.

    Maybe we will just have to agree to disagree

  • Vote with your dollar/ethical consumerism is not effective at bringing political or economic change

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  • But this just lends to my point that it's ridiculous to expect average consumers who are just trying to survive to juggle all of these things that they can't easily see and which business owners have a direct incentive to hide. There's a reason that ethical consumerism hasn't worked.

  • Vote with your dollar/ethical consumerism is not effective at bringing political or economic change

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  • If we all shopped at 20 million different stores instead of the same one, we would not recreate the same oligarch power.

    Even if it didn't, which I'm still skeptical of, the products on the shelves would likely still become consolidated into mega corps. The shipping companies would consolidate. Every piece of the supply chain that the consumer doesn't have direct control over would consolidate. Would that really be that much better than the current situation?

    You can't just count on markets to manage themselves. That's how we got into this mess.

  • Vote with your dollar/ethical consumerism is not effective at bringing political or economic change

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  • I'm just not convinced things were as peachy as you describe. Basically since the beginnings of capitalism there have been people with power and influence similar to modern billionaires. It is just the natural trajectory of capitalism for those people to accrue more and more wealth and increase the gap between those at the bottom of the socioeconomic hierarchy.

    Small town businesses abuse their employees and rip off their customers as much or more in my experience than big businesses. And many of them are directly politically opposed to me and are actively doing damage in my local community. Their suppliers are big businesses who I don't have control over. I just don't see them as ethically better.

    So what would life be like if every American stopped patronizing Amazon and started funding their local community? All of that would start to become undone, and we would begin to regain that lost prosperity and wrest control over our politics away from billionaire oligarchs.

    And I don't think this is true either - if people spent their money locally on small businesses and their criteria for where they spent their money primarily revolved around that, all that would do is prop up more local oligarchs and turn those small businesses into the big businesses you say are worse.

  • Vote with your dollar/ethical consumerism is not effective at bringing political or economic change

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  • Of course mega corps are a bigger problem than owners in my town specifically. I'm just trying to understand what the end goal even is if we were somehow able to convince the whole country to do ethical consumerism (which for many reasons I think will never happen). Of course coloring all of this is we may have different optimal outcomes in mind since I'm a socialist. I appreciate the good faith debate.

  • Vote with your dollar/ethical consumerism is not effective at bringing political or economic change

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  • So does my local mom and pop business owner. In fact they probably donate a larger fraction of their net worth than bezos. And they fund changes that have a larger impact on my local area than bezos.

  • Vote with your dollar/ethical consumerism is not effective at bringing political or economic change

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  • How exactly do you come to the conclusion that buying from Amazon is "more harmful"? In my view, I have limited time and energy to sort these things out. Why spend time splitting hairs like this when there are more effective things I could be doing?

  • Vote with your dollar/ethical consumerism is not effective at bringing political or economic change

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  • Honestly wouldn't count on it. Most small business owners at least in my area are huge Trump supporters or zionists. And even if they weren't, if everyone went there they'd just become the new Amazon. That's how capitalism works.

  • Vote with your dollar/ethical consumerism is not effective at bringing political or economic change

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  • Fair enough. I guess I just don't have much faith that any profit seeking companies are not evil or won't become evil once they find success, so I don't really get any catharsis from moving from one to another over moral grounds. Which is why I try to focus on avoiding companies altogether when possible, instead going with community made alternatives (e.g. lemmy > reddit) which to me represent something more revolutionary. Any less fundamental changes than that generally feel pointless to me.

  • Vote with your dollar/ethical consumerism is not effective at bringing political or economic change

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  • that's going to have an effect and it'll say something.

    Sure, if you somehow were able to accomplish this feat and get millions of people to stop going to Amazon, it would cut into Amazon's profits. But what is the statement? And what is the desired outcome? Amazon won't die, they have AWS which is most of their profits. Even if they did something equally shitty would likely replace them.

    And where should consumers go instead? I don't think walmart is more "ethical" overall than amazon, or costco or ebay or fedex or ups or whatever. So what's the point? Why should I spend all this time and energy splitting hairs when I could be organizing, participating in established boycotts with specific actionable demands, striking, voting with my vote in the few direct democratic systems that exist, donating to organizations trying to make systemic change, and volunteering in my local community mutual aid groups?

    And do you have any real world examples that worked (still not sure how we're defining "worked" here) that weren't well organized boycotts with specific demands?

  • These used to cost less than half as much as they do now and they used to be twice as big.

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  • If you want to do so and can afford it, go for it. But without an organized movement backing it, don't expect it to change their behavior.

    Whole foods? Eat a dick bro. Stop supporting national companies that are supoorting this admin.

    This is precisely what I hate about "ethical consumerism." Not only does it not work, it also pushes people to perseverate and waste energy over individual choices that, again, do not matter and divides us for no good reason. We are all just trying to get through this. Shopping at Whole foods or Amazon does not mean you endorse everything they do. It might just mean you have a dietary restriction that local grocers cannot accommodate or you need things delivered to you because you are disabled. Amazon makes the vast majority of its profits from AWS anyway. Whole Foods could die tomorrow and it essentially would not change anything.

    In fact Whole Foods once was your local grocer. That's how capitalism works. There is no such thing as ethical consumption.

    You want change? Organize. Boycott. Strike. Participate in mutual aid groups. If given the opportunity for direct democratic action, vote - with your vote, not your wallet.

  • These used to cost less than half as much as they do now and they used to be twice as big.

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  • you really think they're gonna say "yes people aren't eating at your place because it's to expensive, you should lower your prices"

    That is essentially what they said.

    Another article...

    That article also doesn't say anything about the efficacy of voting with your wallet. Just that people are doing it.

    It does give examples of boycotts that worked, meaning organized and with a clear message. Very different from randos silently "voting with their wallets" over "thing they don't like about a product"

  • These used to cost less than half as much as they do now and they used to be twice as big.

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  • I literally just quoted the people in the article you cited

  • Waymo robotaxi hits a child near an elementary school in Santa Monica

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  • Most folks in there want to imagine everyone in the world lives in a dense metropolis with easily accessible, 24/7/365, cheap/free, and timely public transportation. Alternatively they seem to believe people shouldn't live anywhere but that dense metropolis. While most of that criteria does certainly exist in small pockets scattered around the globe, the other 98% of where people live or need to get to farther than walking/cycling can where public transportation doesn't exist need cars.

    Not the "rural places need cars" argument lmao. Tell me you haven't lived in a rural town without telling me you haven't lived in a rural town.

    See also https://youtu.be/REni8Oi1QJQ

  • These used to cost less than half as much as they do now and they used to be twice as big.

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  • Voting with your wallet out of a need to survive is still voting with your wallet.

    Are you hearing yourself right now? How tf is it a vote if you don't get to choose?

    Wikipedia's definition is: "an analogy that refers to the theoretical impact of consumer choice on producers' actions by means of the flow of consumer payments to producers for their goods and services."

  • Waymo robotaxi hits a child near an elementary school in Santa Monica

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  • Now you're fine with cars, but its the volume/speed you take issue with?

    No, that is not what I said.

    You...actually think that there weren't people injured and killed by horse carts long before cars existed? Are you serious?

    Again, not what I said.

    I don't think fucking horses were killing 400 kids per day but if they were I would be against ubiquitously using them on streets as well.

    Since you're clearly arguing in bad faith, I think I'm going to disengage.

  • [meme] cars are cars

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  • Waymo robotaxi hits a child near an elementary school in Santa Monica

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  • Wrong community.

    Cars can get fucked in every community :)

  • Waymo robotaxi hits a child near an elementary school in Santa Monica

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  • Streets were used by horse/ox driven carts/carriages for thousands of years and long before cars.

    Not at anywhere near the speeds or volume that they're used by cars today. Streets used to be legitimate and safe places where kids could play or people could walk. Cars changed all of that.

    Modern cities that are actually well designed focus on making streets destinations - places where people would actually want to exist outside of a car. Streets like this are generally better the fewer cars they have