(no subject)

[feotakahari]

None of the history books I read in school ever drew a connection between the harvest of cotton by Southern slaves and the production of cotton cloth in New England. They always talked about slave cotton in terms of trade to Europe, so New England’s textiles were treated as if they’d just appeared by magic. Reading about it now, I got to wondering if anyone ever tried to kill the trade on the purchasing side rather than the production side.

The answer appears to be “yes, but mostly in Britain”: http://www.quakersintheworld.org/quakers-in-action/153/Boycotting-Goods-Produced-by-Slaves Even with the unpopularity of slavery in the North, boycotts didn’t get too far there. Which makes me worry about the ultimate feasibility of our modern attempts at boycotting human rights violators that control a large chunk of the market. How much damage can we actually do to near-monopolies?

Comments

[entanglingbriars]

From a utilitarian standpoint, consumer activism under near-monopoly capitalism is functionally useless. My vegan stepmom shared a post recently that claimed (no citations provided, but it seemed plausible) that farm subsidies were picking up the slack in demand due to decreased consumer consumption of meat and meat by-products. Even absent that, the power of the individual to make meaningful changes in the economy is arbitrarily close to nil, imo.

I think you might be able to make a case for consumer activism from a non-utilitarian standpoint, but I've yet to run across anyone making a serious effort to do so.