Organized abolitionist movements came pretty early on actually.

They weren't separate. Early abolitionists called for boycotts. Organizations called for boycotts. It is a useful recruiting tool and the actions taken, while insufficient due to their nature, are not worthless, which is the impression people get when you tell them what they're doing won't work and provide no on-ramp to anything else.

Consider the void that is offered to them, generally. Even if a socialust gives alternatives, it's vague. Collective action... with whom? You can't go to the collective action store or vote for collective action or tweet collective action. They either need to create an organization themselves or join one. Which one? If we don't give concrete collective actions to displace (or, far better, supplement) their current individualistic ones, we will come across as armchair activists who don't actually prioritize doing anything about the problem.

Berating people over consumer choices is not going to make an organization, to say nothing of the fact that those orgs did and do exist.

Calls to action are not inherently berating, though it can be helpful to imply there's something wrong with typical consumption, even by individuals, particularly in the imperial core. Putting out a call to boycott all slave cotton if you're a Quaker could be interpreted as berating, but really it's about having an individual call to action as part of building sentiment and solidarity for a movement.

If we were in the 1790s and our primary persuasive contribution was to crap on slave cotton boycotts, all we'd have done alienated some people from our cause. We are in the earliest days of doing anything, of organizing anything. Even saying "we" is nearly farcical, we're a couple thousand dweebs scattered widely and there is no well-known ecosocialist organization we can point people to consistently in our countries. We have to concretely build options for activism like they did, build on top of insufficient activism, keep building until it eventually is sufficient.

Get those libs into your ecosocialist caucus or org. Personally ask them to join and give their information to be contacted. The bread and butter for doing so is by creating an individual call to action and in-person canvassing for that info. Get your group, no matter how small it is, a megaphone, and clipboards. Build on their sentiment.

The ELF got recruits, they did damage and direct action. Yelling at people to consume less without first dismantling corporatism is not going to solve anything.

Insufficiency is not the same as pointlessness and libs will notice the contradiction between their experience + research and such dismissiveness. Don't blow an opportunity to radicalize people motivated to take what action is on the table.

"Do this seemingly impossible thing that you might not even believe in first instead of this tractable thing" won't capture what enthusiasm they have. They have to be onboarded, given things to do, real things. There is no "dismantle capitalism" button, but that's what we sound like to them by default.

Most abolitionists didn’t have slaves in the first place, or have much impact on whether or not slavery was profitable.

That sounds like an argument that individualistic action makes more sense in the case of climate change.

Mass boycotts of slave products, or at least the calls for them, certainly got the attention of the ruling class and were widely known.

Boycotts are fine and all, but framing opposition to corporations first and foremost as “western privileged lefties” and that we must cut down our own consumption primarily; is moronic.

That's a sentiment of frustration at people (Chapos) who use the most ridiculousness rationalizations for refusing to do individual action regarding just about anything, to remove their participation in a select set of horrors in which they've become jaded.

I don't see a lot of threads about, say, a given user becoming a cop being nbd because it's individualistic, though. Chapos understand solidarity and individual consistency in supporting or even participating in movements, but we can say that it seems to be selective. I don't think it's productive to speculate about reasons right now, though. I'll just say to be cognizant of solidarity in these situations, to challenge assumptions about it.

Also your sanctimonious responses to people in this thread keep assuming that everyone who disagrees with you, doesnt cut down on consumption or is not environmentally conscious. (...)

I haven't said anything like that. Are you sure you're thinking of the right person?

People are already doing activism, but don’t exactly have the ability to make a difference and no amount of yelling about consumption is going to give them that power.

My suggested course of action is not "yelling about consumption." Or would you think that BDS and using it to promote membership in (preferably socialist) anti-war, anti-imperialist organizations is just "yelling about consumption"?

Many people don’t have the ability to do personal actions or invest time and money in what amount to insignificant acts.

Everyone can just not eat Sabra hummus. Sabra hummus is not a necessary part of, say, Americans' lives, no matter how poor or overworked or sick. Having a call to action regarding Sabra hummus is also not an inherently shaming act asking too much from anyone, it's a call to solidarity. I'm not thinking to myself, "oh that bastard eating Sabra hummus, why do they hate Palestinian children so much?" But I can see why a Palestinian might get frustrated by socialists crapping on the boycott because it's "individualistic" because what's actually necessary is ending apartheid. Yeah, duh.

And yelling at them and calling them privileged westerners is NOT forming some grand movement, it is just about scolding people and creating an enemy in your mind among the left cause the actual opponent is to hard to fight. It is defeatism just with a different solution

Again this isn't describing me or what I said at all.

They weren’t though. The first actions taken against slavery came from Quakers together voting to oppose it though this amounted to nothing materially.

The first actions among Quakers were scattered and individualistic, with arguments thrown back and forth about what to do and whether Quakers should be enslavers and people trying all kinds of different things, including petitions, traveling to spread the word to other Quaker communities, writing books. The boycotts were actually more collective and more direct than several of these, but at their core these activities built solidarity. None were sufficient. Many still helped. That much less money to enslavers. That many fewer people enslaved by Quakers themselves as it became unacceptable to be both Quaker and enslaver. You didn't get that solidarity immediately, it took decades. We don't have anything remotely like that. And still that would never be sufficient, either: it was just enough for them to help build the rest of the abolitionist movement. People actually being on the same page, which clearly we are not: most people focused on individual actions on the climate are liberals who are worried about it, don't know what we can do, try to do something with their own lives knowing it won't be sufficient, and implicitly think something will give in the future to make things okay.

They're not frantic, focused on collapse. Just like with the Quakers, where women ran home finance, the gender roles of the imperial core pop up in these groups: a fuckload of moms and younger women. Some of the most female-dominated spaces on the internet I've ever seen. The personal economic connection is a concrete way to build solidarity through positive action that we all know is insufficient.

Also, I was implicitly thinking of American abolitionists, which I should get out of the habit of doing. UK Quakers had more and earlier success at collective approaches, though not the only successes.

The next was the Georgian colony in 1733 banning slavery via its founder who fought attempts to change this. In Massachusetts various Freedom Suits occurred and legal battles over slavery raged.

Of course, but these were all the very earliest days. I should've communicated my thoughts better. The abolitionist movement was small in the colonies for ages, then got much more popular from the late 1700s to the 1830s or so, when it finally became large enough and was able to pick fights on containing the expansion of slave states. When I think "early groups" that includes those in the mid to late 1700s, even. They all employed a mixture of individual and collective tactics, but boycotting was a common way to have solidarity by then, if one could afford it.

The early acts of American abolitionism came from organizations, and they went for the throat. Even community based actions like those taken by Quakers did not just amount to berating people for wearing cotton or something, rather a community would purchase slaves from other Quakers and free them, if they refused they would be ostracized from the community. They went after slave owners first, foremost, and almost exclusively right from the start.

Something that had to be built up over time from individuals taking seemingly individual actions appealing to their communities. We have even less to start with organizationally than the Quakers did. Who are we going to ostracize, if that is an example of meaningful collective action to contrast with individualistic climate action? We aren't even in the same orgs. Do we declare, "nobody who purchases X, Y, or Z can be in DSA"? We don't have enough solidarity in merely avoiding X, Y, and Z among most of our comrades. A bunch of people are fighting me about it right now in this thread and making unsupported and personal accusations against me.

Organizationally speaking on this issue, we're in the 1500s. I have hope that we can organize faster given the educational state of kids in the imperial core and rapidly contradictions of capitalism, but we have to build from where we are, which is far, far behind Quakers even in the 1600s.

The Pennsylvania Abolition Society also focused on going for the throat even with very few members. They got their founder, Benjamin Franklin to petition congress as president to ban slavery in 1790. Not exactly consumer choices.

Right, we're nowhere near there yet. We're purely on a mode of political action where the ruling class dictates messaging and movements downwards more than the reverse via a heavily propagandized populace. The closest thing to this is a farcical one, like the Green New Deal, which aside from its own insufficiencies and injustices did not come from a grassroots organized demand but from a handful of ruling class legislators with some level of (still liberal) ideological commitment.

The most widely-known org with any cache is constantly getting its members arrested for no reason and the loudest spokesperson is a high schooler getting easily coopted by the ruling class. We don't have a common ecosocialist organization to join in our countries or even regions.

We have nothing. No community, no org, no membership, no actions. We have to build from this, grow orgs, educate, and keep going. Individual calls to action are how you hook people and get their information to get them to come to your more collective actions.

I appreciate your point, but Waterbear is right about the history being different

They're not, there's just a miscommunication.