bibo
@biboofficial
am i going to get yelled at
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/E5vr5-WVgAM6Ih6?format=jpg&name=large
https://twitter.com/biboofficial/status/1412982293963018247
Western leftists: eat less meat, that is individual choice and it matters greatly!
Global south: burn less carbon, pls, the ocean is drowning us
Western leftists: :pit: :pit: :pit:
Individuals opposing slavery built the abolition movement into a force that could force several crises regarding slave states, creating essential pressure for the civil war and its resolution. We can speak of them as being a product of their conditions, but when it comes to a question of individual action, it always precedes (more effective) collective and we can and should be part of it.
It's also useful for getting a handle on how revolutionary the change in production must be. Trying to reduce your own waste and carbon footprint will make you an ecosocialist if you aren't already one and can be leveraged to radicalize liberals when they inevitably realize how difficult it is and what is outside their control.
Individual opposition didn't build abolition. Communities, specifically perishes, did that by organizing. Even then you could not just make a consumer choice and change the fact that cotton was king. Even in the North, your products always had some role in slave labor.
Organized efforts to free slaves, create networks for them, and literal armed revolts made differences. Not individual abolitionists
Individual opposition was a necessary component of abolition. This is trivially obvious: you don't get abolitionists who don't personally oppose slavery. And in particular, the abolition movement necessarily started out with small numbers who could not coordinate anything you described. We do not have an organized climate justice movement, just as they did not have an organized abilition movement at first. We have to build it from individuals who currently only have personal actions in their arsenal for perceived activism.
In terms of comparable individual action, the abolition groups that did arise coordinated boycotts of slave cotton, something that earned a lot of attention for the movement and made the sociopaths who benefited from slavery create rationalizations about how buying slave cotton is actually good even if you oppose slavery, etc etc. Calls for boycotts were also a recruiting tool, though I can't imagine how someone today would gauge their efficacy there. Anyone who pushed the idea that the boycott would itself end slavery would have been foolish, but it was pressure that brought attention and a relatively easy way to have a personal tie-in.
Organized abolitionist movements came pretty early on actually. 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. 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. Most abolitionists didn't have slaves in the first place, or have much impact on whether or not slavery was profitable. 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.
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. Getting pissy at everyone else for blaming the actual cause of the problem is not going to create a movement, the end of slavery did not come from people being berated to not buy cotton, and those organizations did not grow from blaming people for personal consumption of cotton instead of blaming the plantation owners.
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. Many people don't have the ability to do personal actions or invest time and money in what amount to insignificant acts. 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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I haven't said anything like that. Are you sure you're thinking of the right person?
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"?
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.
Again this isn't describing me or what I said at all.
I am mostly talking about the OP whose responses have been some imagined fit by "western leftists". You is general, not you specifically. sorry about any confusion
But also, you are comparing disagreeing with this stupid meme with thinking we should shit on boycotts. You put more words in my mouth than you think I have to you. Calling western leftists triggered essentially because we understand that consumer choices will never matter in the grand scheme of climate change is not saying BDS is dumb. You created a dichotomy to complain about
Makes sense and this is a pretty common miscommunication throughout this thread by everyone.
No, I'm not. I'm seeing generalized shitting on all individualistic action, something that is done selectively around here. Everyone's against certain individualistic actions using sweeping arguments that apply just as much to other forms of "individualistic" solidarity that they not only support but bake into the expectations of this site. Saying, "you can't be leftist and transphobic" is something I agree with, but that is definitely some individualistic shaming. And when you see some IDpoler who got annoyed by that and stirred some shit, people here naturally assume they're a transphobe. Turn the conversation to the climate, where the Global South will face the brunt of devastation due to completely unnecessary or absurdly wrong production to and consumption by the imperial core, well now it's just pointless individualistic shaming that can never do anything, even having solidarity.
These are really just liberal rationalizations within a leftist aesthetic that knows collective action is better, but is turning around to punch at people supporting individual action in solidarity. It's the opposite of good organizing, it's like Trots getting pissed at each other in a room about the best way to overthrow a nation in the imperial core when they've never organized so much as a bake sale. We have nothing to offer and have to build on this kind of crap to capture the enthusiasm that exists in the real world.
I'm looking at the very real responses around here that are making ridiculous generalizations. But as you said, this can come across as me implying that you said them, and I don't mean to communicate that.
And I'm saying that this understanding is false. Individual calls to action are the building block for collective action, especially when you have no organization. The biggest difference between totally atomized consumer shaming and a slightl organized boycott like BDS is a leftist org giving it a name and talking about it so that it becomes a rallying cry. Responses like "they will never matter" means you have opted to not create that label or rallying cry, pointlessly giving up on the only tools we actually have right now and alienating people who are motivated to fight but don't know how. "Join an org" is not good advice for a lib. They'll join a letter-writing campaign with incompetent grandmas for a carbon tax supported by Exxon without updating their understanding, without becoming allies. "Join this org so you can do that" or "the system is inherently flawed but we can build on this by taking this action" are helpful.
You are acting like it is our job in this thread to create a rally cry you deem acceptable. The understanding that the majority of the damage happens at production and not consumption is not false, and no anecdotes or metaphors about Quakers serve as a counter argument. At least one person here posted theory right from the source about this. Take it up with Marx and Engels and their understanding of modes of production, cause that is where so many of us are coming to our conclusion.
People have not opted out of trying just because they recognize that shaming individuals for consumer choices wont make a difference or is just about ones' own sense of being better. Consumer choices are not the only tools we have at our disposal, but more than that, complaining about people complaining about corporations and strawmanning some imagined leftist is not creating allies either. Stop calling the kettle black
I'm not doing that at all.
I think this conversation has reached the end of its potential usefulness, I'm starting to only get subject changes and baseless accusations.
Hope you're not like this in irl organizing.
This is a convo on an internet forum over a fucking meme, there was never any potential usefulness. You act sanctimonious, get called on it, and then decide everyone else is acting shitting for telling you you are being rude. Youve made nothing but baseless accusations and wild subject changes in every response in this thread, and yet you cannot see that? The level of dissonance is mindboggling. No one asked to have a conversation with you on the nature of organizing, YOU decided everyone else was arguing against boycotts and not the meme that the thread is built around.
I hope you are not like this irl in any sense or I pray for the poor service workers or mailpeople you gaslight into a debate they are not interested in having. No one here asked you for a debate on the 50 topics you decided we all disagree with you on. Self crit or shut the fuck up with the mammoth replies cause I've been trying to nicely say leave me alone for a day now
I think your views about the end of slavery isn't correct historically
The pressures added by abolitionists created the crises that were batted away by the ruling class through "compromises" up until they could no longer do so with Kansas entering as a non-slave state. I am not equating the abolitionist movement with atomized, individual actions coordinated through social movements, I'm pointing out that they were initially built up starting with individuals who did such things. Personal boycotts of slave-made goods that eventually became coordinated and we're accompanied by better-organized collective action.
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 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.
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. 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.
I appreciate your point, but Waterbear is right about the history being different
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.
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.
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.
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.
They're not, there's just a miscommunication.
Boycotting is not what the meme is arguing over though. The meme is assuming that leftists who identify that our consumer choices have next to no actual effect on climate change policy and extraction industries are stupid cause they do minutely matter in a technical sense.
This whole thread is about that meme, not about the viability of boycotts writ large. No one is saying dont do boycotts, the push back is to the meme patronizing people for saying the truth, that those consumer measures are minor at best and many cannot actually afford to implement them or care. That as states burn, worrying about your plastic straw is like arranging the chairs on the Titanic. Yes chair arrangement is important and all,no one is disagreeing with the concept of chairs ffs, they are disagreeing with the time and place
Like the calculus is correct and understandable: if the navy pollutes more in a day than all of us possibly can, then even if we somehow caused a minor change in how much is produced, we will not have stopped the onslaught of destruction. Patronizing people for not caring about consumer choices is not going to build a movement, and any change will be too little too late. Any efforts need to be dedicated to destroying capitalism first and foremost, we cannot wait for organizing for a century to get some collective bargaining power. The US military existing is the biggest threat even just environmentally, and individualistic recruitment wont bring that down in time. Or can be co-opted like the decades long push for recycling which just meant push our trash onto the global south
I mean OP is mocking people but the meme is making a correct point about the oft-cited "it's corporations, not us" excuse to do nothing being faulty. And I do mean nothing, these are ideas flippantly thrown around to become a doomer.
I don't really want to rehash OP's meme, though. That isn't what we've been talking about regarding Quakers and boycotts.
Except for when people make incorrect negative generalizations about the futility of boycotts and other "individualistic" actions.
I've repeatedly made the point of insufficiency vs. pointlessness and the errors that we make by leaving dismissals unqualified and without offering concrete alternatives that build on enthusiasm. I think they contradict this very well.
Nothing you do right now is going to be sufficient to create a revolution, yet a revolution is necessary. Are you going to stop working towards revolution? Are you going to tell people that all of your socialist work will inherently have "no actual effect" and that they are "rearranging the deck chairs on the titanic"? So many people here confuse limitations for futility or implicitly dismiss the option of coopting and diverting cynical corporate PR, but I can guarantee that this is selectively employed as a rationalization that functions to protect one's views, not a coherent push for better organization.
You assume that these are isolated and dichotomous options, or even options that are in conflict. They are not. Zero actions taken today as socialists are solving our problems. None of our problems. None of them. They all have the problem of being a drop in the bucket, but they all build if we create them in solidarity, build connections, build the ranks of organizations with them. We need sufficient mass action created through a process of smaller insufficient actions or should just be doomers and check out of the conversation altogether so that those who do want to try will not be saddled with that association.
We can never organize around simply having the sufficient collective power immediately or without a concrete plan that is "fast enough". That is pure fantasy.
Here's a challenge: find a single comment in this thread that has promoted joining any specific organization to build collective power.
This thread is not about organizing and collective power. Search the comment history of anyone here and you will find promotions for joining specific orgs and shit. People are not going to lay out an answer you like to a question the OP didn't ask
Also you act like people who are not interested in complaining about others complaining about the scale of corporate pollution are just wanting to check out of the conversation and are at odds with the saintly ones who "do want to try". Its a false dichotomy, no one here has said dont try to cut down on waste. People are shitting on the sanctimonious BS of the meme and preconfigured strawman of "western leftists" who are just so irresponsible cause they believe that consumer choices dont matter and will never matter when it comes to production.
No one is asking you to be "saddled with that association", this is not an organizing thread for pete's sake. Shaming people or bickering about incremental change because they dislike a meme calling everyone who views corporations as immovably involved in climate change a triggered settler. People are shitting on the meme, not the imagined good faith conversation.
Oh and which socialists? Cause a heck of a lot are solving our problems with their actions and not through consumer choices or yelling at imaginary leftists. Look at China's environmental policies or any other socialist party in power
Yes, collective actions gets shit done