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.