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.

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.

This whole thread is about that meme, not about the viability of boycotts writ large.

Except for when people make incorrect negative generalizations about the futility of boycotts and other "individualistic" actions.

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

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.

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

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.