More than 150 Starbucks stores and 3,500 workers will be on strike next week across the US, the union representing the coffee chain’s baristas said on Friday, after it claimed the company had banned gay Pride month decorations at its cafes.
Starbucks Workers United union said earlier this month the company took down LGBTQ+ Pride decorations and flags at several stores, while some workers took to social media to report the same.
Starbucks on Friday denied the claims as “false information”. It said last week there had been “no change to any policy on this matter” and that it was still encouraging store managers to celebrate Pride month.
I don't see how this is a win in any way, rainbow capitalism still served to at least normalize Pride. Now we just have capitalism without rainbows.
Nobody, not even the libbest of liberals, ever believed that Raytheon cared about LGBTQ rights because of a rainbow logo. Literally nobody thinks this. But even so, it still sent a signal that being gay is normal and nothing to be ashamed of, if only through virtue of "everyone's doing it".
Corporations being afraid to display pride stuff is a really, really bad sign.
So true.
The number of leftists openly cheering the accelerationism of this when it’s only happening to minorities is really gross.
News flash - this isn’t going to help end capitalism. It will just make it a little more unbearable and horrible for LGBT.
I've been cheering it and I'm in those groups. Rainbow capitalism is gross while also coopting and deradicalising pride turning it into something that has stalled at progressing the rights of lgbt people. Pride achieved 1000x more before capitalism stuck its fucking nose into it, it slowed and regressed once capitalism coopted it.
If capitalists started coopting socialism and waving red flags everywhere while essentially maintaining capitalism and only doing welfare it would have exactly the same effects on socialist movements. It would stall them, and then it would halt them, and then regress them. We literally saw that happen with social democracy implemented to fight the ussr and that's what rainbow capitalism is to Pride. It is social democracy to radical queerness.
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What? Yeah, Capitalism and Neoliberalism are not only detrimental to a progressive movement, they're ideological opposites, but we're talking about rainbow capitalism. "Rainbow capitalism" isn't an actual economic model or an ideology, it is a facetious name given to a tradition of corporations paying insincere lip service to the LGBTQ community to appeal to customers.
I'm fully aware of the unsustainable nature of capitalism inevitably leading to fascism in an undending effort to redistribute wealth to increasingly smaller in-groups. My point is that as hollow as rainbow capitalism was, it still served to superficially normalize LGBTQ identities and its end is the canary in the coalmine that this period of (relative) LGBTQ acceptance is coming to an end. Even the most cynical leftist can't deny that things have been better for gay, lesbian and trans people in the past 2 decades than they were in the previous centuries, and even if this progress was always doomed to fail, that doesn't change that its failure is going to have very real consequences for millions of people.
"The end of rainbow capitalism" here doesn't unfortunately mean the end of capitalism, it just means the end of rainbows. And while the rainbows under capitalism may not have contributed to a genuine, sustainable progressive movement, they at least made it marginally safer for gay and trans people to be themselves for a while.
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Maybe I'm just sick of companies co opting my identity to sell more of their shit. Did you consider that? Fuck rainbow capitalism I don't need Starbucks to tell me I'm valid.