I had the misfortune of seeing some posts calling for an “economic blackout” on February 28th—a single-day boycott of Amazon, Walmart, and Target (and occasionally food and gas more generally). These sorts of things are nothing new; ever since the development of social media, a certain type of mind has become ensnared with the possibility that one can bypass the deeply challenging organizing work that goes into building a genuinely effective mass movement and simply call for grand, utterly ineffectual actions that have absolutely no impact on the functioning of capital and society.
“I declare bankruptcy!”
“I just wanted you to know that you can't just say the word bankruptcy and expect anything to happen.”
“I didn't say it. I declared it.”
This is not to say that boycotts have no place as a tool for nudging corporate policy; after all, a company that is focused totally and utterly on the bottom line will act solely in its best financial interests, not by any particular moral code. This is, remember, why Target has come under fire in the first place—diversity, equity, and inclusion measures that were initiated after the 2020 murder of George Floyd and the uprising that followed, seen as necessary pacification measures to regain credibility with a shell-shocked nation, were rolled back in January in a sycophantic act of preemptive compliance with the new federal attempt to paint DEI as the new Red Menace and with the corresponding shifts in public opinion that made this possible. Progressives and faith leaders, particularly in Target’s homebase of Minnesota (also the site of Floyd’s murder) have led the charge in response, calling a more prolonged and more competently organized response that will likely actually have a meaningful impact on the company’s bottom line, although there’s no guarantee that it will change anything policy-wise.
To take a longer-running example of a boycott campaign: the BDS campaign against Israeli apartheid has done much to raise public awareness on the casual discrimination and wanton cruelty meted out against Palestinians even before the genocide in Gaza reached its current pitch, and it has helped inform the conversations that have happened since that point. But the ugliness of the current moment lays bare the fact that even after many years, BDS still has a long way to go in ending the violence and segregation that Western-backed Israeli settler-colonialism has forced onto Palestine. This, remember, is a campaign that has been running for twenty years and is only one part of a broader movement that is even older. A one-day “blackout” is nothing in comparison.
Returning to DEI: this is the obligatory paragraph where I note that corporate, neoliberal DEI programming is more a form of capitalist assimilation for individuals than a genuine path toward liberation and meaningful justice for communities. At the same time, we should be concerned about the fact that the fundamental principles of diversity, equity, and inclusion, i.e., a key part of the bedrock of basic human decency, are no longer considered even remotely valuable in significant chunks of modern society. Certainly, as a trans individual, I find it a little disconcerting.
The question of whether to boycott corporations based on their DEI stance is fundamentally tactical rather than strategic, reactive rather than proactive, one that is forced to deal with the problem on inherently unfriendly turf: cede the battlefield entirely or wage a rearguard action? The nature of American capitalism in its current form is that it is essentially impossible to avoid interacting with any major corporation. Even if it were possible to stick to local small businesses—a pseudo-progressive micro-autarkist concept that mirrors MAGA’s America First in concept if not scale—the reality is that small businesses and their owners, as a class, fundamentally differ only on matters of scale from their multinational billionaire counterparts, as has been exhaustively discussed by prior theorists and as is proven anew any time these institutions find themselves at risk of any inconvenience whatsoever.
At this point, to pay homage to the late Mark Fisher’s concept of capitalist realism is inevitable. To briefly paraphrase the basic premise: neoliberal capitalism has taken root in our society and in our hearts and minds to the extent that we genuinely cannot conceive of an alternative. We can see some of this in the current boycott mindset—we don’t like the way a corporation is acting, so we’ll go find a new corporation or petit bourgeois to support, permanently or until the political winds change. We may be able to conceive of a better world beyond this, but we haven’t yet found a set of political tactics or strategies that breaks us out of the world we’re in right now.
One of the key features of a capitalist realist society is its ability to sell any dream to those looking for an escape from the bleakly purgatorial nature of contemporary life, and at any given point, the dreams that are currently selling are a reflection of the zeitgeist, the collective subconscious of society reflected in strip-mall receipts and credit card bills. Consequently, analyzing the consumer trends that are in vogue as a method of societal psychoanalysis has long been a pastime of cultural critics and philosophers (generally with a fair amount of derision displayed towards the subjects of the study).
Unsurprisingly, escapism is in vogue at the moment for those who feel powerless in the current moment and who have not yet learned to find their own power. To pin this entirely on the Trump presidency fails to acknowledge the fact that American life was in fact pretty shitty during the Biden administration as well. Pop culture has been torn between making futile acknowledgements of the fact that the modern world sucks and simply turning its back on it altogether. We watched the Kendrick-Drake feud with bated breath because it sure as hell beat watching the presidential debates; Taylor Swift sold millions of copies of a drab, landlord-beige, brutalist slab of depression-core that nodded to the million little evils faced by young women without acknowledging their deeper roots in any meaningful way; “365” and “Espresso” demonstrate that hedonism, whether delivered up the nose or under the skirt, continues to sell. In the bookstores, the “romantasy” fusion genre continues to dominate (a phenomenon I hope to dig more deeply into soon), marketed directly at the earlytwentysomething women who feel newly and deeply precarious in the current world in a way their mothers never did, and who prefer reliable yet fictional lust packaged alongside dragons, magic, and intrigue over the horrors of checking Tinder or Twitter, Bumble or Bluesky, any platform where the reality of toxic male ego at both the micro and macro levels must go acknowledged and its power recognized. As blatantly escapist as they can feel, at least romantasy and the authors at its vanguard are willing to at least sometimes acknowledge and interrogate systems of power, even if the depth and quality of the analysis varies wildly. A glance at the top movies of the past year or so, or at any news summary of the Oscars (I confess I couldn’t be bothered to put myself through the ordeal of watching them myself), will not disabuse one of the notion, accurate or not, that Hollywood and American filmgoers alike are simply not interested in meaningfully acknowledging the fact that we do, in fact, live in a society.
Even if the films, the books, the TV, the music, were advocating revolution on every channel, where would we be? Take the Kendrick-Drake feud again; with both artists signed to UMG, it hardly matters who wins the war of words on an artistic front—the corporate shareholders are the ones who will truly be laughing all the way to the bank, cashing checks written by Black musical talent, just as they have for decades. Even content with genuinely subversive messaging struggles here. Boots Riley, originally earning his name as frontman of communist hip-hop outfit the Coup, has begun making waves in film and television (Sorry to Bother You and I’m a Virgo respectively), with his presence behind the camera just as pointed as his lyrics on Genocide & Juice—but ultimately still reliant on Universal Pictures and Amazon Prime to get the message across to the public. The same is true of fiction literature; the leftist bookstore remains a stubborn presence within any proper U.S. city, and plenty of small-to-medium subversive presses help keep those shelves stocked, but to make a broad impact with anything that breaks out beyond literary circles requires a mainstream, corporate publisher. Hence we see R.F. Kuang’s Babel—an acclaimed and frankly excellent novel that shouts “Protest and even violence against systems of oppression is not only justified but obligatory” in big flaming silver letters across the Oxford skyline—put out on an imprint of Rupert Murdoch’s HarperCollins, the same major publishing house which also gave the world Hillbilly Elegy. If the capitalists will sell the masses the rope with which they themselves will eventually be hung, they’re certainly making an excellent profit margin in the meantime.
Should we stop consuming any product of any corporation engaged in “unethical” behavior (whatever that means)? Should we stop consuming any product of any corporation at all? Short of dropping off the grid and going full Kaczynski, it’s not doable. Food, water, rent and mortgages, power, heat, healthcare—it’s theoretically possible to get by without having to buy into these things, sure, but to do so isn’t exactly something the masses are raring to sign up for, and I imagine not many people are seriously ready to be convinced of the necessity of living on nuts and berries. And of course, if you have a job, you’re already having a substantial amount of the value of your labor peeled away to line the pockets of upper management and keep the wheels turning even before you hit the mall for Black Friday.
We all need to remember to see the bigger picture: unless your name is Luigi Mangione, odds are you, as an individual, haven’t done much that has substantially altered the current trajectory of global or national history in the past few years. (And even if your name is Luigi Mangione, your action made history for what it represents and for the nationwide wrath it’s inspired, and also, if your name is Luigi Mangione, why are you reading my blog? Thanks for dropping in, but don’t you have a legal defense to work on?)
Change comes from collective action, organized and sustained over time. Boycotts and consumption decisions can be a part of this; it’s up to you to decide how much you value the things they’re currently organized around and if giving up on something for as long as it takes for a change to come is worth whatever change you’re asking for. Not all issues and causes are created equal. Either way, if a return to the Biden status quo isn’t enough for you, or you aren’t sure you want to wait years or decades for a campaign to bear fruit on its own, think about other ways to get together with like-minded folks and make things happen, even at the lowest levels. Donate supplies to the unhoused. Join a union. Write to queer prisoners. It’s hard to get the big things figured out if no one can be bothered to manage the little ones.
Above all, remember: there’s no way to consume our way out of the current crisis.
—coronabeth