Nike and the choices we don't have

[Carrol Cox]

I find this whole discussion bizarre. When a nationally organized boycott
of a specific company, not for its general evilness (they are all, large
and small, multinaitonal and local, capitalist: enough said) but as one
tactic among a collection of tactics which make up a strategy, then I
might be interested. The grape boycott in the 60s fulfilled those
criteria. The effort in Detroit to boycott the newspapers there fulfills
those conditions. There are other possibilites. If they can be effective
(ineffective boycotts only hurt workers by costing them time, money, and
energy without achieving anything) -- so, if they can be effective,
boycotts of states (as of Colorado over gay oppression, Illinois over its
failure to ratify ERA) would make sense. But it never makes sense for an
individual to choose commodities on a moral basis.

The Nike "boycott" (if it can be so called) does not fit those conditions,
but has a sort of partial and secondary value of being a way of
dramatising the widespread use of sweatshop labor and the effort to turn
the U.S. into a third world country (an effort already partially
successful).

But to take it on oneself to boycott "bad companies" and try to only buy
from the good or less bad companies. Pah! Silly. A waste of time.
Moralistic hogwash! 

Carrol