[lbo-talk] boycott histories (was: west on obama and boycotts)

shag carpet bomb shag at cleandraws.com
Thu Apr 8 19:39:08 PDT 2010


At 10:15 PM 4/8/2010, John Adams wrote:
>-----Original Message-----
> >From: shag carpet bomb <shag at cleandraws.com>
>
> >Also, at the meeting, when I mentioned I wasn't a fan of boycotts but
> >that I'd go along with the group as long as the boycott was called for
> >by _workers_, a couple of people got really upset with that argument.
> >Others liked it though.
>
>I like it well enough so far as it goes but think your formulation is
>incomplete. Where would it put the Montgomery bus boycott?

yeah. when you mentioned it earlier, that was totally tough one -- and I'd forgotten it when it got buried under the pile of stuphage. i don't like my formulation either. Carrol will help. :)

still, there's something different. it's a group of people saying, you don't treat us, your consumers, properly. So we're boycotting you. In this case, the actual employees of the bus systems were, if Robin D.G. Kelley recounted the whole story, perpetuating and holding up the system: shooting passengers,. beating them, pistol whipping them, refusing to pick them up.

this is different than boycotting a product because of their treatment of workers. the boycott is to get a company to stop treating consumers in a socially unjust way. if, for some reason (an SA hypothetical methinks) the workers weren't perpetuating this racism - like the scabs -- then I wouldn't boycott. but i think that would be highly unlikely.

shag



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