It’s not invalid for anyone, obviously if people keep buying something it will create a demand. The only problem with that rhetoric is that it implies everyone has an equal amount of power in the market, and that boycotts will cure any harmful business practices. The reality is large corporations who cause the most harm own tons of brands and even buy/merge with other companies so you can’t just boycott monopolies. Also, corporations attempt to cover their harmful practices and often people don’t even know about them until they’re uncovered, like the Volkswagen scandal. Overall “vote with your wallet” is a very inaccurate and simplistic idea under capitalism.
Also, even when people know that a corporation has deeply unethical practices, the products they make might be so indispensable a tool for modern life that people have no choice but to buy them anyway. Cellphones are a good example – the fact that the production chain involves super-exploitation of sweatshop workers is basically common knowledge now, but modern capitalism has made cellphones a necessity. And this isn’t even getting into the increased atomization of workers under neoliberalism, a trend that implicitly seeks to rob people of their organizing potential (for boycotts and strikes and such).
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Worse still often if I boycott doesn’t get publicity enough to drop the stock prices, the capitalists won’t lose any money and will instead just fire employees, cut wages, and create robots to do the job instead so that they can keep hauling in their hugely inflated salaries. Capitalism is built by capitalists to shield themselves from the harm they do. That what makes America free, capitalists are free from consequence
The amount of times people try the ‘if you hate capitalism why do u have a smartphone’ shit it’s rage inducing
Is “vote with your wallet” only valid for people with money to spend then? I mean, we should try and spend on things we want to see more of if possible, right?
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gayfeline 