Boycott or Strike?
Liberation movements have a long history of using labor strikes and consumer boycotts to catalyze change. Both tactics recognize that the people and systems in power rely on our money and labor to maintain that power, and depriving them of those resources will help us influence policy. However, these tactics differ in their approaches: labor strikes involve withholding labor by refusing to work, and consumer boycotts require refusing services or products.
A Consumer Strike draws inspiration from both of these tactics. Similar to a labor strike, our aim is to disrupt those benefiting most from the economy by reducing overall production and consumption. Like a boycott, a Consumer Strike is about how we spend our money and withholding it from companies and people that are incompatible with our values.
Like a labor strike, the Consumer Strike has a defined time period and clear demands. This is different from a boycott, like the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement, that has been ongoing for 19 years. The Consumer Strike complements this longer-term strategy.
The benefits of the Consumer Strike in this ongoing genocide is that it’s widely accessible, far-reaching, and immediate. Labor strikes require significant groundwork to coordinate demands, support, and resources to ensure their success. Consumer boycotts are generally narrow and targeted at specific companies or products. We want to make as large an economic impact as possible as quickly as possible, so we chose the Consumer Strike to blend the advantages of both tactics while mitigating potential barriers.
This is both a short-term action responsive to increased spending during November and December and a long-term movement toward using our economic power more intentionally to build the world we want to live in together. The ethos of a Consumer Strike is not to postpone or anticipate our spending during the strike by making December purchases in months before or after the strike, but instead to reinvest those dollars intentionally outside of corporations altogether. This is a call to both refuse corporate holiday consumerism and to invest in relationship building, reciprocity, and new ways of getting material needs met for the long haul.
The groundwork for successful economic movements is organization and trust. When we coordinate collectively, grow alternative networks of support, and trust that our communities will be here to care for us, we reclaim power. Our vision is for an impactful Consumer Strike that leads to ceasefire and arms embargo now, and strengthened networks of reciprocity and people power that will extend far past this season.