Boycotts, Strikes, and Violence

The modern anti-capitalist movement suffers from various ills rendering it totally impotent. The methods in use are totally inadequate, performative, and nonsensical. There is no broader organization. Violence is seen as a total non-starter. Communism is dead in the water.

Firstly, the few methods that anti-capitalists deem respectable and civil are downright pointless. Boycotts are a favorite. The CPUSA, when not playing pretend that Stalin is still alive and well, enjoys calling for boycotts against various companies. For instance, a recent call for a boycott against Target following the rollback of various DEI programs. The stated aims included:

As we all know quite well, the Communists are in the field of supporting small-businesses, coming to the aid of banks, ensuring 'retail centers' are established -- so much for supporting small-business -- around colleges, and ensuring the proper amount of racial minorities are being exploited by capitalists. If we do these four things, we are just one step closer to TOTAL GLOBAL COMMUNISM. All this and more could be achieved if only the CPUSA's 20,000 nationwide members engaged in a total boycott of Target.

Other boycotts are similarly nonsensical. For example, boycotts against corporations such as Amazon and Wal-Mart, set to last for a singular day. This is meant to demonstrate the 'power' of the consumers. This is plainly ineffectual. A consumer who wants to buy a laptop, a television, or essentials such as food, will abstain from shopping on that one day and instead will make their purchases on the previous or following day. There won't be any affect on the weekly earnings, let alone the company's quarterly-earnings reports. If anything, it is a demonstration of the workers' total dependence on the large corporations.

Having a boycott, strike, or other action with a specified end-date is ridiculous. It tells the company that they can wait a few days and this will all blow over. It makes the conditions for the action to end based on time rather than demands being met, resulting in the action being made wholly ineffective. This is unless the action can be sustained for weeks or months at a time, and if it can be sustained that long there's no sense in setting a time limit for the action.

There is another similarly insane tendency of anti-capitalists: the cult of the Small-Business Owner. The Small-Business Owner is still a capitalist. There is still wage-labor being employed and workers being exploited, the same as a large corporation. SBOs are generally worse for workers as well, feeling more of a need to punch above their weight by cutting costs wherever possible. They offer few benefits, low wages, and any notions of a pension are ludicrous.

There is an idea that by supporting small-businesses, we are 'keeping money inside the community'. But where does this money go? It doesn't result in higher wages. The small-business owner will either keep it in his own personal accounts, or will spend it at other small-businesses. In either case, the worker is left out of the equation entirely. Unless, of course, the goal is to turn every man into a small-business owner, a sole owner-operator, in a vast decentralized network. This would be good, if it wasn't for the inherent inefficiency of small-business.

When a business grows, it is able to afford more advanced and efficient machines, better divide labor, have specialized teams of engineers, scientists, lawyers, and so on. Large businesses are able to take full advantage of economies of scale. A small business simply cannot. It has larger relative overhead, lower turnover, and generally has to outsource specialized roles at a surcharge rather than sourcing them in-house. This is why small-businesses often have to raise prices often times nearly double that of a large retailer, because they are simply an uncompetitive and inefficient business model. If this wasn't true, we wouldn't see small-businesses in such large quantities sourcing their inventory and supplies from large companies like Sysco, Amazon, and other Wholesalers. Big Business just does it better.

Small businesses are only able to survive off of a ridiculous sense of 'moral duty', pity, by the consumer, or inhabiting a niche so small that it isn't worth it for a large company to incorporate it into their business model. The moment that some niche becomes mainstream, a big business will enter and outcompete the small-business with lower prices and a more efficient business model.

The obsession with small-business as the salvation of the working class against exploitative big-business largely comes from those who haven't worked under a small business, or have childish delusions that a small-business offers a better experience. This is nonsense. Big business is not the issue. Business as a concept, Capitalism itself, is the issue.

The only way to non-violently fight capitalism itself is on economic grounds. This is not done by boycotting, by shopping local, or for not buying anything for a day. This is done by work stoppages. Strikes.

Strikes are the key to every union's negotiations, the only real lever of power they hold over the company. The company can only gain profit through exploiting labor. If the laborers refuse to work, there is no ability to generate value for the company. A general strike is the only real non-violent method that workers have against corporations.

The main issue with a general strike is organization. Any strike in a workplace requires some broader form of organization, most times a union. For a larger-scale strike, a larger-scale organization is needed. A sporadic, loose association of workers will result in an uncoordinated mess. Without a set list of demands and conditions, some workers may stop while others continue, leading to the strike faltering when some parties are satisfied, necessarily stopping it from enacting real, fundamental change.

Without organization, a broader structure, any sort of action is going to be floundering, riddled with infighting, and totally ineffective. Part of this is due to the efforts of various government programs throughout the decades, focused anti-communist efforts, as well as the various reactions to the Russian Revolution -- Trotskyites, Marxist-Leninists, and Left-Communists all emerging as rival movements. Rather than a unified movement, there are various ideological splits and petty squabbles over the teachings of men who have been dead for nearly a century. Many people are stuck in the idea that 2026 is still 1926, that the methods and conditions that existed then still exist now.

The lack of any unified organization and the lack of suitable methods cripples the movement. The ban on political strikes, secondary boycotts, solidarity strikes, and wildcat strikes under the Taft-Hartley Act has been one of the biggest actions against change of any kind in American history.

Even besides the illegality of political strikes, allowing 'legal' violence to be inflicted on workers, strikes have historically been countered by private armies hired by the company, by local police, or by the state's army. Events such as the Ludlow Massacre and the Pullman Strikes leaving dozens of workers dead and the rest sent back to work could fill whole volumes of books. Even nowadays, such as under the Biden administration, striking workers are forced back to work if the strike is deemed contrary to national interest.

Methods of peaceful change are either totally ineffective or outlawed. The only option besides peaceful change is violent change. All debate as to the possibility of a peaceful transition to communism is made pointless by the illegality of it. But violence receives constant, hypocritical condemnation.

The system that forces people to work to enrich the owner or else starve or freeze to death, the system that starts endless, brutal wars for resources, the system that herds millions into jails to work them for pennies an hour, the system that forces people to work themselves to death, the system that guns down protestors, this system will cry out about the unacceptable nature of violence. This system, established through theft, violence, and armed revolution, will decry violence at every turn. But the issue for the system is not the use of violence, the issue is violence against itself. Capitalism will gladly use violence to protect and perpetuate itself, while constantly spreading messages encouraging people to stay peaceful, to not take up arms, to submit. Politicians who vote YES for oil wars will decry the idea of violence in politics. It is a disgusting joke. By making peaceful revolution impossible, they have made violent revolution inevitable.