A Good Person Wouldn’t Buy That: Boycotting as a Social Movement Facilitator

Graphics by Madeline Barber

In recent weeks, the Starbucks Corporation has been fraught with turmoil as it faces a $11 billion decline in market value. Amongst a tepid holiday promotion and growing labor strife, another factor underpinning the deceleration of Starbucks’ share price is a boycott over the ongoing genocide in Gaza. The boycott touches on sensitive geopolitical issues after the company found itself in controversy following a tweet from Starbucks Workers United—the union representing many of its baristas—expressing solidarity with Palestinians. The swift corporate response condemning the tweet sparked a series of boycotts as calls to action. Despite Starbucks’ best efforts to quell the protests, the hashtag #boycottstarbucks is still trending across social media platforms.

This boycott thrusts into the spotlight the larger Palestinian-led Boycott, Divestment, and Sanction (or BDS, for short) movement as the conflict has worsened over the last few months. The global nonviolent protest movement attempts to channel individual actions into a larger economic and cultural movement to pressure Israel’s government into ending its genocide of the Palestinian people. Other companies currently being boycotted include McDonald’s, SodaStream, and Hewlett Packard (HP). Inspired by the South African anti-apartheid movement, BDS’ directive is to disrupt Western support of the Israeli government and violations of Palestinian human rights. 

At a general level of description, boycotting is a social response that involves one party pointedly withdrawing from or avoiding interaction with another party. As a method of collective action, boycotts are championed and implemented voluntarily by private citizens. Boycotting is a strategy in the moral toolbox of ordinary people. Describing a boycott as a collective action emphasizes that a plurality of actors is involved and that the action itself could not be performed without the efforts of the group. Boycotts involve exposing and drawing attention to the perceived injustice. 

Across different eras of capitalist development, boycotts have been utilized to urge people to sympathize with exploited groups via the corporations that connect them. Whether the corporation is the direct cause of economic exploitation or the contributor to a larger injustice (such as war or genocide), there is always an exchange of commodities that obscures the suffering of a minority group of people. Boycotting is a dedication of people to mobilize on behalf of those marginalized groups from which capitalism has extracted social and economic value. It is also is an avenue for people who do not directly experience a problem to become involved in envisioning a solution by taking political action through the very commodity-exchanges that can overshadow those at the mercy of corporations.

Exit strategies such as divestment and boycotting are a growing form of political behavior largely because they are a more simplistic form of collective power. However, the efficacy of boycotts is largely disputed. There is an ongoing debate on whether boycotts are still effective when participation is predicated by the perception of receiving an intrinsic reward. Instead of prioritizing the injustice occurring, individuals may orient around self-enhancement by, for example, using a boycott to avoid guilt or respond to social pressure. The concern surrounds how centering on the self might mitigate the egregiousness of a firm’s actions and obscure the movement’s true motivations. Nevertheless, the end goal of boycotting is not only the education of consumers but the widespread action they take. Individual incentives to join a boycott do not necessarily have to be aligned with social incentives to still add to the movement. 

Even so, it must be acknowledged that movements such as BDS face additional limitations apart from efficacy critiques. Although an effective way to raise awareness around an issue, boycotts are often not effective in creating significant or immediate policy change. In some ways, BDS continues and was born out of a lack of alternative ways to express Palestinian grievances. There are few other ways to raise awareness of their struggle: with the criminalization of other forms of resistance, boycotting has remained a viable channel for the movement to continue. Despite the broader economic impact of the boycotts being largely negligible for Israel’s economy, BDS continues to act against systems of oppression. The BDS boycotts against Israel dig deeper than merely examining what consumers buy at the store. To date, BDS has been successful in pushing government pension funds in Luxembourg, New Zealand, and Norway to divest from Israel. 

The BDS movement actively demonstrates some of the limitations of boycotting. However, we must look beyond the purely economic implications of boycotting. It might not change much on the geopolitical level, but BDS and boycotts like them are not failures. Boycotting is a compelling social response, successful in and of itself because of its ability to inspire mass mobilization. Boycotts are unifying movements built from individual choices against exploitation and racialized capitalism, which work to raise awareness of ongoing injustices by removing support from corporations contributing to the inequitable systems that perpetuate them. 

One can acknowledge that boycotting is not enough on its own to achieve the necessary political change while also conceding that maintaining boycotts until other avenues for leverage appear keeps people aware and involved in the fight for justice. The BDS boycotts demonstrate an ongoing commitment to social justice and are indicative of a much larger social consciousness. Especially in situations where other vehicles for progress are restricted, boycotting fuels the narrative that individuals still have the capacity to take meaningful political action.