What Are Days of Action Supposed to Accomplish?
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So today you aren’t supposed to shop or something.
The question is why? What is this going to do? This is the question everyone should be asking. Not because engaging in such an action is wrong. But organizing needs to have a point? What is the ask? What comes next? What is the goal? What is the strategy moving forward? Today’s No Shopping Day has none of this and neither do most “days of action” that are common these days. These are just one off actions to make participants feel like they are doing something. There’s nothing wrong with this, but there’s not much right about it either.
But I like to know what I’m boycotting, and People’s Union USA doesn’t really answer that question. I’m especially put off by this:
Are you against Trump, Elon Musk, or any specific individuals? This movement is not about one person. It is about the system as a whole.
Both political parties, both past and current leaders, and billionaires have manipulated the economy and profited off the working class. We will hold them all accountable. Our focus is systemic change, not political drama.
You want me to boycott “the system as a whole”? Do you mean capitalism? I don’t want to bring down capitalism; I just want to make it behave. There are people (Jeff Bezos appears to be one) who think it’s anti-capitalist to favor (as I do) more regulation, higher taxes on the rich, stronger labor unions, a more generous welfare state, and a larger government presence in the economy. Bezos may think believing these things means I oppose the free market, but I don’t. I’m just a New Deal liberal trying, like Franklin Roosevelt, to keep capitalism from destroying itself and taking the rest of us down with it.
People’s Union USA’s sneering reference to “political drama” is my biggest problem with this boycott. Aside from making no logical sense (surely a movement that wants the entire country to engage in protest intends that protest to create political drama), that phrase commits the same sin of bothsidesism of which the mainstream media frequently stands accused.
Why is it wrong for The New York Times to be evenhanded (its mission is to report news “without fear or favor”) but OK for People’s Union USA? I’m a partisan for the Democratic Party—not because it’s perfect, but rather because it’s the only major party that’s remotely sane. I’m in no mood to hear it even hinted that, as George Wallace famously put it in 1968, there ain’t a dime’s worth of difference between Democrats and Republicans. There’s a billion-dollar difference. The GOP has completely lost its mind.
We’re in an emergency, but the emergency isn’t that “the system as a whole” is unsatisfactory in some ill-defined way. The emergency is that Donald Trump is president, and he’s trying to turn this country into a dictatorship. Let’s focus on that. As they said in the civil rights movement of the 1960s, “Keep your eyes on the prize.” The prize in this instance is preserving the rule of law, which Trump defies at every turn. The civil rights movement, Thomas E. Ricks argues in his excellent book Waging a Good War, was plotted with the precision of a military campaign. We need to apply that same military-style discipline to fighting Trump.
People’s Union USA acknowledges in a backhanded way that Trump is the problem by making the boycott partly about diversity, equity, and inclusion, or DEI, programs. These are in eclipse largely because Trump and his fellow Republicans are bullying corporations to drop them. But boycotting all of corporate America doesn’t work here, because not all of corporate America has abandoned DEI. Apple, Ben & Jerry’s, Costco, Delta Airlines, and Microsoft are all standing by their DEI programs. To whatever extent this protest is about DEI, punishing good actors (on this issue, anyway) along with bad ones defeats the purpose.
So there’s a problem with the people doing this in that they don’t seem to have thought much of this through.
But my concern is the bigger issue about days of action that have no secondary goal or something for you to do tomorrow. That’s not organizing. It’s just meaningless. Not shopping today but shopping tomorrow is meaningless. It doesn’t have to be. If the people organizing this gave you something to do tomorrow, that would be something else. If anything, this feels like a shunt to real organizing and action. There’s a day of action thing that someone has called for campuses later this spring. There are faculty who want the union to do something here (as if they are not the union). But they can’t answer any kind of basic questions about it, such as, “who are we targeting?” and “what’s the goal?” Actions only become effective when they can answer such questions.
Again, if it makes you feel good, that’s cool I guess. Me, I am going to buy Alejandro Escovedo tickets today to make sure I get a decent seat. Waiting until tomorrow would have the precise consequence of me sitting farther from the stage and that is the entirety of it.