REASONS (a wishlist footnote)
I said on the intro to my wishlist that I don't have a problem with you sending me stuff from Amazon, even though I'm specifically not doing an Amazon wishlist because I don't want to support them.
This is a slightly expanded explication of why that is.
There's an expression that I'm sure you've heard, for the power of consumption as an act of political speech. "Vote with your dollar." The idea here is that enough people individually making decisions for themselves about what to buy will create consequences for a company that will force them to reconcile ethial problems with their practices.
This is extremely wrong and the fact that people believe it is a huge benefit for corporations.
The argument in support of "vote with your dollar" is essentially this:
Collective action consists of a large number of people pursuing individual actions.
Within those groups, individuals don't all perform the same action, because a diversity of roles are necessary to accomplish collective action.
Therefore, when a large number of people with a common agenda engage in a diversity of activities in pursuit of that agenda, the result is collective action.
And the reason this argument doesn't work is that it denies that coordination contributes anything meaningful to collective action.
Corporations can easily weather gradual changes in market demand over time. They can divert revenue from one service to bolster a hard time in another—or one whole corporation in a conglomerate can divert revenue to bolster an associated corporation that’s under siege. A corporation that owns both the name-brand and generic versions of a product might fight back against a push against the name brand by just sustaining it on the added profits from the generic—waiting for it to blow over so they can go back to reaping the advantage of the markup on the name brand.
Collective action can hurt corporations because organizers can identify specific points of weakness in the corporation’s structure and coordinate a deliberate, large-scale, sustained attack on those weak points. This coordination includes things like identifying the need being fulfilled by the corporation, and creating alternatives to make available during the action.
Collective action goes both ways, though: if an organizer takes steps to coordinate people’s behavior to support a company, that has a much bigger positive effect for the company than even just all of the people involved choosing to work with that company on their own.
Amazon dominates online book sales in large part because of their affiliate program, which means individuals make money when people buy things from Amazon after clicking their affiliate links. I may occasionally buy books from Amazon (when I need them quickly or when Bookshop.org doesn’t have them) but I’m never going to sign up as an affiliate; instead, I’m an affiliate with Bookshop.org, an online bookseller specifically built to combat Amazon in the domain of book affiliate sales. Bookshop.org puts 10 percent of the money from all its sales into a fund that goes to support independent bookshops around the U.S., and the company’s bylaws explicitly prohibit them from consenting to be acquired by Amazon.
Wishlists are another way that Amazon leverages content creators’ power to organize their audiences in collective action. By having the easiest wishlist system on the internet, they can arrange so that virtually all gift purchasing needs to happen through them. So I won’t use an Amazon wishlist to ask my audience for things.
But if you want to send me something and Amazon’s where you can get it, that’s fine. If you can’t find a site to go with apart from Amazon that doesn’t seem sketchy AF, that’s fine. If you can get it from somewhere better, that’s obviously better. but if you can’t, you aren’t meaningfully hurting Amazon by refusing to get it.
Your individual choices about what to buy (for yourself or for anyone else) are not collective action, and taking them as seriously as you would take participating in a collective action is a waste of your time and energy, and makes you actively less capable of making a difference when organizers do call for collective action.
Don’t cross picket lines, but don’t act like there’s a strike happening when there isn’t. Your power as a consumer within capitalism is in your ability to communicate change, and if your participation in a boycott is the same as your behavior before and after that boycott, you aren’t participating in the boycott, because you’re not contributing to a perceived drastic change that the accountants will tell the executives about.
I feel like this is going to read like I’m just trying to persuade you to buy me things from Amazon, but this is something I think is really important, and have thought so for a long time: when we push everyone all the time to treat all their individual decisions like activism, we’re burning through all the energy they would’ve had to put into real activism. Humans are limited, and no everyday choice is zero-cost. If you’re always boycotting you’re never boycotting, and you’re tiring yourself out doing it.