By Dr Usman Masood
As we debate the sanity and economics of boycotting products during our tea breaks, many in Gaza are going through one of the slowest and most painful transitions imaginable – agonizing starvation. The aroma of my favorite coffee may be one-of-a-kind, but if the same brand operates in Israeli-occupied apartheid territories it’s time to rethink my choices.
Sometimes we call our favorite brands irreplaceable, being so attached to them so as to identify ourselves with their trademarks. Sometimes the economists within us argue that if we don’t buy from a certain company, our people are going to lose jobs. And sometimes, the cleverest among us spell out a simple calculus: boycotts are a sentimental overreaction that is not actually actionable or sustainable.
Arguably, a person should not be defined by a brand. In a world ever more sensitive to businesses’ social responsibility, it is the brand which should be defined by the kind of people it serves – its responsibility to society in the neatest sense.
Humanitarian-washing
If a company thinks it is legitimate to set up its businesses in illegitimately occupied lands, serve an army carrying out massacres, and then offer them “deals” on goods ranging from demolition machinery to feel-good grocery packs, then allowing such brands to represent us is profoundly troubling.
Sprinkling a few giveaways to the poor here and there in the name of social responsibility, after making fortunes from genocide, is the kind of “humanitarian-washing” some companies are heavily relying on these days. As responsible consumers, we need to be wary of giving them a free pass. Draped in philanthropic robes, beneath you’ll find the same Faustian bargain on offer – pleasure, products, and plenty in exchange for “looking the other way,” assuming convenient apoliticism.
Even if you set aside these moral considerations, the arguments in favor of “business-as-usual,” on the pragmatic basis of “it’s the economy, stupid,” are fundamentally flawed.
Economics beyond slogans
Yes, standing up to Israel – and the complicit companies – may cost jobs and investment to the boycotting country, but this considers only the static, one-time costs, ignoring the potential for dynamic, long-run gains. If a boycott causes momentary unemployment, an economist should tell you that capital flows, divestment in one company means investors warming up to another, and hence substitute job creation.
Moreover, a local company picking up steam at the expense of its foreign competitor ensures that the profits and jobs stay at home, rather than being repatriated to the countries of origin. Many economies that saw unprecedented growth in history used the recipe of replacing goods previously imported with local production, which vitalized the domestic industry. While import-substituting policies have had their demerits, the formula proved transformational in the case of economies like Japan, China, and South Korea, where the local production which had initially kicked off in an effort to replace imports flourished with time, making these countries the leaders in global exports.
In his book, Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism, Ha-Joon Chang notes that the drive for consuming domestically produced goods came down to the grassroots level, to something as frivolous as cigarettes. Such was the emphasis on consuming local products in South Korea that a stigma was attached to smoking foreign brands.
The state encouraged people to report such “treasonous” acts that wasted foreign exchange – foreign currency being a scarce resource, which represented the “blood and sweat” of “industrial soldiers” (p. xiv). Through this lens, boycott metamorphoses into an opportunity. The reluctance to buy Israeli – or occupation-aligning companies’ – products has already been instrumental in carving out a market for local products in countries like Türkiye, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia.
Transformative power of consumer choice
There are still some who contend that a comprehensive boycott is simply not practical, and therefore, futile. But what’s the point of such an all-or-none approach? To be clear, boycotting does not have to be extreme – not everything, everywhere, forever. One may start with a few products that are easily substitutable, as soon as they may be substituted, for as long as necessary. Small, incremental changes to our consumption patterns may feel insignificant but they can affect retailers’ buying decisions, wholesalers’ stocking decisions, and ultimately, a company’s production decisions. The effect of consumer decisions is such that the impact is heavier each step up the supply chain, a phenomenon referred to as the bullwhip effect.
A small jolt to one consumer’s whip may feel unimportant, but collectively, it may unsettle the machinery of complicit capitalism. It’s time to opt out of the genocide, one product at a time.
The author is an assistant professor in SZABIST University in Islamabad, Pakistan and contributed this article to Anadolu.
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