South Asia Citizens Wire | 17 April 2003
To Boycott or Not to Boycott?
Aditya Nigam*
The war is not over yet. We are now in a permanent state of war. Iraq is
only a sign of what the Empire is all about. Already, 'recalcitrant' states
are being threatened and whether or not they are attacked in the way Iraq
was, this war is going to continue by other means. In fact, it is going to
he fought by all means possible. The arrogance of Empire is truly
unprecedented. It has arrogated to itself the power to determine what the
new world order will be like and what rules of conduct will govern it.
Means, of course, have never been an issue with rulers - anything that
guarantees their continued domination is justified. Hitler did it in the
name of the supremacy of the Aryan race and the German nation; Bush does it
in the name of democracy and the freedom.
The question of fighting with all possible means is above all, a question
for those who wish to challenge the power of the Empire. We do not want
violence, for we believe that violence cannot achieve lasting peace.
Violence cannot, by itself change anything. We abhor violence because we
believe that violence creates prototypes of the oppressor within the
oppressed. And yet, will mere peaceful demonstrations yield anything? The
American answer to this question is a loud and unambiguous NO.
Even as literally millions of people around the world came out in
demonstrations, the US administration decided to go ahead with one of the
most brutal and one-sided wars in recent history. This cynical disregard
for world public opinion has forced many peace activists to think hard.
What is it that can affect these war mongers? It is in this context that
some anti-war activists in Delhi started thinking aloud about the
possibility of boycotting US goods. Some suggested a boycott of both US and
British goods. These were early days of the war and we did not really know
that already in other parts of the world people had begun to act along
these lines. In fact, even in other cities in India, antiwar activists were
thinking and acting along similar lines. The message of this moment must
not be missed, the moment when millions started thinking and acting along
similar lines: If our voices as citizens do not matter, what really matters
to capital is our so-called 'freedom of choice' as consumers. This is the
moment of recognition. This is the moment of subversion of that great
neo-liberal mantra of the sovereignty of the consumer. This sovereign
consumer of the neo-liberal utopia is and must only be a passive consumer.
This is the moment of the global citizen-consumer to say that "we will
decide what we want to consume".
And so it began. The boycott of some selected consumer goods of US
corporations is now gaining momentum. The campaign in Delhi is modestly
focussing on three cultural symbols of the US - Coke, Pepsi and McDonald's.
The idea is to leave the rest to the decision of the individual consumers,
how much and what else they will boycott. This is incidentally the position
also being advocated by the Adbusters (www.adbusters.org), one of the
frontier organisations of the counter-globalisation movement in Canada.
While their call "Boycott Brand America" is more ambitious, their decision
to leave the actual extent of the boycott to the individuals concerned is
based upon an appreciation of the intricacies of the situation.
Interestingly, it is at this precise moment that many doubts have also been
expressed about the meaning, efficacy and the point of such a move by some
who are themselves part of the antiwar movement. Is it right? After all, in
this era of global production, by doing so, are we not going to affect the
livelihoods of the poor third-world workers who are employed in these
firms? Is there a violence involved in this move - like picketing or
attacking outlets of McDonald's? More importantly, can we be so selective
as to boycott some and not all American and British goods? What about our
computer hardware and software? By being selective, are we thereby being
duplicitous? The issues are serious and call for discussion.
Let us take the last, that is the 'consistency' question first. The
struggle against the war is certainly a battle for principles and ethics
but it is also question of strategy. For, this is an unequal battle, fought
under circumstances determined almost entirely by global corporations. The
way things are, if we argue that unless we can, from the very outset,
boycott everything that is produced by these corporations, we must not even
begin to think of taking a small step, we might be abandoning the struggle
before it has begun. For the big lesson of the past is that this
all-or-nothing attitude only means nothing, because we will never have
'all'. The logic of this argument is that unless we can transform the very
conditions of capitalist production, unless that is, there is a
revolutionary transformation that overturns capitalism globally, we can
never even begin to act. Not at least in ways that are internally
consistent. For all struggle is about negotiation, about fighting on a
terrain that is determined and constituted by the Big Other. In such
conditions, we are doomed to remain prisoners of global capital and Empire.
In other words, in order to fight, we might just need to be 'opportunist'.
One of the points of the present campaign for boycott is that by doing this
we can start focussing on certain linkages that are almost non-existent in
the public mind. We might not be able, right now to start affecting the
demand and the sales of such corporations but we will certainly make a
connection between corporate globalisation, the greed for profit and the
war. We might, as a friend recently put it, make an emotional appeal to
certain sections of consumers to expunge certain items from the their
everyday. This is, in other words, a political campaign which is beginning
to tell the corporations that they cannot take their consumers for granted;
that they will have to answer in the market-place for what they do in their
secret chambers of power.
This is not the first time that such an assertion of 'consumer sovereignty'
is taking place. India might in fact be one of the first countries in the
world where the boycott of foreign goods became a crucial part of its
political, nationalist struggle, in the early decades of the last century.
That was a different context and a different time. No nationalist boycott
will or can work in today's world. But more recently we have the experience
of the boycott of South African goods in the apartheid era. In a different
way, even there the troubled question had to be faced: will the boycott not
affect the poor, black workers if it becomes effective? The same question
is coming up now in relation to the impact on third world workers. Here
again, the question must be turned around. Can we take up any campaign
today - against use of plastic bags, against fire-crackers, against the
environmental degradation wrought by the present model of development,
against nuclear power, for cuts in military expenditure etc - that will not
involve some dislocation of current employment? Can we merely sit and await
the never-to-arrive millennial transformations when alone we can rearrange
priorities such that nobody will be hurt? On the other hand, if millions of
opponents of the war and of the US decide to boycott certain goods, and if
they can really affect their demand, then they can spur the demand of
alternative products as well. After all, this is not a call to boycott 'all
foreign products' but a call to make the corporations hear the only sound
they do - the sound of cash. It is to make them realize that they have to
have some accountability and if governments and political parties can be
bought over, not everybody can.
Finally, the question of violence. Certainly, there have been incidents of
violence in picketing and such other activities and many of us are not very
comfortable with such methods. One friend from Nepal has raised the
question of this kind of violence and has counter-posed it to Gandhi's
non-violent movement. This is indeed a serious question for us to ponder
over. Many of us are certainly uncomfortable with the organised violence of
picketing that is often undertaken by many left-wing groups during strikes
and bandhs as well as in such boycott campaigns. Such violence can often be
self-defeating in that it just put off people who might otherwise like to
join such a movement. But we also probably need to distinguish between such
organised violence and acts that are undertaken by social groups under
extreme conditions of desperation. We also need to remember, it seems to
me, that even Gandhi's movement was not always in Gandhi's control and
there was considerable violence - often in his name. Such acts of violence
cannot always be ruled out and we certainly need to make allowances for the
fact that the antiwar movement today emerges out of a confluence of
different currents, of people with different beliefs and we cannot decree
any specific kind of approach as legitimate and others as illegitimate. We
are moving in uncharted waters and not all issues between us can be
resolved at the outset. Maybe they can never be resolved to everybody's
satisfaction. This is both the strength and the weakness of this moment.
When millions of people across the globe raise their voice, disagreements
and differences are inevitable and have to be respected. That is why, in
the final analysis, the decision of what each of us will boycott and how
has to be left to the discretion of the individuals/groups concerned.
*( Aditya Nigam, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, 29 Rajpur Road, Delhi-11005, India)Return to: Progressive South Asian Voices Against the War on Iraq - 2003
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