Why Does Jacobin Magazine Always Report Against Direct Action???

I guess out of boredom mostly I took a gander recently at Jacobin’s Twitter (X) feed and noticed an article entitled: Walmart Is Still Putting Ebenezer Scrooge to Shame by David Moscrop. And essentially the article is pretty decent until you get to the very end of the article where Moscrop states the following: “You simply can’t “outcompete” or “out-innovate” the country’s largest retailer and employer and deliver higher wages, nor can consumers shame or boycott them into doing the right thing. What we need is a law that requires Walmart — that is, retailers or grocers or food chains of a certain size — to pay a proper living wage or better.” If you’ve read anything on Jacobin this is a recurring theme of the magazine. In 2021 Dr. Ben Burgis (one of my favorite faux socialists targets) wrote for Jacobin an article entitled " 'Voting With Your Dollars' Is an Antidemocratic Illusion”—the fulcrum point of his argument hung on this idea: “We vote with our feet when we go on strike. We vote with our votes when we participate in elections. When we “don’t buy” from some companies, we aren’t voting with anything — and the idea that we do is an unhelpful distraction from strategies that can actually empower democratic majorities. Don’t buy it.” In both cases the ultimate solution to massive power discrepancies in the economic system is to ultimately attempt to create a majority of power in representational democratic friendly methods i.e. like voting in a bunch of DSA friendly congress people…. How has that worked so for?

The reality is that voting with your dollars is in fact a very real threat to corporations! A perfect example of this threat happened in the 1990’s and early 2000’s during the height of the Bookstore Culture that saw the explosion of Borders Books and Barnes & Nobles locations in America even as the book reading population was declining. Then something happened the big tech explosion brought us Amazon.com and the savings of not paying sales tax and 24 hour shopping, quick delivery and so on meant that a substantial shift in buyer’s preferences went from the brick and mortar store to the online store. Now, Borders Books is dead and Barnes & Noble has reduced many locations sizes and their inventory. Why again consumer preferences. Capitalism is completely driven by consumer preference we call it demand. And the same can be said for many companies in retail like Montgomery Ward, Ames (Northeast Especially), Woolworths and so many more that are out of business completely. Then you have once giants like K-Mart down to 6 locations in the US and Sears with only 11 locations. My point is simply that customer preferences are fundamentally the root of demand in all economic endeavors.

Is the fundamental belief that direct action is inferior to electoral policies. And this would be correct if direct action against these multinational corporations takes the form of switching from Coke to Pepsi or Ford to Chevy as our vote with dollars. That will not work at all. However, if our goal with direct action is to literally paralyze the economic system by removing large swaths of the economic purchasing power from the system then it is a different story.

The problem is that fundamentally direct-action requires sacrifices of the people doing it. This is always seen as a negative in the world of the DSA. They prefer the cleaner less confrontational aspects of electoral politics it seems to me. That is the problem the unwillingness of the DSA to support anything that might be seen as anti-electoral politics. I don’t necessarily believe that either. My personal opinion is that essentially the question of direct action is one of sacrificing. It seems to me that the DSA is populated by a segment of the population that wants change only if it is doesn’t upset them.

For example Dr. Ben Burgis’ writes the following:

Workers have power at the ballot box, where political issues are front and center and the number of people lining up on each side matters more than how much money is in anyone’s pocket. They have even more power on the job, where they can grind everything to a halt until their demands are met.

[“Voting With Your Dollars” Is an Antidemocratic Illusion]

Of course if we are to believe this statement we have to question why are elections in the US routinely becoming billion dollar affairs? And usually the side with more money wins! Of course Burgis’ is correct in a perfect world the mere fact that one group has more people should win the day. But, since voting and elections are as much about culture and one’s perceived place in the world an election is a matter of not just raw data points and ideas—it is also about fears and desires. So, putting your faith in an electoral only policy is to me rather absurd. Now, I’m not advocating for the abandonment of electoral politics either—especially at the local level.

What, I’m advocating for is direct action movement. One that shapes the political-culture of the people that are the most disenfranchised and disenchanted in the socio-political and economic system of today. This is a movement that much horizontally organized in nature. In this sense we have to take a page from the Anarchists in Spain in the 19th and 20th Centuries. We must be willing to living the change that we want to see.

If Breakfast Cereal Company A pays its workers more than Breakfast Cereal Company B, a given consumer’s decision about which one to buy wouldn’t just be a referendum on what they wanted the wage floor to be. It would be a referendum on which cereal tasted better, which one was cheaper, whether they were willing to be the jerk who had to tell their kids they couldn’t get the cereal they liked because their parent cared so much about what people they didn’t know were making, and a lot of other things that it’s psychologically implausible to think are going to matter less than politics to the average stressed-out consumer spending perhaps five to ten seconds standing in the cereal aisle deciding which one to stick in the cart.

The above quote from Dr. Burgis is almost laughable if he weren’t so serious about it. First off it seems that Burgis is wonders about the mixed message that that not buying a product might mean for the company. Are they capable of asking simple questions in a focus group like is our product: a) unappealing due to our taste, price , or packaging; or b) due to our abysmal record of using sweat shops and other labor abuses? It is as if Burgis thinks that these sort of movements to boycott a product over labor practices aren’t announced in public and made viral on social media accounts. And then Burgis worries that parents won’t have to make hard decisions about food in America. CNN reported in May of this year that one out of every eight people in the USA suffered from food insecurity. Sounds, like to me very hard decisions are being made by the impoverished each day as to how their money is spent on food. Which of course means that price becomes the critical issue for these people when they vote with their dollars. So, I pretty sure they are used to scrimping on the Lucky Charms!

But, the point is that somehow Burgis feels these people when voting aren’t going to have the same mixed signals sent to the party they support? How many voters voted for X things and how many for Y things? And what if the group that voted for X represents 30% of the voter base but 90% of the cash do they win out over the 70% but the 10% of the cash flow? The answer to question seems to be that Big Money and many Upper Middle Class people feel the same way. America’s oligarchy has been able to bamboozle so many people into believing they are part of the Oligarchy or can move into this position some day. And that is where Burgis’ argument fails. There is literally no difference in the complex systems of voting with dollars and voting with ballots— in both systems the end product is an aggregate of demand and population or costumer generally satisfied or not.

The answer is not to play the same voting game that we are currently engaged in with the Ballot Box. Because voting with your dollar, just like voting with your ballot, really only works when you actual choices. So, this means we have to look to building these choices.

That is the ultimate issue here and the answer is we do have very real choices if want to build them. The simplest and most reliable way we can affect change in our world is by changing our preferences. For example when we take public transport instead of private when possible we create less demand. When make decisions to carpool we are also fundamentally shifting the demand curve in a meaningful way. When decide to reduce our general consumption we shift the aggregate demand curve. If stop buying coffees and make it ourselves we shift our demand curve. I think you can see where I’m going with this idea.

You have to remove yourself from classic economic model— which means altering your preferences. So, instead of buying a cup of coffee each morning at your local coffee shop make it at home. That says more to the economic overlords than anything else when you literally check out of the system. For example in the February 5th article of this year from Restaurant Business noted that McDonald’s saw a decrease in consumers in the “45,000 USD annual tax bracket and lower” when they increased their prices by 10% over the same price from the previous year. So, the idea that voting with your dollars is not effective is just not true. McDonald’s and other restaurants are in fact now trying to woo these people back from the home by reducing price hikes this year in 2024 the same article goes on to say. So, clearly the a large drop is sales is noticed by the Producers!

The problem with the dollar voting strategy is creating a bloc of dollar voters that make their message very clear: “We are no longer beholden to your economic model”! Changing the model is the fundamental problem for Social Democratic position if you ask me. And that is in part because they cannot fathom the idea of changing their own comfortable lifestyles for the greater change they supposedly wish to see. Instead they want a magical wand like solution of legislation to do the heavy lifting and put that burden on a small group of people they feel are exploiting the poor—the 1% of the economy. And it’s true they are exploiting the poor the most. But, the cold hard facts the poor are being exploited by the everyone else as well. Perhaps, not as directly as the top 1% of the population who are making most of the political decisions—is true. However, that doesn’t mean that those who are making less than $1.5 million but more than $150,000 aren’t also benefiting and perpetuating an economic system that exploits the bottom 90%. The only problem is that these middle groups wish to deny their own culpability in the process. So instead claims like voting with your dollar is anti-democratic. And that what we need to do to defeat Walmart is to get legislation passed that limits their terrible labor policies.

But instead of competing in their game— what if you change the rules? You see that’s the part that DSA and Jacobin author’s seem to forget that is even possible. While authors like Dr. Burgis are pointing out that buying Coke or Pepsi from Hanford, Kroger, or Meyers or Walmart is not much a change—they forget that you can stop buying Pepsi all together and instead drink water from the Tap. I know crazy right? But, imagine if you could get a 100,000 people to stop buying from those stores? And that group of 100,000 consumers instead invest in a worker-consumer owned cooperative grocery store in your neighborhood that sources it produce from other worker owned farms? Now, you’ve voted with your dollars! And so for a short period of time you have to give up certain things you like until you find substitutes for them. So, your 6 Pepsi’s a day are now 36 ounces of homemade Lemonade (that’s my vice Pepsi). Your Coffee is purchased from small farms in Puerto Rico that Nestle isn’t strangling— so instead of making a pot of 4-6 cups and wasting 2 of them per day you make pots of 2 cups and waste less of a more expensive commodity. Less waste is good no matter what.

Maybe you have the space to grow your own vegetables like I do…. Maybe you have an enough space to grow enough for a small CSA project. Right? Maybe you can grow enough to support yourself all summer without going to a Grocery Store for months for fresh produce. This is an older picture but this year my goal is to produce enough produce for 8 months of not going to Grocery Store. And it’s due able I’ve been able to do 6 months in the past. And it saves a bundle of money. We could do this in cities across America. We could turn entire city blocks into green paradises that reduce radiant heat from the buildings and decrease food instability.

Yes, this possible. Yes, it is long process. But, any process of change is long and difficult. But , if we take a page from the Spanish town of Marinaleda that has for the last 40+ years has become a beacon of anti-capitalism economics working and succeeding-not because it is easy but because it offers a better future. It is an ironic fact that Jacobin Magazine has never once talked about the success of Marinaleda as an anti-capitalist economic system in an otherwise capitalist state like modern Spain. It would seem that Jacobin Magazine and most of the Democratic Socialists shy away from this town because it is believes that direct action is the power of anti-capitalism. Not, essays or well crafted podcasts—just hard work and the will to live the cause. And that is why Jacobin will never champion direct action it completely antithetical to the sterile technocracy they propose as the future. One where they offload the unpleasant nature of competition to other parts of the world for exploitation. Endlessly championing electoral policies that will never come fruition because they require real change from the bottom up to occur. And finally never doing more than pretending their hands are tied because they are too comfortable to make the sacrifices necessary to make change.

OR, you could start today by not being part of the consumer based society. Look at what really makes you happy and whittle all the excess things way.