As theories of change go, consumerism has a lot going for it. "Voting with your dollars" cuts out the middleman: rather than voting for a politician and hoping that they do the right thing, you can just reward good companies directly by buying their products (and punish bad companies by not buying their products).
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But voting with your dollars has some obvious deficits. The first one is that you can't shop your way out of monopoly capitalism. If you don't like how Walmart's predatory pricing and fat tax breaks let it drive every business in town out of business, you're stuck. After all, every other business in town went bust, and you still need *stuff*.
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The next one is that dollars are not evenly distributed. In a country where most Americans can't afford a $400 medical emergency, the flow of dollars to a business is no marker of democratic legitimacy. A million normies can boycott a business but if a billionaire shops there, their "votes" are washed away.
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There's another defect, though, that's a little less obvious. When you stop voting with your ballots and start voting with your dollars, then the companies that get your dollars can capture your political representatives (this is even easier if the company has a monopoly). Once the political system is on the company's side, you lose the ability to vote with your dollars, too.
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Like, say a company claims that it is "good for the environment" and thus deserves your dollar-votes. How do you know they're telling the truth? Maybe they're like the "green" credit card Aspiration ("Make your dollars make a difference") whose claim of planting 35 million trees is just a lie:
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Aspiration's 35 million trees includes "the cumulative total of to-be planted trees" which its "partners" will plant. But the partners' numbers don't match Aspirations' numbers. And some partners won't give you the numbers, because they're a *secret.* I'm guessing they're not keeping it a secret because they're done really well and don't want to spoil the surprise when they reveal their tree data.
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Or take carbon offsets. In theory, you can board a jet, buy an SUV, or run your backyard patio-heater and still not hurt the planet, merely by buying enough carbon offsets to incentivize companies to scale back their emissions. In theory. In practice, carbon offsets are also lies.
https://pluralistic.net/2022/03/11/a-market-for-flaming-lemons/#money-for-nothing
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Companies - and even charities like the Nature Conservancy - get millions in carbon offsets by promising not to log forests that no one was allowed to log in the first place. They get offsets for not logging forests that have burned down. If an offset fights climate change, it's purely coincidental.
https://therevolvingdoorproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/Industry-Agenda_-Carbon-Offsets.pdf
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Then there's "ESG" - investment funds that claim to be a way to save for retirement without rendering the planet uninhabitable by the time you're ready to retire. These, too, are fraud-magnets that don't live up to their claims. Up until a couple months ago, some of the best-performing ESGs you could buy
were heavily invested in Russian gas and oil:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/03/15/sanctions-financing/#profiteers
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To the extent that voting with your wallet works, it depends on you knowing what you're buying. Traditionally, we look to the government (e.g. consumer protection agencies) to make sure that we're not tricked into buying crap disguised as gold.
Neoliberal ideologues don't like this *at all*. The dominant doctrine of the past 40 years is that governments are liable to "capture" and that they should be replaced by private-sector alternatives.
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So we draw down securities regulation (which ban certain financial products) and ramp up private bond-rating agencies (which purport to tell you which financial products are sound). It works great, until the rating companies get captured by the bond issuers, and then you get the Great Financial Crisis.
There was a time when limited liability companies were rare, highly regulated, and subject to close oversight.
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After all, limited liability is a potential financial weapon of mass destruction, because it lets corporate owners inflict harms on customers, workers and bystanders and escape the consequences.
But as the number of limited liability companies exploded, that kind of tight regulation and oversight was no longer practical. Instead, we looked to private entities to sort the good companies from the bad ones, effectively producing "voters' guides" for people hoping to vote with their dollars.
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The zenith of this was the creation of the B Corporation, or "Public Benefit Corporation," a kind of company that was formally exempted from prioritizing making money for its shareholders, in favor of doing good for the world. B-corps are certified by B Lab, a nonprofit.
Some of the B-corps that B-Lab certifies are doubtless great. Others are manifestly not.
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@pluralistic The social network site Ello which was famous for 15 minutes in 2015 organised as a B Corp.
It's since been sold, and so far as I'm aware none of its social benefit committments are now available online.
@dredmorbius @pluralistic I will never forget Ello, largely because about once a month I get a message that says "SvetlanaHotMILF348 is following you on Ello." I log on and report/block SvetlanaHotMILF348, only to have to repeat the operation a month later with CandieeLuvvs69 etc. And so on.
That someone apparently believes that you might be able to make money by follow-spamming on Ello really demonstrates that there are no limits to human optimism.
Cory Doctorow
Doc Edward Morbius ⭕
Angus McIntyre
xinit