Wednesday, August 17, 2011

The Flexible Boycott, Another Tool of Reaction

One tool I might suggest for reactionaries and conservatives alike is the flexible boycott. By this, I mean treat any businesses owned by your friends (and frankly there are few of those) as if they were offering a 20% discount relative to the norm. Treat any business owned and operated by neutrals (and usually only a few large corporations fit into this category, but lots of local businesses do) as if they offered 10% off. Then make your normal price-based decisions with those adjusted numbers. There's no need to announce it with a great deal of fanfare, just apply it. To some extent, encouraging people to 'buy local' also feeds into this, since local is more likely to mean neutral or even friend than is a large corporation, which is almost always enemy.
The problem with rigid boycotts is they get old for those that practice them---Alinski will tell you this straight up. Discriminating in favor of your friends on the other hand, never gets old.

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