With all of this pro-Israel and Free Palestine movement, I've always wished there were ways to support small indie businesses without having to worry about sacrificing food, transportation, technology and stuff all because the companies who own them support Israel in some way. I do apologize for being political but hear me out!
Tumblr, unfortunately, is one of those places where people can get pretty extreme in my opinion such as pushing everyone to not buy McDonald's because you're like giving money to them and boycotting every company that doesn't support Palestine. I feel like these small indie businesses would have to work hard to win more people over and branch out to market themselves across the board.
I remember a post somewhere stating that people need to do their due research and understand how things work before taking action. For example, what if I need to buy food, clothes or a laptop except they're all owned by companies that profit off the war in Gaza? We can't simply boycott them unless there's an alternative.
Also, celebrities are also likely to get criticism because they either endorse a company that doesn't support Palestine or might not be aware of the impact the companies they're working for could have on the region.
I just wanna share this anonymously because I doubt putting this out on my blog where everyone knows who I am isn't exactly the best idea. I don't want people here assuming I'm being generally dismissive. I hope you have a great day and you're free to ignore this if it's not relevant to you.
Thank you for your post Anon, and I completely agree.
There is a pandemic of a lack-of-knowledge on how corporations affect local economies and how small businesses really only survive in middle class and wealthy communities.
The concept of Food Deserts is one many people are unfamiliar with. But big businesses typically enter communities with extremely low prices and wide variety of products, like Walmart for example, to out-compete the smaller businesses in the area. They can afford to swallow the loss in sales by increasing prices in established regions, undermine indie and small businesses and then, once the consumers have no one else they can go to, Jack up the prices.
Capitalism relies entirely on the short memory of consumers. No animal on the planet has less object permanence than a consumer.
Meanwhile, McDonald's isn't really a restaurant chain, but a corporate landlord. The issue with that example in particular is that franchisees may actually dedicate a portion of their earnings towards pro-Gaza groups, but the portion they make that goes to McDonald's will be sent to Israel. In the fires in LA, I saw a picture of a McDonald's on fire and people talking about corporate influence on global warming and had to point out that McDonald's didn't lose much of anything if that location is a franchise. But whoever owns that store has lost everything.
There's so much more to how these companies function, and restaurant franchising is no different than any other gig economy hustle. And the people who lose are the tenuous middle class and the working class.
It's not black and white, and it's all about removing transparency and separating consumers from workers and workers from the means of production. Marx wrote about the economy in Das Kapital how we went from a society of Consuming from need to consuming for the sake of consumption.
Commodity (C) and Money (M) should have always functioned as C-M=C. But we have a world where the exchange is M+C=M. The second M somehow magically created value where there wasn't any before. Chasing a number for the sake of the number going up is genuine insanity.
But point blank, if you are a consumer, there is no such thing as ethical consumption. If you are interested in creating Money and not a Commodity, you're doing society wrong.
