I will say, I'm glad folks are talking about the issues of global exploitation and the way the small-creator-merch production pipeline has a fucked up role in it, I think it's a conversation that absolutely needs to happen...
But I feel like y'all need to find a way to actually organize a campaign to materially do something about it instead of letting it devolve into a guilt-stick people bludgeon others over the head with without doing anything.
Like, for clarity's sake I'm the last person who should actually head such an org, and I'm saying this from a perspective of hypothesis, but I do at least have a list of questions you should ask yourself if you do want to start an org/movement.
Like, for the general ones:
What are your end-goals? both short-term and long term? What is a good immediately-achievable goal to work towards at the start to recruit?
What levers of power are available to use to get your goals done? What could you do to expand those levers of power?
What forces stand against you? What pillars support their power? How can you undermine those pillars?
Where is an adversarial framing avoidable? How do you build solidarity in that context? Where is adversarial framing unavoidable? How do you go forward then? How do you tell when that framing is avoidable and unavoidable?
How do you get people onboard? How do you get them to stay? How do you get them to actively work on this?
And for the ones specific to this:
What is your immediate goals for the production of these luxury goods? For it to cease because it is logistically impossible to do ethically? For it to be done with a fair wage by unionized workers if that is possible? For creatives to diversify and divest into smaller, more ethically producible merch? A combination?
How would you establish contact with those overseas workers to address their needs? Who would you ask amongst them, and how would you center their input? What would acting as a representative of your organization to speak with them entail?
What would more ethical small artists merch production entail? What methods are logistically possible? What barriers might prevent small artists from engaging in those methods? How does one deal with the problem of a consumer base that might not buy that ethical merch from said artists?
How do you propose dealing with the potential loss of income from this production for those artists who potentially cannot afford to lose it? Are there any other things causing artistic poverty or mitigations of the problem that can be addressed by this campaign as potential means to fill in that gap? Are there any orgs working on those you could potentially ally with?
What can be done to create solidarity between global north artists and global south workers rather than the current adversarial arrangement? Is that even possible? If so, what goals would achieve that in the immediate term, short term, long term?
Note I mean none of this as a bad faith rhetorical-question "gotcha," but rather, as the first steps to thinking about how one might go about this, because we need an org for this because it's an important issue we need to address as both creatives and as a larger society.
And like, while org-building is easier said than done, if this remains just in the realm of "vagueposting and scolding on social media," well...
...I ain't gonna stop you, but have fun being politically irrelevant.
