This ignores that the scale of the industry matters, and is affected by consumption. If consumers quietly started buying 50% less chocolate, companies would continue to exploit child laborers, but the amount of unethical labor that the industry could bear would be reduced.
This is literally impossible based on individual consumer choice. The chocolate industry has been developed over centuries of colonial exploitation. There are entire bodies of law governing just chocolate. Whether I or you or my neighbor is browbeat into not buying specific brands of chocolate could never reach even a 10% impact on the industry. That's never how boycotts have been effective. They are effective because they are publicly organized, very loud, and do serious reputational harm to brands and to politicians. That is to say, people had to organize to make the consequences of staying the course worse than changing course. Quiet personal morality doesn't rise to that standard.
there is an unbreakable link between the consumption of commodities and the labor used to make them. It doesn’t matter whether the consumers are organized, what their intent is, or if the companies are even aware of what’s happening.
But now you are ignoring scale. You are correct that the link is there. But you fail to recognize that even if you managed to get an entire village to stop buying those chocolates, if you didn't propagate the ideas and create a movement, your village would not even factor into the economics. There are entire counties where certain chocolates have not yet managed to establish market penetration. Losing a village of 10,000 consumers wouldn't be noticed, unless someone realized that there was some propaganda that was effective in shutting down purchasing behavior and became worried about that propaganda spreading to other locations and creating large scale problems in the future.
This is why loud boycotts sometimes win. Not because they actually hit the bottom line but because they create interest convergence whereby the people who have both the financial incentive to use child labor and the power to choose otherwise become aware that choosing otherwise has become more inline with their financial incentives. This does not happen because half the world just stops buying chocolate because of a personal moral code. It happens because a successful propaganda campaign was demonstrated to be highly effective in a small context which creates the threat of becoming highly effective in a larger context. Capitalism behaves in such a way that it will never need to reach 50% of buying behavior because by the time you have demonstrated you have an effective propaganda campaign the investors are already reallocating capital to maintain their profits.
And we've seen what doesn't work - atomizing people, ostracizing them, browbeating strangers with whom we have no relations, etc. These are the tools of oppressors. These are the tools of religious missionaries in a colonial project. We can directly moralize with people we have existing relationships with. With people we don't have relationships with, it's almost always counter productive. Instead, building relationships with more people is how we get to the position where we can engage in moral discourse with more people. Connect first, then educate, then make demands. Not the other way around.
you can’t make a materialist argument that raw cacao has nothing to do with finished chocolate products.
I never did. I simply said that the choices of an individual consumer cannot impact child labor practices and that moralizing about it won't do it either and that there is evidence spanning over a century that supports this position and also evidence that illuminates what does work and why.