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"If you read theory, you'd understand that there's nothing wrong with supporting child labor" (thelemmy.club)
submitted 4 months ago by to c/slop@hexbear.net
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What a ride.

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[–] 5 points 4 months ago* (1 child)

I agree with you that pressuring people to change individual purchasing decisions is not a good strategy, or a good use of someone's time, and that there are better approaches to reach the same goal. My point is that you're taking the factors that limit a person's ability to exert their consumer choices, and making a leap to say that the consumer has no material impact on the world. That doesn't make much difference for the moral implications of this issue, but it's anti-materialist, and it gets in the way of understanding how the world operates.

The chocolate industry has built a machine of cruelty that controls governments, and has continued for hundreds of years despite all the people it has immiserated and motivated to fight against it. No one is going to take it down by putting a candy bar back on the shelf at the grocery store. And yet, the industry is the size that it is, and no larger. If the capitalists had their way, it would be ten times bigger, and then ten times bigger next year. It's limited by material factors, including the fact that people will only buy so much of the finished product. Marketing, lobbying, mercenaries, etc. are all tools that companies use to push against those limits, but the fact is even someone who doesn't give a shit about labor practices, and puts five cases of chocolate bars in their cart before deciding they only really need four, is participating in limiting how many child laborers cacao companies are capable of exploiting.

The impact that any one person, or the handful of people one person could recruit, can have on overall consumption is very small compared to the global population, but those minuscule changes do propagate through the system of production and exchanges. You can't be a communist and not believe that tiny contributions can add up to meaningful change. Organizing and coordinating those contributions is far more important than any one individual, and it's good to emphasize that and redirect to it, but that can't be done by dismissing that the small changes matter at all.

You make a good case for why the focus shouldn't be on moralizing specific consumer choices, and why the products someone buys says little about them in comparison to the impact they could have in other areas. You're going to have to rely on the strength of those arguments because, while it would be nice if we could fully absolve ourselves by saying that the commodities we buy have exactly zero impact on the world, it isn't true.

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  • [–] 0 points 4 months ago (1 child)

    You're right. It's too strong a claim to say that individual consumption has zero effect on the economics. The better claim is that an individual choosing to stop consuming something has no material effect on child labor. It has a material effect on a specific quantity of product purchased in specific location during a specific time period. That quantity is not directly tied to the amount of child labor consumed. The economic system has layers upon layers of buffers between the consumer and the child laborer and the individual choices would need to build to point where they can have a material impact on the first buffer before they can have an impact anywhere else.

    This is why the actual effective boycotts are about demonstrating power, not about actually causing a mass quantitative change through changes in consumption. The ability to do it deliberately and in a focused way demonstrates effective organizing that could be used at a mass scale, and thus the capitalists are required to meet the demands of the boycotters in order to prevent them from actually wielding that power to do mass economic damage.

    It's NOT the individual choices that make this change, though individual choice has a role to play as discussed elsewhere. It's the ability to organize and demonstrate the power of the organization that makes this change. It has nothing to do with the actual loses of profit and everything to do with the risk of future losses of profit.

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  • [–] 5 points 4 months ago (2 children)

    You're still making a distinction where there isn't one. The capitalist system has enough layers, buffers, and complexities that trying to quantitatively study the impact of any one transaction becomes impossible after a few steps, but that doesn't mean its impact is zero. Individual choices need to build up to a certain point to have enough impact on a layer to be measured statistically if you're looking to write a paper about it, but there is no actual threshold that prevents small changes from being passed down the production chain. The layers of the economy are not static objects held in place by friction unless shoved by a big enough force. They are an ongoing response that aggregates all of the interactions that feed in to them. They often don't respond efficiently, effectively, or ethically like the propaganda says they should, but they are responsive. The global economy is made up of all the individual transactions, it's not a separate entity that is insulated from all but the biggest market trends.

    The chain connecting consumers to child exploitation involves many individual decisions that are generally too big to be affected by one chocolate bar purchase. Hersey's decision of how many tons of ingredients to buy from their suppliers will be rounded to some whole number, so the amount they buy next year is unlikely to be changed by a slight difference in sales numbers this year. But there necessarily has to be some tipping point where any more loss of sales will cause them to cut their order. Although rare, a small number of specific purchases will have a hugely exaggerated effect. For this purpose, the vast scale of the global economy compared to an individual provides a very high number of avenues where a small change can potentially have a unexpectedly large outcome. The bigger the market, the more avenues, and the more transparent the layers are to propagating the impact of the transaction.

    Buying one chocolate bar statistically has a direct impact on the extent of child labor in the world. There's no way to know which specific chocolate bars may trigger small tipping points in companies along the line choosing to adjust their production up or down slightly, but every single chocolate bar purchase plays a role in maintaining the child labor used by the industry.

    None of this means that buying chocolate is morally equivalent to owning child slaves. The impact of buying a chocolate bar on child labor is incredibly small, and almost any political activism a person does would be far more meaningful, but there is no material basis to say that the end products are disconnected from the workers who made them. The only reason to double down on claiming that is out of moral discomfort.

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  • [–] 3 points 4 months ago (1 child)

    That's just not how the math works. The reality is that the choices of individual consumers is indistinguishable from statistical noise in the data. A single error in a spreadsheet formula has more impact than an individual's choices. No, as systems get bigger and more complex it does not mean that the avenues for individual choices become more numerous. It means that individual choices get averaged out. Again, more consumption patterns are changed by people dying then people making private ethical choices.

    Buying one chocolate bar statistically has a direct impact on the extent of child labor in the world. There's no way to know which specific chocolate bars may trigger small tipping points in companies along the line choosing to adjust their production up or down slightly, but every single chocolate bar purchase plays a role in maintaining the child labor used by the industry.

    No. It doesn't not. This is a ridiculous claim. The very first thing that will happen if sales lag because of your choices is that retailers will shift to places where the demand is more reliable. The bars easily transported and they are shelf stable. They can be moved to wherever demand for chocolate is increasing. The larger the system, the more easily it can absorb tiny temporary blips in consumption patterns. This is why what is required is organization, because you have to be capable of bringing the movement into a sufficient number of markets such that moving the product around would not avoid the hit to sales.

    The impact of buying a chocolate bar on child labor is incredibly small

    Again, it's literally non-existent. Children don't make chocolate bars. They harvest and process cacao. Their product is fungible. If the bars sell less, they just move the product of the child labor down market. But even that scenario is ridiculous because your personal choices are indistinguishable from random noise in consumption data. The larger the market, the more organized you need to be to cross the threshold of random noise.

    there is no material basis to say that the end products are disconnected from the workers who made them

    No one is claiming this. My claim is that this connection is insufficient to be used as leverage by simply choosing to not buy the chocolate bars in private. The labor was already paid for, the bars were already paid for. Your choices have to rise to the quantity required to be noticed statistically in a data set of large scale consumption, and unless you're buying 100x more than a normal person, your choices won't be noticed in the data.

    The only reason to double down on claiming that is out of moral discomfort

    No one is making the claim in the first place let alone doubling down on it

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  • [–] 3 points 4 months ago (2 children)

    Industries grow and shrink as a result of changes in consumption. The change in outcome is a sum of all the changes in the conditions. All changes, whether we have the tools to measure and distinguish them or not.

    You’re inventing a mechanism where a change being too small to be considered important means its effects are erased from reality. An organized boycott is still composed of many individual immeasurable purchase decisions. If the small actions had no way to exert their effects, they couldn’t make up for that with numbers. Capitalists would be able to will a boycott out of existence just by refusing to see it as a trend. You could will away a dune based on the impossibility of following a single grain of sand.

    Again, industries are not boulders that sit static until given a big enough shove. They are dynamic processes that continually fluctuate as a result of all the transactions that did or did not happen at each stage of production and distribution. The friction of whether or not to make a change is already always being overcome by other market forces.

    Industries are governed by thousands of people making endless small adjustments to the operation of the node they manage in response to the changes made by the managers of the nodes they interact with. At no point is the manager who decides by how many children the cacao company can expand its workforce going to hear about a movement becoming organized enough to be considered a boycott. They will make their decision as a result of the decisions of their nearest organizational neighbors. The layers and layers of decision makers aggregate and obfuscate the decisions made leading all the way back to the consumer(s). In the same way that it’s impossible to trace the impact of a single purchase forward from a store, it’s also impossible for the person hiring the children to trace back and selectively be influenced only by coordinated efforts, but not by silent individuals. If it is possible for a boycott to succeed, it is only because the individuals who participated each had a small impact.

    You can say that it’s a negligible effect, you can say it’s unimportant when compared to the effect of [X], but your claim was “an individual choosing to stop consuming something has no material effect on child labor”. That is not true. It’s a tempting simplification that offers comforting reassurance morally. In many cases it’s close enough to true to accept as a premise. But if you take it to be literally true, then you’ve necessarily buried some magical thinking into your understanding of the world.

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  • [–] 3 points 4 months ago (1 child)

    You are attempting to make a conceptual argument using a misunderstanding of systems.

    The statement that private individual consumer choice does not have a material effect on child labor is demonstrable using math. It is you who are proposing magical thinking. You are also incorrect in your assessment of my analysis.

    I am in no way assuming industries are static objects. I am starting from the assumption that they are complex systems with feedback mechanisms and buffers. Let's take a ridiculous example: the ocean. Sea levels are rising. A single person choosing to spit into the ocean daily has no material effect on sea level. I don't think this is a controversial statement. But neither does it assume that the ocean is a static boulder. The global water system is a complex dynamic system, and as such, it exhibits dynamic equilibrium. One person's daily spit will not rise above the level of random noise already in the system.

    Similarly is large global economic systems. If you want to talk about the material effect of a single moral protestor choosing to change their private behavior, it materially affects the retailer, specifically in their gross sales. When gross sales are affected, the retailer makes choices about how much of that product to order on the next cycle. That's the effect. It hasn't reached child labor yet. But before we move forward, we have to ask the question of whether the retailed will actually change their wholesale purchasing behavior. And depending on where you live, like for example a major city, the number of people new people moving in and the number of existing people moving out, daily, is going to have a bigger effect on gross sales at that retailer than one moral protestor. Street construction is going to have a bigger impact. The weather is going to have a bigger impact. The retailer is a buffer. Depending on their size (let's assume a non-chain local large retailer), they are not going to notice your choice not to buy. Hell, my whole adult life I have never been able to sustain stable housing longer than 4 years. My constant moving has more of an effect on retailers than my moral choices.

    But that's for a single retailer with a single location. When we move to the conglomerate level, individual choice matters even less. Like the water cycle constantly moving water in and out of various locales, this dwarfing the contribution of your spot, conglomerate retailers are constantly reallocating inventory based on demand. Now your individual choice needs not only to rise about the random noise of consumer behavior at a single location, it needs to rise above the random noise of consumer choices around the whole territory of the conglomerate. That noise includes the rise and fall of populations in entire states, it includes natural disasters, it includes national marketing and trends.

    So until your individual choice has a material effect on the amount of chocolate candy that a retailer purchases at wholesale, your individual choice has demonstrably no affect on child labor.

    And that's only the first and second buffers in the system! The food companies that make chocolate candies also make other products that involve cocoa, and they operate under different brands. If you managed to have an effect on the wholesale purchase numbers of a single purchaser from the food manufacturer, that wholesale change would need to rise above the random noise of the thousands of wholesale purchase numbers around the world. That buffer absorbs major regional changes very well, by reallocating inventory to growing markets and clawing it back from shrinking markets, without ever having to change how much cacao they purchase, therefore not having an affect on childa labor.

    This is how highly complex systems maintain over long periods of time in highly variable environments. They build feedback mechanisms and layers of quantitative buffers so that small changes get aggregated into larger trends allowing larger trends to be anticipated and adapted to without threatening the system.

    This is how systems work.

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  • [–] 3 points 4 months ago (2 children)

    When you talk about signal versus noise, you are referring to measurable material effects. Whether a material effect exists is not dependent on whether someone notices it. When a signal is lost in the noise, it's no longer measurable, but the material effect continues to propagate. If someone spits in the ocean daily, no weather station on Earth could detect the change, but if the person is getting their water from a source not usually in the water cycle, then yes, the average volume of the ocean would increase by an incredibly small amount.

    There are market trends that are large enough to be observable despite the chaotic nature of the system. But our collective ability to observe and comprehend the effects depends on how well surveyed the global economy is, the resources put into analyzing the data, and the ideology used by the analysts. If the signal was truly destroyed when it was overtaken by noise, then when corporations see an unfavorable trend coming they could raise the minimum signal to noise ratio to protect themselves materially by firing the analysts, erasing the data, and enforcing a more favorable ideology. This is the magical thinking. Companies and governments attempt this all the time, but it doesn't change their economic situation.

    You've thoroughly laid out how the noise amplifies through each layer of the system. The problem is that the system you've described is far too noisy to function if noise wipes out signal. At the opposite end of the chain from the consumer, it's all noise, there's no signal left. Even when something like closing the strait is clearly big enough that it should have some effect, the farm managers have no coherent way of determining what the effect actually is. They're hiring and firing children based on random number generators.

    Given that the system operates at least somewhat rationally, that can't be the case. "Signal" and "noise" are subjective concepts. One person's noise is someone else's signal. At each layer, the managers watch the decisions made by their neighbors for signals, make their own decisions, and then pass those on to others as noise. Then they wait for signals to come back in the other direction.

    If you fix your perspective to either the consumer or the farm manager, they have no way of ever perceiving each other through their personal noise. But if you look at the system as a whole, their actions do impact each other, and there is an intact chain of decision makers who will continue to communicate the effects of each one to the other. This is evidenced in the physical product repeatedly transported from one to the other. For each step of processing and transportation, there has to be a person maintaining the link between them, or else the product would not arrive.

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago (2 children)

    We're talking past each other and it's exhausting. You are attempting to use systems language to describe how a single purchase has a material effect on child labor and ignoring ALL of systems theory about feedback, equilibrium, and buffers. I don't need to argue with you. Read a book on systems theory please. I am done trying to explain it to you.

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