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Strategies from the Past: Boycott, Part 1
by
Wendy McElroy, September
2000
The current disillusionment with politicians — which may be
Clinton’s true legacy — will be positive only if it becomes
disillusionment with the political means itself. Otherwise, people will
continue to look primarily to the “state” for solutions instead
of to “society.”
State vs. society
The German sociologist Franz
Oppenheimer explained the difference between these two terms in his
classic work, The State. By “state,” Oppenheimer
meant “that summation of privileges and dominating positions
which are brought into being by extra-economic power.” By
“society,” he meant “the totality of concepts of all
purely natural relations and institutions between man and man....” In
other words, the state uses the political means — or force — to
acquire wealth and power. Society uses the economic means, or
cooperation. An example of the political means is to acquire wealth
through taxation. An example of the economic means is the acquisition of
wealth through productive labor.
The goal of libertarianism is to
persuade people to look to the economic means, first and foremost, to
achieve their goals. When this is achieved, society will be both peaceful
and voluntary. Thus, it is necessary to demonstrate effective nonviolent
strategies that can provide for social change and redress wrongs.
Fortunately, libertarianism has used nonviolence for centuries and its
history is a textbook rich in such strategies. One of them is the boycott.
Defining boycott
Ostracism and boycott are such
closely related social tactics that one is often considered a form of the
other. Ostracism dates back to ancient Greece (at least) and refers to the
act of excluding an unacceptable person from the fellowship of society
through general consent. The term “boycott” was coined in
1880 by the Irish Home Rule leader Charles Stewart Parnell to describe
the version of ostracism being used against a certain Captain Charles
Cunningham Boycott by his Irish neighbors. This specific form of
ostracism became an effective tactic in the struggle of the Irish peasants
against English landlords who enjoyed legal privileges. By contrast, Irish
tenants faced legal barriers to ownership and paid racking rents that left
them near starvation. In 1879, Parnell and Michael Davitt founded the Land
League in order to achieve the three “Fs”: fair rent, free sale,
and fixity of tenure. The League evolved into a widespread peasant
rebellion — the first peaceful mass uprising that Ireland had
enjoyed.
The campaign against Captain Boycott
was the League’s most notable early victory. The captain was a
much-hated overseer for Lord Erne, an absentee landlord in County Mayo. In
1880, when he refused to lower rents for the tenants, an audacious
scheme was hatched. Servants no longer worked in his house, stores sold
him nothing, no mail was delivered, and laborers refused to bring in the
harvest. Boycott imported politically friendly labor from the county of
Ulster but the expense of doing so proved disastrous. A humiliated Boycott
was forced to leave Ireland. The rebel success galvanized Ireland and
boycotts erupted across the island. Landlords who evicted tenants
suddenly found that no other family would move into the vacated house.
A basic difference between ostracism
and boycott becomes clear through this example. Ostracism is often no
more than the punishment of an individual while boycott aims at achieving
social change. Since boycott is pursued to achieve a separate goal, it has a
better claim to the word “strategy.” And ostracism with a
such a goal is best referred to as “social boycott.” In a more
general sense, boycott can be defined as “a refusal to associate
with someone or to purchase or participate in something as an act of
protest aimed at changing a policy or practice.”
Libertarians and the boycott
Boycott was a popular strategy with
the 19th-century libertarians who congregated around Benjamin
Tucker’s pivotal periodical Liberty. Indeed, it had been well
received by the earlier New England Labor Reform League for which Ezra
Heywood’s libertarian periodical The Word served as a voice.
Boycott seemed to provide a peaceful social means by which people could
address actions they considered so immoral as to be intolerable. Without
such a means, libertarians feared that people would turn to government
for relief.
Tucker was fascinated with the Irish
“no-rent” movement, the main organ of which was Patrick
Ford’s Irish World. “Liberty is not always
satisfied with it [Irish World],” Tucker wrote, “but, all things
considered, deems it the most potent agency for good now at work on this
planet.” Of the Irish Land League, he wrote, “Ireland’s
true order: the wonderful Land League, the nearest approach, on a large
scale, to perfect Anarchistic organization....”
Tucker was not alone in his
admiration. Two of Liberty’s most frequent contributors
— Henry Appleton and Sidney H. Morse — also wrote columns for
Irish World under the pseudonyms of Honorius and Phillip,
respectively. Tucker eventually became disillusioned with the Land
League, however. He believed that movement had been sold out for
political advantage by its leaders, especially by Parnell. In Instead
of a Book, Tucker lamented that the Irish Land League failed
“because the peasants were acting, not intelligently in obedience to
their wisdom, but blindly in obedience to leaders who betrayed them at
the critical moment.”
But the Land League had vindicated
the strategy of boycott in the minds of 19th-century American
libertarians. Tucker later commented on what he called Ireland’s
shortest road to success: “no payment of rent now or hereafter; no
payment of compulsory taxes now or hereafter; utter disregard
of the British parliament and its so-called laws; entire abstention from
the polls henceforth; rigorous but non-invasive “boycotting”
of deserters, cowards, traitors, and oppressors....” Boycott was an
integral part of the “passive but stubborn resistance” that
Tucker considered to be the only strategic alternative to open revolution
and terror, both of which he rejected. He favored passive resistance,
which he called “the most potent weapon ever wielded by man
against oppression” and “prominent features of every great
national movement.”
Not all of Tucker’s circle was
as enthusiastic about boycott, however. Indeed, some contributors
considered the tactic to be invasive because it interfered with
another’s ability to make a living. Again and again, Tucker staunchly
insisted that everyone had the right to ignore others and that such
treatment could not constitute invasion or interference.
Secondary boycotts
Other contributors to Liberty
accepted “primary” boycott — that is, the personal
refusal to deal with people or agencies — but rejected
“secondary” boycott — that is, the use of strikes or
blacklists. The latter tactics were termed “secondary”
because they were usually used to aid and expand a “primary”
boycott. Many, if not most, of Tucker’s circle had great reservations
about “secondary” boycott. Nevertheless, Tucker defended
even blacklists as nothing more than a form of “employer
boycott” and repeated that the refusal to cooperate or associate
could never be a form of coercion.
A century later, free-market
economist Murray Rothbard would echo Tucker. In The Ethics of
Liberty, Rothbard wrote,
Furthermore, “secondary”
boycotts are also legitimate.... In a secondary boycott, labor unions try to
persuade consumers not to buy from firms who deal with non-union
(primary boycotted) firms.... [It] should be their right to try such
persuasion, just as it is the right of their opponents to counter with an
opposing boycott.
Regarding what is arguably the most
hated and vilified type of boycott, Rothbard observed, “The blacklist
— a form of boycott — would be legal in a free society.”
The only problem Rothbard perceived
with boycott lay in practices that were closely associated with but
entirely separable from the strategy. For example, the common practice of
picketing might be invasive if it blocked access to private property or
constituted a threat to so-called scabs who crossed the line. But these
associated practices did not reflect badly upon boycott itself. Rothbard
concluded, “The important thing about the boycott is that it is
purely voluntary, an act of attempted persuasion, and therefore that it is a
perfectly legal and licit instrument of action.”
Ms. McElroy is the author of The Reasonable Woman: A
Guide to Intellectual Survival, published by Prometheus Books in
1998.
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