The more important step was to question the managers of Israeli companies, the most important question being, "Can you quantify in money how much your company lost as a result of the economic boycott created by BDS?" The proportion of Israeli companies able to state that they had been damaged by the sanctions was around 0.75%. The rate of damage of each of them was less than 10% of their turnover, and even that was mostly during Operation Protective Edge; they experienced no damage in other years.

According to our calculations, based on the information we obtained from the companies, the cumulative proportion of economic damage since 2010 was 0.004%. To put it more colorfully, if the Israeli economy's yearly income were to average NIS 1 million, the damage from the sanctions would have been NIS 40 - a completely negligible amount.

There's a couple reasons for this. Israel makes a large number of intermediate goods which are difficult to boycott, there is a strong R&D sector that is also difficult to affect with consumer decisions,

For animal liberation, the case is similar. There has been a shift in product offerings, but the main businesses that have been hurt are small producers that are unable to keep up with the centralizing forces of capitalism. The largest producers and distributors are able to complete on a global level and diversify their product offerings, often increasing sales.

Despite the minimal economic impact, let's look at the political impact:



This political impact has played a part in lower and lower levels of support for Israel's government among Democrats as well:



Only 12% of Democrats have a favorable view of Israel and an unfavorable view of Palestine, which is considerably lower than polls in the 2000s.

Now let's look at animal liberation:

A new study has revealed that the number of Americans following plant-based diets is up nearly 9.6 million over the last 15 years. This is a 300% increase and nearly 3 percent of the population in the United States.

Nearly one in four Americans (23%) report eating less meat in the past year than they had previously, while the vast majority (72%) say they are eating the same amount of meat. Very few (5%) report eating more meat this year than in the past.

Across pretty much every category, people have been slowly moving their opinions in favor of animal liberation:

https://infogram.com/2019-blog-trends-1hkv2nqv7klw2x3

So what is the real value of the boycott? I believe we need to look to Mao to get a better understanding of what role boycotts play:

Marxists hold that man's social practice alone is the criterion of the truth of his knowledge of the external world. What actually happens is that man's knowledge is verified only when he achieves the anticipated results in the process of social practice (material production, class struggle or scientific experiment). If a man wants to succeed in his work, that is, to achieve the anticipated results, he must bring his ideas into correspondence with the laws of the objective external world; if they do not correspond, he will fail in his practice. After he fails, he draws his lessons, corrects his ideas to make them correspond to the laws of the external world, and can thus turn failure into success; this is what is meant by "failure is the mother of success" and "a fall into the pit, a gain in your wit". The dialectical-materialist theory of knowledge places practice in the primary position, holding that human knowledge can in no way be separated from practice and repudiating all the erroneous theories which deny the importance of practice or separate knowledge from practice. Thus Lenin said, "Practice is higher than (theoretical) knowledge, for it has not only the dignity of universality, but also of immediate actuality." The Marxist philosophy of dialectical materialism has two outstanding characteristics. One is its class nature: it openly avows that dialectical materialism is in the service of the proletariat. The other is its practicality: it emphasizes the dependence of theory on practice, emphasizes that theory is based on practice and in turn serves practice. The truth of any knowledge or theory is determined not by subjective feelings, but by objective results in social practice. Only social practice can be the criterion of truth. The standpoint of practice is the primary and basic standpoint in the dialectical materialist theory of knowledge.

Participating in these boycotts represents a fundamental leap in the cognition of the participant's understanding. When people participate in BDS, they commit themselves to looking at the role that Israel plays in the world economy. They alienation of commodities is reduced and they see the journey the commodity went through. When someone sees a ring, they see the Israeli middlemen profiting off of blood diamonds and slavery. When someone sees a glass of cow's milk, they witness a cow being forcibly impregnated then having her baby taken away for slaughter so that way she will keep producing milk.

The myth of the boycott is that by changing your personal consumption habits, you are voting with your dollars to create a shift in the marketplace. However, the most impactful shift happens inside the person as they apply their thoughts and their ideas into action. Ideas that aren't acted upon are useless, this is what separates the materialists from the idealists. The simple process of acting on them, even if they are in very minor ways like consumer purchasing decisions, creates a leap in conviction and understanding.

" There is no doubt that, in many cases, sympathy for the boycott is created precisely by these praiseworthy efforts of revolutionaries to foster tradition of the finest period of the revolutionary past, to light up the cheerless slough of the drab workaday present by a spark of bold, open, and resolute struggle. But it is just because we cherish this concern for revolutionary traditions that we must vigorously protest against the view that by using one of the slogans of a particular historical period the essential conditions of that period can be restored. It is one thing to preserve the traditions of the revolution, to know how to use them for constant propaganda and agitation and for acquainting the masses with the conditions of a direct and aggressive struggle against the old regime, but quite another thing to repeat a slogan divorced from the sum total of the conditions which gave rise to it and which ensured its success and to apply it to essentially different conditions. "

swampman posted:

based on my experience as a roommate and caretaker to a dozen free chickens, they fucking love kale and its not poisonous to them

e: well thats what i get for not reading the whole thread before posting