On Sunday, Boston Globe senior assistant business editor Mark Pothier wrote about his feelings regarding a boycott of The Upper Crust, one of his favorite pizzerias in Boston, that has been targeted because of allegations that the company has not paid its employees for overtime.

After a few minutes of “soul-searching” about whether he should join the boycott, he says he decided to follow his taste buds. Pothier then gives a string of standard justifications for his actions:

Sure, it nags at my conscience a little to think I support a company that could be profiting at the expense of these good employees and dozens more like them. But I’m not naive, either – how would I know whether the competing family-owned pizza maker I decided to patronize instead treats its employees any better? Mom and Pop can be greedy capitalists, too.

Nowadays, it seems, the preferred tactic activists use to fight corporate misconduct, whether genuine or perceived, is the boycott. Thanks to social media, they can spread faster than a YouTube video of a cat playing the piano. But what is a boycott supposed to accomplish? Too often, such campaigns are knee-jerk reactions to a company’s blunders. They almost always inflict more harm on front-line workers than corporate culprits in tailored suits. Before the first British Petroleum tar balls fouled the Gulf Coast, for instance, drivers were urged to steer clear of BP gas stations (a “Boycott BP” Facebook page has been “liked” by nearly 850,000 people). Trouble is, most BP stations in the United States are independently owned. If you stop filling up on BP-brand unleaded, departing chief executive Tony Hayward won’t sleep any worse that he already does.

[...]

In the case of Upper Crust, if business at its 17 locations drops sharply because of an ill-advised boycott, you won’t need an economist to figure out the likely consequences: fewer hours for employees, then fewer employees, and, eventually, fewer restaurants. That means more people on unemployment, more dark spaces on Main Streets.

By making this final point, Pothier reveals his true ignorance of the history and power of boycotts. While hypothetically his scenario could play out, an effective boycott could also push Upper Crust to do the right thing and compensate its employees properly.

Noted William James biographer Robert D. Richardson has a short post over at The Second Pass (where they’re doing a William James week in celebration of the centenary of his death) about James’ attempts to grapple with the problem of war. His most well-known confrontation with the matter is of course in the essay “The Moral Equivalent of War,” but Richardson also points to another, earlier effort by James to propose an alternative to warmaking, one profoundly reminiscent of Gandhi:

James made two concrete proposals for how this might be done. In The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), he reached back to Thoreau’s Walden and the idea, discussed in the first chapter of that classic, of voluntary poverty. (When Americans see that phrase, they see “poverty” written in boldface. We must train ourselves to see “voluntary,” meaning willed, written in caps and printed in red.)

“What we now need to discover in the social realm is the moral equivalent of war,” James wrote in Varieties, “something heroic that will speak to men as universally as war does, and yet will be as compatible with their spiritual selves as war has proved itself to be incompatible. . . . May not voluntarily accepted poverty be ‘the strenuous life’ without the need of crushing weaker peoples?”

By the time he wrote “The Moral Equivalent of War,” James had dropped the idea of voluntary poverty or simplicity—the sort of thing advocated in Walden, and by Wendell Berry, and by the modern “freegans”—in favor of something very close to the modern idea of the Peace Corps. “To coal and iron mines, to freight trains, to fishing fleets in December, to dish-washing, clothes-washing, and window-washing, to road building and tunnel making, to foundries and stoke holes, and to the frames of skyscrapers, would our gilded youth be drafted off, according to their choice, to get the childishness knocked out of them, and to come back into society with healthier sympathies and soberer ideas.”

One need look no further for resonance with James’ first proposal than Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj, as he describes the requirement for Satyagraha, or non-violent resistance. While his life was one of very much the voluntary poverty James proposes, Gandhi emphasized spiritual renunciation more than material:

Just as there is necessity for chastity, so is there for poverty. Pecuniary ambition and passive resistance cannot well go together. Those who have money are not expected to throw it away, but they are expected to be indifferent about it. They must be prepared to lose every penny rather than give up passive resistance.

He added elsewhere, on the significance of suffering in the struggle for justice:

He who has not the capacity of suffering cannot non-co-operate. He who has not learnt to sacrifice his property and even his family when necessary can never non-co-operate. … There lies the test of love, patience, and strength.

Both Gandhi and James recognized that the world without war would not be a world without hardship or suffering—nor would we want it to be.

On December 10^th 2009, in a small village of Bil’in, north of Ramallah in the West Bank, the home of 39-year-old school teacher Abdallah Abu Rahmah was raided by Israeli military forces who blindfolded and tightly fastened his hands together with zip tie cuffs. Frightened and confused, his wife and three children could only watch as he was hauled out of his home into the cold winter night and taken away in one of the seven military jeeps.

Almost nine-months later, having been imprisoned in weather-beaten tents at the Ofer military detention camp, prosecutors (failing to provide a single piece of documentary evidence) convinced a military courtroom to convict Abdallah Abu Rahmah for his involvement in coordinating “illegal” weekly marches and “incitement” with the Bil’in Popular Committee Against the Wall and Settlements. These charges, although unreasonable, are not as ridiculous as the ones he was acquitted on, which were taking Israeli tear gas grenades and canisters (weapons that recently killed activist Basem Abu Rahma and have injured others) to create an artistic peace sign.

Protests against the conviction have already begun with large gatherings outside Bil’in where many waved Palestinian flags and yelled out the injustice in Arabic and Hebrew. Israeli soldiers hiding behind clouds of suffocating smoke and ballistic shields regrouped to drive off the demonstrators.

Since 2004, Abdallah Abu Rahmah has organized and led Bil’in demonstrations with the grassroots movement Bil’in Popular Committee that pushes for nonviolent resistance against the illegal fence/wall and the Israeli occupation. These nonviolent movements have become inviolable and more widespread in the West Bank over the years. Despite human rights violations, Israeli soldiers continue to arrest, kidnap, torture, threaten with deportation or even kill those who demonstrate for self-determination.

Within a country that speaks to Palestinians with firearms, bulldozers, and land encroaching, Abdallah Abu Rahmah has been lauded by many as the “Palestinian Gandhi” for his devotion to maintaining a nonviolent stance as he leads the movement. But now Abdallah Abu Rahmah is facing up to 10 years imprisonment for “legitimately exercising [his] right to freedom of expression in opposing the Israeli fence/wall,” according to Amnesty International.

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History tends to look kindly upon Winston Churchill, and for good reason—he wrote a lot of it and he was on the winning side of the greatest power struggle in the modern era. But alternative histories, such as Nicholson Baker’s Human Smoke, have shown Churchill as a warmonger, ultra-nationalist and antisemite of Hitlerian proportion. Almost every action he undertook either provoked, prolonged or intensified the war—such as rejecting plans for peace or the safety of German Jews, starving innocent people in Europe through a naval blockade, imprisoning England’s German population (which included Jews), and goading an attack on his own people.

Repeating these criticisms is not only an important step toward setting the record straight, but also making Churchill’s well-worn path to war less appealing. Metta Center for Nonviolence Education founder Michael Nagler recently expanded upon this point in an op-ed comparing General Petraeus’s stubborn refusal to pull troops out of Afghanistan to Churchill’s equally obstinate declaration that he would not “preside over the dissolution of the British Empire.”

What was Churchill’s mistake? I believe there were two of them, or perhaps more accurately, one big one showing up on two levels of reality. Churchill notoriously missed the source of Gandhi’s power and the depth of determination he had roused in the Indian people. At a dinner party in Cairo, the South African leader Jan Smuts, reflecting on his own defeat at Gandhi’s hands, said the reason they had failed to stop him was that they had been unable to appeal to people’s religious feelings. Churchill, always obtuse on this point, is said to have snorted, “Nonsense; I have appointed many bishops,” and went on to preside over precisely what he denied would happen.

But there is a deeper lack underlying this one: ignorance of the fundamental fact of human nature, that violence is the wrong way to build democracy, win friends or stabilize anything worth keeping. Destructive means – and no one can deny that military means destroy people and property, indeed the planet itself – do not bring to pass constructive ends. That seems to be an underlying law of human dynamics that we ignore at our peril. General Petraeus and everyone who still dreams of a military resolution to the horrors that militant means have created in Afghanistan seem to simply miss this.

Nagler goes on to explain how the positive energy of nonviolence will have greater longterm positive effects on Afghanistan than war:

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• Century City’s business as usual came to a standstill Thursday afternoon as the janitors who lost their jobs cleaning JPMorgan Chase-owned Century Plaza towers were joined by 500 janitors, community activists, and union supporters at a march and protest in Los Angeles. Thirteen people were arrested for blocking an intersection in an act of civil disobedience.

• Some 10,000 people gathered outside historic Dunbar High School in Washington, D.C. on Saturday for the “Reclaim the Dream” march commemorating the 47th anniversary of the historic March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom,” where Martin Luther King Jr. gave his famous “I have a Dream Speech.”

• On Sunday, an estimated 80,000 Hong Kongers marched in honor of eight people killed in a bus hijacking in Manila, attacking the Philippine government for botching the rescue operation and demanding justice for the dead.

• Teachers on Thursday staged a 24-hour strike and paralyzed Puerto Rican public education to protest what they say is a general deterioration of the school system.

• On Thursday, two protesters associated with Climate Ground Zero blocked the entrance to the headquarters of the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) to bring attention to what they believe is the DEP’s failure to enforce the Clean Water Act by permitting mountaintop removal mining.

• A protest of Nigerian women shut down a Shell plant last Wednesday, just one week after a group of Ugborodo women blockaded a Chevron natural gas pipeline.

• Oil workers calling for compensation for recently fired employees maintained a blockade at a storage plant in southern Argentina on Friday.

A long running battle over the construction of a highway through Moscow’s Khimki forest has taken a surprising turn. Earlier this week I wrote about the broad based campaign to save one of Moscow’s few remaining green belts and old growth oak forests. Environmentalists and activists have been working since 2007 to halt the construction of a highway through the 2,500-acre forest, which many viewed as inevitable. Just a couple of weeks ago, one of the organizers, Yevgenia Chirikova, told the Washington Post that, “The next step is probably that they will start building. We are ready. It is going to be very loud.”

For the moment, however, the highway construction has been put on hold. In a video blog posted Thursday, Russian President Dmitri Medvedev ordered the government to, “halt the implementation” of the highway pending “further civic and expert discussions.” It is a rare victory for environmentalists or opposition activists of any kind in Russia. Perhaps not since Vladimir Putin’s 2006 decision to reroute an oil pipeline that would have come dangerously close to Lake Baikal—a national treasure and a UNESCO world heritage site—has the administration responded so forcefully to public protest.

“This has flabbergasted us. It was completely unexpected,” Sergei Ageyev, a member of the environmental group leading the opposition to the highway, told the New York Times. “It is simply a stunning victory for civil society.”

Some are also speculating that it reveals a deeper split between Russia’s President and Prime Minister. “It’s another step that destroys the myth of the all-powerful Putin,” Stanislav Belkovsky, a founder of the Moscow-based National Strategy Institute, told Bloomberg.

However, Putin is already spinning the Kremlin’s decision as entirely consistent. From the Russian Far East, where the Prime Minister was touting the opening of another roadway, the Chita-Khabarovsk highway, he said, “This is entirely consistent with the logic of our behavior and actions in recent years.”

And in a sense it is. If a local issue threatens to spin out of control and undermine the authority of the state the Kremlin will respond. Last year, in the midst of the financial crisis, Putin flew by helicopter to the beleaguered town of Pikalyovo to scold local politicians and businessmen. He forced them to pay workers back wages and turned the town’s woes into a publicity stunt. It looked good on television but of course did little to change things nation wide. It was damage control.

In the case of Khimki, Reuters summed up the strategy well:

Medvedev’s order looked like carefully orchestrated damage control by Russia’s leaders before a parliamentary election next year and a 2012 presidential ballot.

Referring to suggestions by the leaders that they planned to remain in power for years to come, Ekho Moskvy radio commentator Sergei Buntman said Medvedev and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin couldn’t let the issue hinder ‘Operation Continuity’.

Nonetheless the decision is a victory for environmentalists. And, in a sense, a political victory too. The question now is whether they can build on their success and turn the Khimki campaign into a broader civic and political movement.

The Climate Camp currently set up on the grounds of the Royal Bank of Scotland corporate headquarters in Edinburgh has received some strong criticism from The Guardian in a couple recent pieces. On Tuesday, environment page editor James Randerson documented how Climate Camp organizers let Twitter get the best of them during a day of mass action against RBS and its funding of the fossil fuel industry.

Climate Camp had its own Twitter feed of course, but anyone browsing through the #climatecamp hashtag would probably not have got the impression of the day’s events that the spinsters at Climate Camp wanted. Supportive texts were swamped by tweeters ridiculing the activists or even pretending to be them.

[...]

It is surprising that an organisation that puts so much emphasis on the art of manipulating the media (according to the Climate Camp media pack journalists are “weak and cowardly” and “astoundingly unimaginative”) did not think harder about how to use a medium that cuts out the peaky middlemen altogether.

While Climate Camp should have been a little more savvy about maintaining its Twitter feed, it’s not exactly a big deal that some people made fun of them on a social networking site. Far more important to Climate Camp’s success is the effectiveness of its on-the-ground actions. That’s why this next Guardian criticism, from photojournalist Marc Vallée, is more hard-hitting.

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Earlier this month, New Yorkers won a nine-month moratorium from the state Senate on the dangerous and highly-polluting drilling practice known as hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking.” The inspiring story of civic action that led to this decision is told by Maura Stephens in a recently published piece by Yes! Magazine.

Many fighting this battle had never before been involved in political issues. But after seeing the impacts of fracking around the country or in their own daily lives, they got active.

They organized and attended forums, panels, meetings, and rallies—sometimes alongside public figures like actor Mark Ruffalo and singer-songwriter Pete Seeger. Day after day, thousands of people called state senate and assembly offices to pressure for the moratorium. Achieving it was a first-round victory beyond expectations—a small but important win.

With their air, water, land, properties, communities, and health on the line, residents have made the campaign a priority, often sacrificing family time, leisure time, and sleep to keep abreast of developments and share information. “The petrochemical-industrial complex is stealing our land and our health,” says New York resident and architect Joe Levine. “Life as we know it will change forever if we don’t stop them.”

Levine has a home near the New York State border in Damascus, Pennsylvania, with his wife, Jane Cyphers, and their two daughters. The family has turned over their lives to this issue since they were first approached by gas companies wanting to lease their land. They soon realized that their beloved Delaware River would be imperiled by drilling. Levine cofounded Damascus Citizens, a grassroots group made up of people who are fighting to keep the Delaware safe from fracking. Their influence, and the experiences of the town of Dimock, Pennyslvania, inspired Josh Fox to make the documentary Gasland.

Sullivan County, New York, resident Larysa Dyrszka, a retired pediatrician, has also taken on the role of state-level activist for the first time.

“Nobody thought drilling would really come here, to a populated area, with technology that couldn’t ensure against harmful effects to our drinking water and health,” says Dyrszka. “Little did we know it was already happening in Texas and Colorado and in other populated areas.”

Together with her friends and neighbors, Dyrszka started SACRED—Sullivan Area Citizens for Responsible Energy Development. On January 25, Dyrszka joined hundreds of New Yorkers from all corners of the state to lobby their representatives in Albany—many, like Dyrszka, for the first time.

“I was hooked,” Dyrszka says. “Now, whenever Roger [Downs, of the Sierra Club Atlantic Chapter] or Katharine [Nadeau, of EANY] or any fellow foot-soldier groups suggest a lobby day, I’m there.”

For months, Dyrszka and her fellow activists continued building relationships by phone, e-mail, and in person with legislative staff, sending them scientific, health, legal, economic, and other information on fracking.

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• More than two dozen Bremerton Coca-Cola Enterprises employees went on strike Monday as part of a walkout that involves nearly 500 employees around Washington state.

• In Kazakhstan, a threatened hunger strike by 48 workers building the Almaty subway has succeeded in getting them three months’ back pay. The workers, all from one shift, went on a general strike for three days last week, refusing to work until they got their salaries.

• On August 23, about 100 steel workers at the Hormozgan Steel Complex in Southern Iran staged a protest gathering. The workers were protesting 300 workers not having received back wages in the last three months.

• Around 160 garment workers in Cambodia continued to strike on Monday outside the gates of a factory in Meanchey district, where they have camped out day and night since Thursday to agitate for improved working conditions.

• Thousands of Honduran workers marched in Tegucigalpa and San Pedro Sula on Aug. 18 to demand an increase in the minimum wage and to show solidarity with teachers who were in the 14th day of an open-ended strike.

• Last Thursday, the workers at Kian Tire in Iran went on strike closing down the gates of the factory warehouses. The workers were demanding back wages.

• Women bared their breasts to fight for the same right to go topless as men, during protests in Venice Beach, San Francisco, Chicago, New York, Denver, Miami Beach and Seattle on Sunday.

The eight-foot-long Norwegian electric car Buddy may not be most people’s idea of a perfectly sized car, but it is the perfect size for blocking train tracks, as the activist group Neptune Network recently proved, when it managed to block shipments from a mine that was polluting a nearby salmon-fjord. According to Sami Grover at Treehugger:

Whether not the blockade was successful remains a little unclear at this stage—my rudimentary understanding of Norwegian tells me that the blockade of Sydvaranger Mines has been called off, and that discussions are ongoing both with the mine owners and the Climate and Pollution Control Directorate (KLIF) to ensure that the company follows the necessary permits.

It’s certainly an innovative method of protest, and one that manages to both draw attention to the specific problem at hand, and also points a finger to one part of the solution to the myriad of environmental crises we face. I’m not sure the tactic would work everywhere—it wouldn’t take many police officers, or mine workers, to move a car that size (read more about the Norwegian-produced Buddy here). But it looks like in this part of Norway at least they manage to handle such matters with civility and restraint from all sides.

While I agree with Grover’s analysis, a highly visible and metaphorical stunt such as this would still be effective (on a PR/awareness-raising level) even if it didn’t block shipments for very long. Unfortuantely, we won’t be able to see this action replicated in America, as the Buddy car is only available in Norway.