[milderworkacc]

“Capital strike” tends to be used in situations where this kind of behaviour is spurred by an unfavourable government policy, and enacted by firms that have some form of market power (or political power).

These are small businesses with no market power agreeing to collectively price squeeze another player in an upstream/downstream market. Textbook cartel behaviour.

Edit: typo

[beaconstudios]

Capital strike is a strike by capital. There can be typical cases, but fundamentally that's what this is - though under platform capitalism, I think platform residents hold a much more precarious position than traditional capital because they answer to more than just the government and the market - the platform forms a second government for them.

A cartel is a group of businesses who collude to take market power as an oligopoly. That's not what this is, because these sellers are striking for platform changes, not consumer domination. You can keep saying it's cartel behaviour, but you're working with a different definition of cartel to the mainstream one. They're colluding yes, but they are not warping market forces the way a business cartel does (the typical example being the lightbulb cartel: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoebus_cartel).

[milderworkacc]

They absolutely are warping market forces - that’s the whole point.

We can argue about whether or not this is good (by the sounds of it, probably?) but the entire purpose of them agreeing to restrict their output is to influence the cost of their inputs/outputs.

In the absence of market power, individual firms can’t do that!

[beaconstudios]

I wouldn't describe it as market forces when the organisation they're opposing is a platform with monopoly power. Etsy has fiat power over anybody on their platform.

If we're talking about the generic concept of a cartel that encompasses basically all special interest groups, then yes they're a cartel - but they're not a business cartel in the same way that Phoebus group were. The power imbalance puts them in a position more comparable to a labour union.

[JAlexoid]

Etsy sellers could become a cartel. And banding together to force some third player to only play with them, to the exclusion of others, is classic cartel behaviour

[beaconstudios]

they weren't forcing Etsy to only play with them, it's not like they're striking for Etsy to become a closed shop with only those sellers.

[JAlexoid]

They are trying to exclude certain type of sellers - so yes