Why the disjuncture between production and consumption? The separation of the two is a refelction of bourgeois ideology and a capitalist division of labor. That's the point of a boycott afterall: to expose and politicize the connection. And, it is a comment that *completely* ingores the fact that, historically, there were many workers' movements that utterly *needed* boycotts in order to be get anyway and be successful (see Tilly) . As I said earlier, I see problems with attacking capitalism at the point of consumption. But what we buy is political and our choices about what to buy hardly exist in some apolitical vacuum. We are not so-called private persons with merely private preferences. There is no place (socially) that we a merely private persons, not even in our bedrooms. Those damn preferences are political. As a friend said in response to my 'plaints about the lack of public transportation in this town: Well, that's because people prefer to drive cars because we're so individualistic and want our freedom. Well phooey, because its hardly the case that we simply apolitically and naturally (privately) prefer to drive cars rather than ride on trains and/or buses. And its hardly the case that we just naturally just want to be lone auto-jockeys because it's a naturalized preference. My friend's comments reinscribe capitalist ideology through and through and the automakers are damn glad that he does. And, make no mistake, they sure as heck knew what they were doing when they foiled the public transportation system in this country, made sure that it was associated w/ commies and collectivist thinking (like backward Europe and Japan), and made sure that they associated owning and driving a car--look at the ads, so often with a lone driver--with thoroughly bourgeois notions of freedom and democracy. Marx did, afterall, lay the foundations for this critique and some of his followers have elaborated the logic quite nicely.
In some versions of what a socialist future might look like (and that vision, too, is always implicit in any critique of contemporary conditions), the focus always seems to be on how property would no longer be private and that workers would have control over the means of production and have a say in how things are produced. There are many versions of what this world might look like and how we might get from here to there. However, what is so often left out of these formulations is that workers are also the recipients of socially produced goods, though not recipients of *all* socially produced goods (we call them consumers who carry around preferences in their little apolitical knapsacks and whip them out at the local Walmart). Capitalism obfuscates these relationship in a way that no other system of production has ever done in such a thoroughly opaque way. (marxism 101). The point of a socialist revolution wouldn't simply be to make the social character of production transparent with the emphasis on collective ownership alone. It would also need to make transparent the relationship between production and consumption. Decisions about production would still need to be made and in a truly democratic future, those decisions would be made by taking into consideration the needs of the people who are the recipients of those goods--consumers. So, questions about whether we should use gasoline or electricity or some other fuel in our vehicles would be important to consumers, not just workers at factories that make gas driven cars. Questions about how much to pollute would be important to those in the community where the firm is located as well as the wider world community since pollution is mobile. (yer classic negative externality ey?) Questions about potentially dangerous chemicals and the like in our foods and clothes would be raised. Questions about whether to produce viagara, booze, infant formula, jazz music, high heeled shoes, nintendos, marijuana, sex toys, pornography, and she-she coffees, and leather birkenstocks would be raised. These are questions that workers who are also consumers, but not of all of the above, would be interested in because they are political in very obvious ways. And, even though debate over whether we should produce she-she coffees or sex toys or cigarettes might magically disappear in some groovy utopian socialist future where all our needs are fully transparent and uncontentious, they won't disappear on the way there. Quite frankly, I doubt that they all disappear even when they get there.
SnitgrrRl