[lbo-talk] Re: one day "shopping" boycott

[Michael Dawson]

Perhaps this is wrong, but doesn't it hurt to have winking hipsterism, which
has always been a form of distinguishing oneself from the normal (i.e.
working class) people, smothering the real information people could use
about corporate salesmanship and the politics of product choice?  The way I
see it, Adbusters suggests that the only way to resist these evils is to buy
their nonbrand shoes and plan a billboard spray-athon.  And they paint these
hopeless, ordinary-person-repelling gestures as the cutting edge of
radicalism.  In other words, they themselves are more package than product.

And they are also far less theoretically advanced than I suspect they think
they are.  What are we doing calling ourselves "consumers" in the first
place?  Is _advertising_ or _capitalism_ the problem?  The first question
has never occurred to them, even though they use people's supposed embrace
of the "consumer" role as fuel for their thinly-disguised "alternative"
snobbery.  The second question suggests that "Adbusting" is rather like
scratching the surface.

How many potential converts have looked at this publication and dropped it
with nausea?  How much better could the decent energies Adbusters corrals
and directs be spent?  Some and much, IMHO.