Democratic socialists see the point of socialism as extending democracy from politics to the economy. Defenders of capitalism sometimes push back against this by saying that the masses of ordinary people already control production — through the “price signals” they send through their consumer choices. Libertarian writers Milton and Rose Friedman famously argued in their book Free to Choose that every time you buy a product or refrain from doing so, you’re essentially casting a vote about what should be produced.

There’s some truth in this claim, but it also misses quite a bit. First and most obviously, given the massive income inequality produced by capitalist property relations, the “vote” on which consumer goods should be produced is one in which some “voters” get many times as many votes as others. The second, related point is that most working-age adults don’t just participate in the economy as consumers of the goods they buy in the supermarket. They also participate as sellers of their own working hours to employers.

“Markets put power in the hands of consumers” is just as true of labor markets as any other kind of market. When private ownership of businesses is combined with an advanced modern economy where most production takes place through the efforts of many different people working together in the same firm, the inevitable consequence is that there will be many times as many sellers as buyers of labor time. “Markets put power in the hands of consumers” is true with a vengeance here, and the inevitable consequence is that the vast majority of people are dominated, inside the workplace and in society at large, by the minority of labor-time consumers.

Socialists seek to free the working-class majority from domination by private business owners through some form of collective ownership of the “means of production” — like, say, banana farms. It’s important that people have democratic input in what happens in the workplaces where they have to spend so much of their waking lives, and that no one can grow wealthy by hoarding a vast share of the wealth created by the labor of workers.

But in itself, “there should be some form of collective ownership of the means of production” tells us very little about how decisions should be made about what to produce in the first place. And it’s that question we need to answer if we want to start to think about the fate of consumer goods like bananas.

Read more at The Guardian …