The shop, not the shop floor, is now the dominant site of struggle between people and corporate might, and the implications for all who want a good society are simply immense.

This week it is horsemeat, but every week it is something different – banking, rail fares, energy costs or care home horrors. Today it is fizzy drinks and obesity. The faultline between the powerful and powerless has steadily but decisively shifted in recent decades from our role as producers to our place in the queue as consumers.

When was the last time industrial action led the Six O'Clock News? Instead, the focus has shifted to the behaviour of corporations as producers, their ethics and the way they treat us as consumers – not workers. Look at the uproar over tax avoidance fought out on the high streets through the actions of UK Uncut and through consumer boycotts of the likes of Amazon, Starbucks and Google.

The shift in the faultline between a politics of production and a politics of consumption was brought home over the campaign against workfare and the coalition's attempt to get people on benefit working for free – often for big retailers. Protests sprung up outside supermarkets like Tesco and people filmed themselves cutting up their Clubcards and then posted the demo on the company's Facebook site. This then embarrassed the companies into contacting the government directly to demand the reform of the scheme. Parliament and in particular the party of labour had nothing to say and no role to play in the dispute. Today we watch films about the Dagenham Ford seamstresses and their sepia struggle for justice together. Tomorrow the films will be about Cait Reilly and her lonely legal struggle against Poundland.

Where once we knew ourselves by what we did, today we shape our identities through what we buy. Shopping isn't all we do but it's the primary means by which society now reproduces itself. Consumer debt keeps the economy going. When terrorists struck New York the US president invoked his people to hit back by going shopping. But it is also why initiatives like Move Your Money now capture the public imagination – because shopping, not working, is the dominant form of life and therefore struggle.

Today it is as consumers that we are exploited. Not just in terms of being ripped off but in being denied any alternative. Neoliberalism is founded on a massive programme of the public buying themselves out from politics. This dismantling of effective citizenship is presented as the triumph of freedom: as liberation. We vote with our feet. We are seduced by an endless supply of wants turned into needs and a life of shopping enslavement. Of course, in principle, we are free to say no. But opting out means opting out of a whole society that is defined by our success at consuming. Sure, we can go and join the shirkers, the skivers, the dropouts, the failures – but that's the only choice. Keep shopping or be a "failure". It is no surprise that the majority continue to live their life on the anxious, insecure and exhausting treadmill of never-ending consumption. Even after the biggest financial crash since the 1870s no other life is deemed desirable, let alone feasible.

So from the factories of solidarity we have shifted to the shopping malls of individualism, where we compete for our place in the pecking order. A world of turbo-consumption erodes the social soil of empathy and mutual recognition needed for great equality. The point of being a consumer is to be a better shopper than others, to flaunt your wealth, your status and your purchasing skills. At the same time its prodigious use of raw materials ratchets up the earth's temperature in ways that hit the poorest first and hardest – through rising food and energy prices and eventually rising tides.

But it is in the spaces of consumption that conflict and struggle will increasingly ensue. We can't just buy our way to a good society through ethical shopping, although every little helps, but we can apply real pressure through mass consumer boycotts, orchestrated through social media. Competitive pressures now expose the fact that big corporations need to act fast if even a few people stop buying or start switching. But unless and until we decide that living standards are about more than how much we can wedge into our shopping trolley – and are instead about having the time to love, care and be a citizen in which freedom isn't just about shopping but shaping our world – then we will go on being fed a diet that isn't for our benefit but someone else's.

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