The riot as consumption

It is violence, it is destructive, it is tragic but it is also meaningful. It hasn't happened without reason. It is the social action of our children. When part of a community revolts, the act of revolt is invariably a search for freedom in the context of a perceived oppression. In rebelling against the authority of the police and against authority in general, the young people of this country who riot, are looking to liberate themselves from some form of oppression. But what kind of rebellion or oppression is it? This may be an experience of oppression that is grounded in everyday experiences of stop and search, or the oppression of a childhood that is charachterised by neglect, alcohol and drugs. But actually these riots probably weren't so much about the police or the rage of a psychologically abused underclass, although for some this may have played a part.  This was a completely different kind of rebellion, it was a rebellion against everyday life, an everyday life characterised by relative poverty in a consumer society, and the psychological oppression of social inequality.

In many ways we define ourselves by what we consume and the high street or shopping centre is not only the place where we shop, it is also the place where we express the creativity of our self through our consumption. This might not be an idea that many of us are that comfortable with but it is a powerful theme in the work of Bourdieu and Baudrillard and it has important implications for our ability to interpret this summer's riots. Seen in this way the high street or shopping centre  is not only the place where we realise much of who it is that we are, it is also the place where we come face to face with who it is that we aspire to be. For most of the people commenting on the riots of the summer of 2011, the experience of walking through a shopping centre brings with it a taken for granted assumption that if they want to buy something they often can. Or that if they don't buy something they want, it is because they are saving for something else. It is a place where ideas and plans for our homes, our lives and for the way in which we represent ourselves can be made real.

But if you have never lived for long periods of time without money, you will not know that for somebody living in poverty, the shopping centre is something else. It is not a place of self fulfilment, it is the place where they come face to face with what it is they cannot have and what it is that they cannot be. So in seeing thousands of young people smashing up and looting High Streets across London, what we are seeing is not so much political rebellion, as riot as an act of consumption. Of course not everybody who is poor riots; the great majority work hard to get by and to do the right thing for their children and for their families. But more often than not a person's struggle with poverty is fuelled not only with a need to survive, but also by a spark of hope; the belief that if you work hard enough for long enough, you can obtain the things you want and change the life you have. The coherence of an unequal society can only be sustained by the existence of that hope or where it is missing by the sanction and oppressive action of the state. The existence of this hope is a political responsibility and it is in this that the essential difference between Labour and the Conservatives has to lie.

The years of the Labour government may not have achieved as much as they sought to achieve, but it was charachterised by a commitment to the struggle against inequality and poverty, and to the belief that it is a struggle that can be shared and that can be overcome. Whilst Labour may have failed to defeat social inequality they where at least able to convince us that they were engaged in that struggle. In contrast to this, for this ideologically Conservative government, the struggle against poverty has been replaced by the language of division and the symbolic and actual oppression of minority groups as economically unproductive. Immigrants who take jobs, disabled people who exploit the benefit system and young people who are expected to take on 30 to £50,000 in debt if they want to get a degree and improve their lives.

Because of the divisive nature of this government; for significant numbers of young people, the idea that poverty and inequality can be overcome all of a sudden seems far less achievable. The hope that is the essential component of democracy in an unequal society no longer exists. The belief in a better life seems unreal, what people are left with, is a sense of themselves as excluded; as inevitably unable to define themselves through the creativity of their consumption. Without that hope, however tentative it may be, poverty becomes oppressive and the search for a constructive sense of self all the more problematic. Some may turn to faith, some may turn too crime and the relative security of the street gang. But where a nation's poor no longer believe that they can make things better for themselves, then it should come as no surprise that some will resort to rioting as consumption. And whilst it is unquestionably a crime, it is as much a failure of political leadership as it is of parenting or policing.

Contagion, debt and the economics of extortion

Its funny how some words get used in ways that we understand and in other ways that we don't. For example the word contagion is increasingly being used to describe the process by which confidence in a national economy dissipates. There are no specific rules outlining exactly when it is that an economy becomes infected with the contagion, but at some point in time they are and at that point everything becomes more expensive and a nation becomes economically unviable. The recent problems in the US are just the latest example of this.

The interesting thing is that, many of the economies that are now in trouble, are in trouble because banks and rating agencies have decreed that current levels of debt are unsustainable and because of that are raising interest rates. Of course there is no mention or consideration of the fact that much of that indebtedness arises out the steps that countries took to protect the savings of their countries investors. Or that the act of increasing interest rates makes the possibility of default all the more likely. The association of a national economy with the notion of contagion is enough of an excuse to heap overtly political pressure on government's to reduce their spending.

The ironic thing is that the uncertainty within the global economy did not start because people had concerns about levels of government debt. It started because banks exposed themselves to speculative investments and in the end had to be bailed out by the governments that they are now manipulating for additional and exploitative rates of interest. The paradox heaping misery on irony, is that for some countries the bank bail outs represent a significant proportion of the national debt that is being to justify the extortion that they are experiencing.

But as the example of the US makes clear, contagion is not just about debt. Contagion is about the scope and scale of the state and the things that the state can be responsible for. In the US the scope of the state and its responsibility is not seen as a political priority. It may well have been acceptable to rescue the banking system; it may be seen as a priority to spend an enormous proportion of their GDP on the ability to invade other countries.  But the well being of the poor and the disadvantaged is not seen as something that is in anyway the responsibility of the country's government nor of its rich and its middle classes.

So when Republicans, the T.E.A. Party and our own George Osborne use the idea of contagion to argue for a shrinking of the state.  The contagion they really fear is the contagion of care and mutual dependency. They fear having to accept that the poverty of their fellow citizens is not the responsibility of an individual's indolence but rather the product of their own ideology. An ideology rooted in the narrowness with which they conceptualise humanity and of their own need to be indifferent to the suffering of their fellow citizens.

The current economic crisis is not about debt; its about people, its about a financial system that is yet again being allowed to exploit the gullible and its about right wing politicians who would rather spend a government's money on the state's power than on it responsibilities.