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.
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