It was going to take something extraordinary to pull me back into daily commentating, as I wrestle with a book-length thesis about how environmental politics has to reckon with our human desire for novelty and stimulation. I guess destructive consumer riots in several of the major conurbations south of the border will do it.
You’ll have probably read enough overview-erotica on this, so I’ll confine myself to some blips on my own personal radar. The copy-cat element, spreading beyond London, fascinates me. I wonder what the mix is in each area between the two elements copied – one about young men physically and spatially confronting the authority of police in the streets, the other (involving all sexes) about looting and destroying local and chainstore shops.
For the first, it surely involves a few elements. There’ll be some legitimate grievance from some ethnic minorities about stop-and-search and racial profiling – the unresolved legacies of decades of structural deprivation, the control levels probably increasing after the domestic terrorism of 7/7.
But that also cross-fertilises with the desperate solidarities of gang society – sometimes racially, sometimes geographically defined, engaging young men at a psychologically susceptible moment in their development, and amplified by its own specific pop culture in music and media. Politicians might encourage us to downgrade this, but I don’t want to underestimate the power of the Tottenham police’s killing of Mark Duggan as a cultural meme – easily inflaming other street-battling, gang-oriented youth in different parts of the country.
The looting and arson is, to me, a lot more complex. I’m partial to the academics pulled together by Zoe Williams of the Guardian on Tuesday, who noted that the young looters weren’t exactly storming shops for basic staples – the food riots that were the early tremors of the Arab Spring, for example – but for goods that confer status in consumer society (phones, TVs, clothes).
The late-night shots of male and female hoodies sashaying down the street with JD Sports and Debenhams bags was like some surreal parody of a Saturday afternoon’s “retail therapy”. Which is, of course, our official compensation for securing and holding down jobs in a service economy.
Most of the commentary you’ll read will be about how we piece back together a “work ethic” for a now “feral” youth: a generation who, in an age of free downloads and welfare mollycoddling, have lost all sense that consumer gratification should come well after one's respectable efforts in the labour-market.
Let me just, for a moment, flip it round. Might it not be that this is the second, technologically amplified wave of what the 70s punks would have called “No Future”? Except this time, it’s a Grand Refusal based on cultural plenty, rather than industrial scarcity – ie, the right to a job in traditional sectors threatened by neo-liberalism (we don't need to bother about that these days, of course, under economic globalisation).
These kids have been super-conditioned by all kinds of powerful media and branding to think they live in a world sprinkled with stardust. A world where self-expression and recognition, not just through the medium of art (X Factor) but via the basic interactions of their lives (Big Brother), is what essentially matters.
If you don’t have the talent (and few do, and even those who do soon realise how tough it is to make it), then you have to buy into the lifestyle that at least evokes such stardom. When you realise you are always going to be pretty far short of the spending power to live that lifestyle, that’s a recipe for permanent, corrosive dissatisfaction. What’s different compared to the 1970s is the explosion of media – meaning the explosion of ways to get a tantalising, frustrating taste of the consumer identity you know you’ll never quite possess.
Our headlines about youth in recent years have been about the calamitous rise in their mental disorders, as in their delinquency or failures of character. Might not the compelling, multi-sensory surround of lifestyle consumerism be to some degree the cause of those disorders? And might not that psychological fragility contribute to the corroded characters of those English youth, thinking they can turn their High Streets into glass-strewn fields of excess?
How do these kids get out of this bedazzling trap? My 2004 book The Play Ethic suggested one response to the plenitude of visions of the good and creative life that a multimedia society generates, without much opportunity to realise them. Which was to systemically and infrastructurally expand the zone within which people could express themselves, through freely chosen and satisfying arts, crafts, trades and lifestyles, supported by a new social contract involving shorter working hours and a reinvestment in public amenities.
My new thesis ties that playful zone to the biggest crisis that we all face – the need to move away from hyper-consumerism under the threat of climate change. I’m suggesting that a playful lifestyle will enable us to replace status consumption with joyous co-production, and also lighten our load on the planet.
The classic retort has been that this is an unaffordable, indulgent luxury. I’m a fool to presume that our human nature is naturally social and convivial; and I’m incapable of addressing fundamental questions about prosperity and economy. Alright then: on the brink of a double-dip recession, with the Western world up to its eyeballs in debt of all kinds, and with financial plutocrats dumping the costs of their mendacity on the populace – can anyone out there say that the traditional production-consumption model has really served us all that fabulously well?
At the moment, given the parade of revolting, hypocritical harrumphing from millionaires and Bullingdon types in the Westminster regime, I have no hope that any of these ideas will even be audible at a UK level. So before I go back to peering at my Kindle, a few words on what is (so far) an interesting anomaly: Why no consumer riots in Scotland?
Well, we do have rather regular consumer riots, at least in Glasgow – they’re called Old Firm games. These are policed in a generally acceptable way – and enterprisingly, some of those collective resentments are turned into reliable retail and merchandising revenues. Our only errant elements are the occasional attempts to bouncy-bouncy Glasgow’s underground train off its tracks; outbursts of domestic or street violence in and around fixtures; and – more recently – a problem around the psychic compensations of 19th-century migrant labour history for bored-shitless-with-themselves West of Scotland males. (Yes, the red irony light is ON).
But I also couldn’t help noticing a classic Scottish social indicator, sneaking into view as London roiled and burned. It seems that we are still the leading European nation for drug deaths; slightly down on last year, but still seven times the continental average. I walked through Sauchiehall Street yesterday – the equivalent of Manchester’s Arndale or Tottenham’s High Street – and felt weirdly safe among my fellow, trundling Glaswegians. The only impedance to one’s complacent, Salmondesque stroll? The regular piles of shrunken, junkie humanity at my feet, nodding off with a plastic cup in their laps, none of whom seemed terribly capable of conducting any kind of consumer riot amidst the retail saturnalia.
Maybe that enduring self-loathing and inferiorism of Scottish life – possibly more virulent in the 50 per cent who didn’t vote in the last Holyrood election, than among those who did – has its pacific benefits after all. The needle and the damage done keeps the more desperate quarters of the Scottish poor quiet and manageable - that is, until Smart, Successful Scotland gets round to them, as something to tick off the progressive checklist. Onwards, and sideways.
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