Conservatives in power, vicious cuts applied to the welfare state while regressive taxes increase, police violence perpetrated against the poor against a background of declining legitimacy. Yes, the parallels between 2011 and 1981 are irresistibly suggestive of a political explanation for the British summer riots.

The triggers in 1981 were ‘heavy handed’ and often racist policing reflecting long running policing policies that systematically targeted young black men whose experience of state authority would likely have been unremittingly negative. This combined with racial tensions between communities and with the deep-set inequalities of urban life where whole areas were devoid of opportunities for meaningful work. There were instances of looting and arson but the prominent images of Brixton, Toxteth and so on is the violent clashes with police. At times small numbers of police found themselves surrounded by angry youths with improvised weapons. More often, lines of police in riot gear would tackle large groups of rioters head-on. Battles would last hours and the aim, it would seem, was primarily to hit back at the police while the usual power relationship had been reversed.

This summer, after the first night of anger at the police shooting of Mark Duggan, people’s purpose on the streets seemed to be different. Rather than directing violence at police, such confrontations were often avoided as the fast moving and, at times, well organised crowds descended like bargain hunters on high street stores. Rather than an opportunity to settle scores with authorities, this looked like a rush to get free stuff, as was sometimes evident on various communications on social networks and in media interviews after the events[Guardian, Telegraph]. This difference in the character of the riots is suggestive of  a different explanation for why they occurred. As Zygmunt Bauman was quick to argue ‘these are not hunger or bread riots. These are riots of defective and disqualified consumers.’

Bauman’s contributions to the sociology of contemporary capitalism have drawn out the implications of a shift in the way in which people create and understand their own identities, which in turn frame their understandings of the world around them, their decisions about action and their identification of friends, allies, and opponents. Whereas once most people understood their identities in terms of religion, nation, social position or vocation in the present we can talk about a multitude of consumer-based identities. This analysis is understood best by clever marketer, who consciously try to create brands for products that carry a heavy load of meaning. As a result, a large portion of the value of global corporations is attributed to their brands (see Interbrand for current values.) The value of a consumer object becomes detached from either the cost of production or the utility that product has, but instead is tied to what it signals about us both to ourselves and to those who see use engaged in conspicuous consumption. Apple iThing brand construction is a little stroke of genius in this regard  - I’d be very surprised if Apple marketers didn’t come up with a list of things that the now ubiquitous ‘i’ could stand for that included identity. If we’d had the ‘myPod’ we’d have an everyday description of ownership of a thing, but by using the active, verbal form of the pronoun ‘i’ we get a much deeper signal that ‘I do Apple products’, such that ownership of the product also says something much more meaningful about the consumer , perhaps that they see themselves as technologically savvy lovers of design and aesthetics, willing to pay a high premium for apparent quality (and therefore relatively wealthy), keen on music, smart, intelligent.

So, what’s the problem with people using objects of consumption to build an identity? Intrinsically, perhaps nothing, but this trend has to be understood in relation to two realities of contemporary capitalism: first that we are inescapably bombarded with advertising so that claims that certain products are required for certain aspects of identity are familiar to people from early childhood; second that many are excluded from participation in this make-believe world of music players, cars or deodorants with sex appeal. The unemployed and the underemployed are Bauman’s ‘defective consumers’, stoked with the desire for identity-confirming objects by a lifetime of marketing but unable to grasp them by legal means. The impact of consumerism on the poor is just to make their experience of inequality much sharper; their lack of opportunity for income or credit robs them also of the primary social tools for self-expression.

This argument needs to be tempered though, and shouldn’t be reduced to the idea that these riots were simply about consumerist greed. Owen Jones made some useful observations at an RSA talk (audio here) including plenty of quotes from people involved in rioting who were directly complaining about police behaviour or about the lack of opportunity for work. Just because, to my mediated view of things, the riots didn’t look like a well targeted kick at the police, doesn’t mean that that wasn’t exactly what was intended. As Jones points out, we’re actually looking at a series of riots and each one contained many motivations. For some it may have simply been hedonistic bravado, for others free stuff and for others still a battle with police. Whatever the mix of motivations, a broader explanation for episodes of collective willingness to transcend the normal rules are demanded. As in the early 1980s, deep material inequalities and an abiding hopelessness in the face of more restrictions on opportunity and shrinking safeguards for even a basic standard of living seem to be clear precursors, generating anger and resentment on a huge scale.

So, while this casual comparison of riots is suggestive of an explanation for differences in the form of the riots, with this higher emphasis on iLooting an outgrowth of wild consumerism, perhaps the traditional explanation for the existence of the riots in the first place – an austere state exacerbating deep social and economic inequalities – remains intact.

In Times of the Technoculture, my old boss Frank Webster argued that current info society trends in the capitalist economy are largely the logical extension of trends that have been around more or less since the birth of capitalism. Specifically, Taylorism brought scientific management to the workplace, with surveillance and discipline hand in hand; but there were full on plans (through an organisation of engineers and capitalists called ‘The New Machine’) to take those advances in efficiency into the realms of politics and society where a (positive) form of social control was expected to make life generally more pleasant. Using the new information techniques to keep track of mass consumption they started to do market research and develop scientific principles of advertising. (ref: HC Link, 1932, The New Psychology of Selling and Advertising)

“In a paean to American productivism, David Potter suggests that ‘advertising [is] an instrument of social control’; it is, he continues, ‘the only institution which we have for instilling new needs, for training people to act as consumers, for alterning men’s values, and thus for hastening their adjustment to potential abundance’.” (Potter, 1954; quoted in Robins & Webster, 1999: 97)

So, here we have a claim that consumerism is not in any way natural, but needs to be inculcated, a belief in the coming abundance of capitalism, and a valorisation of the advertisers’ abilities to change people’s values, all wrapped up in one tidy quote! The ‘New Machine’ certainly has plenty of momentum, but now we’re beginning to realise that there really are limits to growth and market expansion we need some development akin to advertising for altering values and thus hastening their adjustment to potential scarcity – who’s going to take on that job? Could that be what Tesco are up to with the Institute for Sustainable Consumption Institute?

Paper presented to the European Sociological Association General Conference, Lisbon, September 2009.

Abstract:

The academic publisher Reed Elsevier also organised the world’s largest defence exhibitions. The exhibitions themselves have regularly met vibrant street protests, and from 2005 campaigners targeted the corporate organisers. A coordinated network of anti-arms trade activists, academics, medical professionals and institutional shareholders formed a multifaceted campaign that sought to persuade the corporation to change its behaviour on its own terms. After initial intransigence, Reed Elsevier divested itself of its defence sector activities in 2008.
On the basis of interviews with activists and corporate employees, this paper addresses two sets of questions about the Elsevier campaign. First, what are the components of a successful, corporate-focused campaign? Insights from the recently expanded literature on the outcomes of social movements will be tested against both facts of this case and the conscious strategy pursued by participants. I will argue that the movement outcomes literature continues to cope better with movements demanding state responses than those directed at corporations. Secondly, therefore, this paper examines a set of broader questions about the character of moral demands placed on corporate activity, and the way in which management discourses of corporate responsibility or citizenship partially constrains the response of relevant decision makers.

You can download the presentation slides from: Moral Business Presentation (ppt).

Presentation at Medsin Global Health Conference, University of Manchester, 29^th March 2009.

This talk was based on recent research into the campaign that persuaded Reed Elsevier to quit the defence sector. You can download the powerpoint slides here.