After the third night of rioting in London, other British cities, such as Birmingham, Nottingham, Liverpool, and Bristol, have also seen serious disturbances and vandalism. Media reporting has been very clear that the rioters are young people, but unfortunately there has been little attempt to understand the reasons behind the unrest.
Akin to the Home Secretary, Theresa May, who has talked about ‘sheer criminality’, the media has tended to report the unrest in terms of a kind of irrational, meaningless, pointless deviance. As a Sociologist, I have no doubt that the riots appear irrational and meaningless, but I also know that this is not really the case and that there are social reasons for these kind of disturbances. In some ways it is easy to talk about ‘criminality’. All you have to do is lock people up. You don’t have to try to understand or deal with deep rooted social and political issues. Having said this, there is no doubt. The riots are not explicitly political. Instead, they are the acts of people who feel excluded and believe that they have no stake in the communities and society they are seeking to destroy.
But if the riots are clearly an expression of rage, and reflect what happens to people when society falls to listen to them or factor them into its plans, they are also clearly entrepreneurial in respect of the fact that the rioters are clearly looters, stealing clothes, electrical equipment, and other consumer durables. Again, one does not need a PhD in Sociology to understand the reasons behind looting. The American Sociologist Robert Merton explained in the 1930s that if a society sets itself up on the basis of particular goals and objectives and then deprives a large section of the population from access to those goals and objectives, then that excluded population will find alternative means to achieve those goals and objectives. In Merton’s American case, it is easy to see how this theory plays out. The goals and objectives are money, consumption, success, and the American dream and the excluded population are the poor people, and especially the racially excluded Blacks and Hispanics, who turn to crime in order to achieve the goals that the middle classes take for granted.
Is the same theory not playing out in Britain today? What has happened over the course of the last 15 years is that we have raised a generation of people on the basis of an ideology that said that the capitalistic goods of society should be accessible to everybody. Following the last Conservative government, the New Labour model of social mobility, premised on the value of education, was meant to allow everybody to have a piece of the pie. Unfortunately, even then, youth ran out of control in a society absolutely geared around consumption and enjoyment, because nobody wants to wait and our society is already massively unequal. However, Blair et al held back the tide of criminality because they could offer people the potential of legitimate means to achieve the socially determined goals of consumption and success. Unsurprisingly for a group of millionaires who have never had to think about means to ends because they have always been there, the Conservatives behaved in an entirely socially irresponsible manner and set about destroying the basic social framework in Britain which could allow for the promise of legitimate means to the goals of inclusion in consumer capitalism.
Cuts to everything, including welfare and education, have created an atmosphere where the poor and alienated feel that the basic means to the ends of success are no longer available. Moreover, at the same time that austerity is expected of the poor, who are simply meant to swallow their lack of opportunity, it is, of course, business as usual for the rich who continue to consume and the mass media which persists in selling everybody a consumer fantasy. In other words, at the same time as the Conservative government has pulled up the ladder of social mobility, the media has continued to advertise the spectacle of the riches and excesses of the consumer society. As a consequence, our society has effectively rubbed the noses of the poor and young in their lack of opportunity. Of course, New Labour never did anything to tame the excesses of the rich, but at least they had the good sense to leave a crack in the door open for the poor and centrally the young who still believe they can make it.
It is precisely this crack in the door that the Conservatives have slammed shut. If our current economic problems last for another five to ten years, the average 16 year old could be somewhere between 21 and 26 by the time we emerge from this situation. It is not enough to sacrifice these people and treat them as collateral damage in order to save the bacon of the rich who would rather not pay more tax. It is not enough to say that cuts are necessary and lump the burden on the poor and the young, leaving the rich free to enjoy what they have apparently earned. If cuts are necessary, the burden should fall on the richest members of our society, who should carry the weight of the mistakes of the past, because they are the people who benefited most in the good times. Quite apart from the ethical evil of throwing a generation on the scrap heap before they have even had the chance to start their adult lives, it is entirely socially irresponsible to do so, because riots will inevitably by the result. As a Sociologist, I am truly amazed that the Conservative government did not see these riots on the horizon. The fact that they clearly did not see this coming illustrates a number of important points for me, which should lead us to democratically remove them from office as quickly as possible. First, they have absolutely no sense of society or the majority people who live within it. They have no idea about the way people feel or how they react when they feel that they have no future. They are out of touch.
Second, they have no idea about recent history. Did these people not live through the inner city riots in the 1980s, which were the result of Thatcher’s war on the working classes? There is no specific working class unrest today, and what we are witnessing is not class war, so perhaps we can excuse people with no sense of social history this over-sight. But what about the French riots in 2005, 2006, and 2007. Did the Conservative government not see how young, disenfranchised, people responded to deep social exclusion in Paris and other French cities? Did they not imagine that the same events might occur in Britain? Third, the Conservatives are clearly arrogant and socially irresponsible in the extreme because they did not consider the possibility that their policies could destabilize our society in this way. They thought they could ride roughshod over people and that everybody would simply consent to their violent policies. Unlike New Labour who understood the political import of maintaining the idea of social mobility, the Conservatives appear to have such a low opinion of the people and their aspirations that they do not feel the need to provide them with the basic possibility of opportunity.
Regardless of the entirely predictable line of Theresa May – we have to be tough on crime – we have to ask ourselves whether we want to live in a society where so many people feel excluded and badly treated? What kind of society do we have where people, and especially young people, feel this way? What kind of democracy do we have where people riot because they feel that they have no voice and no future?
Ironically, we have the same kind of democracy that ignores massive student protests and waves of strikes. We have the same kind of democracy that we had in the 1980s when the Thatcher government felt it was acceptable to destroy entire communities in the name of economic growth and the same kind of democracy the French have today which leaves young ethnic people to rot on sprawling suburban estates. But I do not think we should accept a return to the social divisions of the 1980s. It is not enough for a government to mindlessly repeat the mistakes of the past in the name of protecting the privileges of the rich. Nobody wants to live with riots and social chaos. Nobody should have their homes and businesses burned to the ground. This is not the kind of society anybody wants and it is not enough for government to say that every rioter is a mindless criminal. That is no explanation and that is no way to handle massive unrest. A true democracy listens. As we know from the Arab Spring, democracy is better than authoritarianism because it involves all of the people. It does not ignore them and lock them up.
On the basis that nobody should want to live in a society where so many people are excluded to the extent that they feel that rioting is the way forward, I think it is a mistake to simply focus on the symptom – the rioters – and talk about their ‘sheer criminality’ because this will not change anything. Instead, I think that we need to think about the deep social and political causes of what we have witnessed over the course of the last three nights in our major cities and decide that we need a society that is inclusive and cares about the future of the majority of the population, rather than one which is dominated by a self-interested elite who have no sense of the need to provide the rest of the population with the means of social mobility.
Mark Featherstone
Showing posts with label Coalition Government. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Coalition Government. Show all posts
Tuesday, 9 August 2011
Saturday, 28 August 2010
100 Days: The Politics of Shock and Awe
By
Mark Featherstone
I recently watched Winterbottom and Whitecross’s film adaptation of Naomi Klein’s book The Shock Doctrine and was immediately put in mind of recent news media marking the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government’s first 100 days in office. Despite the inescapable conclusion that their first 100 days in office had been marked by anxiety over public sector cuts and the onset of the so-called age of austerity, the coalition was keen was tell us that the new government was not simply about cutting back for its own sake. Instead, we were told that the future would be bright if we could take our medicine. We were told that we needed to be aware that cuts were essential in preparing for a bright new future. However, at the same time it was difficult to avoid the conclusion that the suggested cuts were too severe, too much too soon, and likely to cause a double-dip recession, with even the Business Secretary Vince Cable able to be no more precise than saying that the chances of the economy slipping into another recession were ‘below 50/50’.
We do not need to be economists to understand why we may face a double dip recession. The problem with applying savage cuts to the public sector in order to reduce the budget deficit resides in the nature of the British economy which has been organised on the basis of neo-liberal theory, consumerism, and credit since the 1980s. On the surface it may appear that the best way to reduce the national deficit is to cut public sector spending, and simply weather the negative consequences of mass unemployment and social instability in the name of balancing the books, but the problem is that taking this short-cut in the context of a socio-economic system marked by neo-liberal ideology, consumerism, and the demand for credit is only likely to result in socio-economic disaster. We know that cuts in public sector spending will inevitably lead to increased levels of unemployment, primarily because the public sector became so bloated under New Labour, and that these increases in unemployment will hit particular areas of the country harder than others. Related to unemployment caused by the shrinking of the public sector, levels of youth unemployment are likely to increase steeply because of the reduction of university funding and the lack of entry level positions in areas of the labour market that had previously provided employment for new entrants to the world of work.
Of course increased levels of unemployment are not in themselves signs of socio-economic catastrophe, even though they may spell disaster for individuals and communities, because societies can cope with massive levels of worklessness, if they are sufficiently prepared to weather the storm and manage outbreaks of civil unrest. We know this much from the 1980s when Margaret Thatcher was prepared to destroy the lives of so many people and so many communities in the name of socio-economic modernisation. We also know that the Thatcher governments were able to manage these transformations on the basis of an aggressive approach to law and order and policing, an approach that became necessary to cope with the fall out of the destruction of the industrial working class, and the creation of a new middle class able to drive the country into a future of consumption and credit that was, of course, expanded by the New Labour revolution that made us all into middle class consumers.
Unfortunately, the recent economic crash and related recession signaled the end of the New Labour revolution. But now that the party is over we need a new socio-economic direction. My view is that the age of austerity and cuts cannot be it because it is entirely negative in its approach to social engineering and will only result in the further decline of the Thatcher-Blair model of capitalism. It is totally unclear what Cameron-Clegg have in mind to lead us into the bright new future. It is not enough to dismantle the Thatcher-Blair socio-economic model because public sector cuts will only result in unemployment, the threat of unemployment, increases in precariousness, anxiety, and the collapse of consumer confidence, the motor of the neo-liberal economy. As soon as consumer confidence collapses, as has been seen in the housing market, production fails, and economic growth slows further, resulting in more unemployment and so on.
Whereas Thatcher, who oversaw the transformation of Britain from an industrial to a post-industrial society and replaced the destroyed working class with a new expanded middle class, Cameron-Clegg seem to have no sense of the need to replace the middle class they are about to destroy in the name of balancing the books. They cannot fall back on industry, since Britain has long since outsourced its industrial production, but equally seem to have no sense of the impending socio-economic catastrophe they are about to cause, because they have made no particular noises about policing or law and order, but rather jettisoned the New Labour security state in favour in a small state and big society.
This feature of the coalition approach is particularly difficult to understand since to my mind mass unemployment and a society of people who had been brought up on the ideology of social climbing, but now must face up to the painful reality of downsizing with no sense of a future direction, is a recipe for unrest and potential social disaster. How, then, can we explain this lack of foresight on the part of the coalition? Much has been made of the socio-economic make-up of the new government, people from old money who have no sense of the reality of the majority of people who must make it in life through social mobility, but I’m not sure this is everything. We must add to this the problem of the lack of social and political imagination that characterises our age, and has done since Thatcher’s declaration that there is no alternative, and it may be that we are close to understanding why Cameron-Clegg have no sense of the need to construct a new future for the majority, seem to lack an understanding of why it might be important to mitigate against the consequences of not providing people with any sense of a future, and probably could not provide any sense of a future social direction even if they were in a position to do so.
However, I do think that we find the glimmer of a recognition of the need to think about a better future in the declaration that there is more to the coalition than cuts, and that it is in this glimmer of a recognition that I think we can detect the roots of the kind of apocalyptic thinking that Winterbottom, Whitecross, and Klein explain in the theory of the shock doctrine and disaster capitalism. The apocalypticism of this mode of thinking resides primarily in the view that a bright future awaits after painful transformation, but centrally in the fact that there is no real causal relationship between the painful transformation and the production of a new situation. That is to say that similar to religious thinking surrounding the apocalypse the coalition’s idea of social transformation involves pain, cuts, and destruction, with no real sense of how this pain will produce an improved future situation. Instead we are asked to take it on faith that pain and cuts will transform the future, but how, and in what ways? What will the future look like?
I think that these are the questions that we should ask of Cameron-Clegg. We should ask them to explain their social theory, and move beyond their apocalyptic theory of purgatorial pain, because my sense is that the only way we can explain the haste with which the coalition has implemented its cuts agenda is in terms of Klein’s theory of the shock doctrine, which traces the history of the view that the best way to impose radical social and economic transformation upon a population is through shock, disorientation, and trauma. Given that is it difficult to believe that at least some members of the government would not be aware of the potential socio-economic effects of rapid and savage cuts to the public sector, my sense is that the coalition’s objective has always been to push radical socio-economic change through social shock and disorientation. As Klein shows in her book, and Winterbottom and Whitecross’s film illustrates so well, social shock, disorientation, and a destroyed landscape clear the way for the implementation of new social and economic models and limits the prospect of political resistance. If this is indeed the case, I think our role should be to oppose shock with thought, resist the notion of the catastrophic economy, and the idea that there is no other way but pain and cuts, and ask the coalition to explain their theory of socio-economic transformation. What kind of society do they think will emerge from the age of austerity and how exactly will the period of purgatorial pain produce it?
Mark Featherstone
I recently watched Winterbottom and Whitecross’s film adaptation of Naomi Klein’s book The Shock Doctrine and was immediately put in mind of recent news media marking the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government’s first 100 days in office. Despite the inescapable conclusion that their first 100 days in office had been marked by anxiety over public sector cuts and the onset of the so-called age of austerity, the coalition was keen was tell us that the new government was not simply about cutting back for its own sake. Instead, we were told that the future would be bright if we could take our medicine. We were told that we needed to be aware that cuts were essential in preparing for a bright new future. However, at the same time it was difficult to avoid the conclusion that the suggested cuts were too severe, too much too soon, and likely to cause a double-dip recession, with even the Business Secretary Vince Cable able to be no more precise than saying that the chances of the economy slipping into another recession were ‘below 50/50’.
We do not need to be economists to understand why we may face a double dip recession. The problem with applying savage cuts to the public sector in order to reduce the budget deficit resides in the nature of the British economy which has been organised on the basis of neo-liberal theory, consumerism, and credit since the 1980s. On the surface it may appear that the best way to reduce the national deficit is to cut public sector spending, and simply weather the negative consequences of mass unemployment and social instability in the name of balancing the books, but the problem is that taking this short-cut in the context of a socio-economic system marked by neo-liberal ideology, consumerism, and the demand for credit is only likely to result in socio-economic disaster. We know that cuts in public sector spending will inevitably lead to increased levels of unemployment, primarily because the public sector became so bloated under New Labour, and that these increases in unemployment will hit particular areas of the country harder than others. Related to unemployment caused by the shrinking of the public sector, levels of youth unemployment are likely to increase steeply because of the reduction of university funding and the lack of entry level positions in areas of the labour market that had previously provided employment for new entrants to the world of work.
Of course increased levels of unemployment are not in themselves signs of socio-economic catastrophe, even though they may spell disaster for individuals and communities, because societies can cope with massive levels of worklessness, if they are sufficiently prepared to weather the storm and manage outbreaks of civil unrest. We know this much from the 1980s when Margaret Thatcher was prepared to destroy the lives of so many people and so many communities in the name of socio-economic modernisation. We also know that the Thatcher governments were able to manage these transformations on the basis of an aggressive approach to law and order and policing, an approach that became necessary to cope with the fall out of the destruction of the industrial working class, and the creation of a new middle class able to drive the country into a future of consumption and credit that was, of course, expanded by the New Labour revolution that made us all into middle class consumers.
Unfortunately, the recent economic crash and related recession signaled the end of the New Labour revolution. But now that the party is over we need a new socio-economic direction. My view is that the age of austerity and cuts cannot be it because it is entirely negative in its approach to social engineering and will only result in the further decline of the Thatcher-Blair model of capitalism. It is totally unclear what Cameron-Clegg have in mind to lead us into the bright new future. It is not enough to dismantle the Thatcher-Blair socio-economic model because public sector cuts will only result in unemployment, the threat of unemployment, increases in precariousness, anxiety, and the collapse of consumer confidence, the motor of the neo-liberal economy. As soon as consumer confidence collapses, as has been seen in the housing market, production fails, and economic growth slows further, resulting in more unemployment and so on.
Whereas Thatcher, who oversaw the transformation of Britain from an industrial to a post-industrial society and replaced the destroyed working class with a new expanded middle class, Cameron-Clegg seem to have no sense of the need to replace the middle class they are about to destroy in the name of balancing the books. They cannot fall back on industry, since Britain has long since outsourced its industrial production, but equally seem to have no sense of the impending socio-economic catastrophe they are about to cause, because they have made no particular noises about policing or law and order, but rather jettisoned the New Labour security state in favour in a small state and big society.
This feature of the coalition approach is particularly difficult to understand since to my mind mass unemployment and a society of people who had been brought up on the ideology of social climbing, but now must face up to the painful reality of downsizing with no sense of a future direction, is a recipe for unrest and potential social disaster. How, then, can we explain this lack of foresight on the part of the coalition? Much has been made of the socio-economic make-up of the new government, people from old money who have no sense of the reality of the majority of people who must make it in life through social mobility, but I’m not sure this is everything. We must add to this the problem of the lack of social and political imagination that characterises our age, and has done since Thatcher’s declaration that there is no alternative, and it may be that we are close to understanding why Cameron-Clegg have no sense of the need to construct a new future for the majority, seem to lack an understanding of why it might be important to mitigate against the consequences of not providing people with any sense of a future, and probably could not provide any sense of a future social direction even if they were in a position to do so.
However, I do think that we find the glimmer of a recognition of the need to think about a better future in the declaration that there is more to the coalition than cuts, and that it is in this glimmer of a recognition that I think we can detect the roots of the kind of apocalyptic thinking that Winterbottom, Whitecross, and Klein explain in the theory of the shock doctrine and disaster capitalism. The apocalypticism of this mode of thinking resides primarily in the view that a bright future awaits after painful transformation, but centrally in the fact that there is no real causal relationship between the painful transformation and the production of a new situation. That is to say that similar to religious thinking surrounding the apocalypse the coalition’s idea of social transformation involves pain, cuts, and destruction, with no real sense of how this pain will produce an improved future situation. Instead we are asked to take it on faith that pain and cuts will transform the future, but how, and in what ways? What will the future look like?
I think that these are the questions that we should ask of Cameron-Clegg. We should ask them to explain their social theory, and move beyond their apocalyptic theory of purgatorial pain, because my sense is that the only way we can explain the haste with which the coalition has implemented its cuts agenda is in terms of Klein’s theory of the shock doctrine, which traces the history of the view that the best way to impose radical social and economic transformation upon a population is through shock, disorientation, and trauma. Given that is it difficult to believe that at least some members of the government would not be aware of the potential socio-economic effects of rapid and savage cuts to the public sector, my sense is that the coalition’s objective has always been to push radical socio-economic change through social shock and disorientation. As Klein shows in her book, and Winterbottom and Whitecross’s film illustrates so well, social shock, disorientation, and a destroyed landscape clear the way for the implementation of new social and economic models and limits the prospect of political resistance. If this is indeed the case, I think our role should be to oppose shock with thought, resist the notion of the catastrophic economy, and the idea that there is no other way but pain and cuts, and ask the coalition to explain their theory of socio-economic transformation. What kind of society do they think will emerge from the age of austerity and how exactly will the period of purgatorial pain produce it?
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