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Turbo-consumerism is the driving force behind crime
Last week my son got mugged for his iPod. He wasn't
hurt, just a bit embarrassed about some of the songs his assailants will
find on it. This week I had my mobile stolen while sitting on a park
bench. This is low-level stuff that is now commonplace. But there is a
vital link between these ever-upgradable gadgets and the prime
minister's call for a rebalancing of the relationship between the
victims of crime and the perpetrators.
In "my day" it was different. No one got mugged,
perhaps because we didn't have anything worth taking. A home-made
catapult was about as hi-tech as it got. Today a kid's trainers, iPod
and mobile can easily cost £400 to replace - and can be gone as quickly
as it takes a hooded youth to claim there's a knife in their pocket. I'm
glad my son didn't take the risk of calling his robber's bluff.
But he had something they didn't. An iPod and the
right phone are now essential trappings of youth - not just because they
let you talk or listen to music at your convenience, but because of what
they say about you. Once we were known by what we produced. Now we judge
ourselves and others by what we and they consume. The advertisers know
this; that's why they ask: "What does your mobile say about you?"
Welcome to the consumer society and the world of the turbo-consumer.
It's a world driven by competition for consumer goods and paid-for
experiences, of hi-tech and high-end shopping signals that have become
the means by which we keep score with each other.
As the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman points out, to be a
successful consumer now defines what it is to be "normal". Therefore to
be "abnormal" is to be a failed consumer. The lot of the failed consumer
is miserable. This new poor may be better off in absolute terms than the
poor of previous generations, but in the world of the turbo-consumer
what you have means nothing - it's what others have and therefore what
we must have next that counts. On these terms the new poor are falling
far behind in an age when keeping up is everything.
The failed consumer suffers not just from exclusion
from normal society but isolation. The poor of the past had each other
in a community of poverty. Misery could be shared and countered through
class solidarity and the hope of a different life. The new poor lick
their wounds alone in their council flats, with nowhere to hide from the
messages on billboards and TV that constantly remind them of their
social failure. The new poor, without the right labels and brands, are
not just excluded but invisible. The final ignominy of today's poor is
that they don't want to overthrow the rich to create a new order, they
just want to be like them. So they are denied even the satisfaction of
anyone to hate - just B-list celebrities to envy and copy.
So if you want the causes of crime then look no
further than the impulse of the poor to belong and be normal. So strong
is this urge that the failed consumer will lie, cheat and steal to
"earn" the trappings of success. In the world of the "me generation",
people become calculating rather than law-abiding in their overwhelming
desire to be normal. This is crime driven by the rampant egoism of
turbo-consumerism, where enough is never enough. And precisely because
of its competitive nature, consumer-driven crime cannot be switched off
through tougher laws. New Labour has attempted to address some of the
causes of crime with tax credits, a minimum wage and the New Deal. They
are all helpful, but the government hardly ever talks about them.
Why should failed consumers play by the rules when no
one at the top seems to - when social mobility is declining; when the
government refuses to implement vocational training reforms for fear of
a Daily Mail backlash over A-levels; when more thick middle-class
children fill our universities; and when school league tables mean
"problem kids" won't be tolerated?
New Labour refuses to change the rules of the market
state and consumer society, and instead attempts another crackdown on
the symptoms through Asbos and control orders. Just like Thatcherism,
New Labour relies on a strong state to police a free market. The prime
minister extols his respect agenda without realising that the architect
of the term, the sociologist Richard Sennett, was talking about the
respect the powerful give to the powerless. So Tony Blair tries to turn
back the tide of crime against a rampant consumer culture of new gadgets
that are designed, advertised, sold and bought to prove our normality
over and over again. Nine years, 50 law bills and more than 700 new
offences later, being even tougher on crime isn't going to work. Of
course, it is always wrong to mug or steal - but unless, as a society,
we are prepared to understand why crime happens then, in the words of
the criminologist Professor Ian Loader, "we are using a sticking plaster
to fix a broken leg". You cannot build a tolerant society on the basis
of zero tolerance.
In his speech last Friday, Blair admitted that "we can
identify such families virtually as their children are born". But his
solution is the science fiction of the film Minority Report, when the
real crime is the existence of such families in a nation bulging with
wealth.
When it is the dominance of the consumer economy that
is driving so much crime, easy answers aren't close to hand. We need a
different conception of the good life, in which time, relationships and
care take precedence over consumerism. Next there is a political
alliance to be created between the post-material, happiness-seeking
middle classes, who want more time, and this new poor, who have all the
time in the world but none of the money. This is what needs rebalancing:
not the criminal justice system, but the wealth and riches of the
nation.
The problem of not belonging, of being anxious and
insecure, afflicts us all. It's just more sharply focused for those at
the bottom of the heap. The social theorist Roberto Unger says: "Almost
everyone feels abandoned. Almost everyone believes they are an outsider,
looking in through the window at the party going on inside." If we don't
acknowledge their plight, the victims of an economy out of our control
will always come back to haunt us. Against the backdrop of our comfort
and complacency, the case for tax and tolerance has never been more
needed.
Neal Lawson
29 June 2006
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,1808236,00.html
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