Children of The Market

Children of the market | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2007/jun/17/children...
Children of the market

Several of the unpleasant traits attributed to young people are
by-products of childhoods dominated by market culture.
guardian.co.uk, Sunday 17 June 2007 16.00 BST
It is astonishing how the most obvious social wrongs and abuses can remain "unknown"
until acknowledged by power and authority. Despite continuous news coverage, the
unblinking vigilance of the camera, the no-stone-unturned persistence of investigative
journalism, the unnoticed gains recognition only when it forces itself upon society,
which it sometimes does with great violence.
So it has been with contemporary discussions on youth, its disaffection, misbehaviour

and alienation from a world that appears to offer it everything. Since the socialising of
children has become primarily another aspect of marketing, the consequences of these
developments ought to have been subject to more searching scrutiny than they have
received. When the market rules, why should the young be castigated for living by the
rules of the market?
While we have been busy bringing democracy to Iraq and other dark corners of the
world, there is growing disarticulation from the democratic process in the lives of young
people. The inner decay of democracy has been replaced by the daily plebiscite of the
market, in which people vote with their feet; a version of popular participation which
contrasts with the apparently sterile immobile state of politics.
A new generation has been shaped by experience, which has transformed its sensibility
and estranged it from a world in which the power of the freely elected is supposed to
hold sway.
Education is obsessed with similar problems - how to keep pupils involved and
committed, how not to lose them to the lure of commerce and its entertainments, which
offer richer forms of instruction than those offered by the state. Parents, too, perceive
their waning social power over children. They have been bypassed by markets, which
appeal over their heads, directly to the young.
Parenting has come to mean, increasingly, supplying the money to provide children with
all the good things for which global markets kindle an implacable desire. What is
sometimes described, rather benignly, as "pester-power" is recognition of this.
A generation has grown, formed within, by and for the market rather than by and for
society. Many unpleasant developments over which the government seeks to reassert its
declining control - binge-drinking, the "normalisation" of drugs, the cult of celebrity, the
supremacy of what money can buy, incivility, absence of respect, obesity, the epidemic
of sexually transmitted diseases - are by-products of childhoods upon which a major
determinant has been a market whose values have been championed above dull politics,
and which have, accordingly, captivated the heart and imagination. (The obsession with
"hearts and minds" abroad ought, perhaps, to be directed to the multiple alienations of
home.)
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A peer-driven market culture is the primary source of identity, not being rooted in place,
function or purpose, factors which shaped an earlier generation.
In this new social order, there is only one thing worse than domination by the market,
and that is exclusion from it, since there is now no other source of knowing who we are.
The market, whatever its emancipatory potential, also brings in its train some strange
pathologies, not least of which is the angry resourceless state of those. The means to
participate are, arbitrarily, it seems to them, withheld.
This should really come as no great surprise. After all, in the first industrial era, the
capitalist labour market created a different kind of humanity out of the wasting
peasantry of an impoverished countryside, as people streamed towards the new
industrial towns of the early 19th century. A different kind of human being, never before
seen in history, was born - the industrial worker, created by the necessities of a national
division of labour, which sent its children into mills, mines, forges and manufactories, to
learn there a cruel pedagogy of survival.
The 19th century was characterised by the works of intrepid social explorers who
ventured into darkest England to discover what kind of alien, and possibly savage,
beings inhabited the manufacturing districts. Engels, Mayhew, Booth, Jack London and,
in the 20th century, George Orwell, tried to make sense of the strange and perverse
character of people whose lives had long ago forsaken the cycle of seed-time and
harvest, and had been remade by the harsh rhythms of industrial discipline.
In our time, the temper of industrial humanity has been dismantled, no less thoroughly
than that of an archaic peasantry in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.
The epic disturbance in our age has dissolved a national division of labour, sent
industrial work to distant countries, and left at a loss people who had never doubted
their function and reason for existence. Unlike in the early industrial era, people have
become richer at the same time; and this has masked some of the more malign
consequences.
The political vacuum has been filled by identities provided by consumer markets, in
which people have searched for meaning, now that the factories have been ploughed
into the earth, the great workshop of the world has fallen silent, its rusting machinery
exported to distant third world factories, its products outsourced to young factory
women in Mexico, Bangladesh or Indonesia.
EP Thompson called his great book The Making of the English Working Class. We have
seen its undoing, and the reincarnation of the popular sensibility in a form for which no
collective name exists. Whatever it is called, it represents a distinctive psychic structure
from anything that preceded it. This remaking is now a fait accompli.
It remains the endeavour of conservatives of all stripes to restore the status quo ante, to
place the new kind of human being into a familiar, recognisable and controllable
context. This is impossible.
The "post-industrial" reality of contemporary Britain is not emancipated from industry,

indeed, is even more deeply embedded within it globally, for even basic necessities in
daily use are brought in from all over the world; but we look in vain if we seek
continuities in the politics that grew out of derelict pit-villages, wasted city suburbs and
provincial towns left high and dry by the extinction of the labour they performed.
Of the early industrial era, JL and Barbara Hammond said "the labourer is not a citizen
of this or that town but a hand of this or that manufactory". Today's definition would be
different - the people are not citizens of this or that place, but are the dependents of a
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global market. This change has the same irreversibility, a psyche refashioned for other,
perhaps equally alien, purposes as those which drove people into the choice-less
occupations of the industrial towns.
It is a rare hypocrisy that promotes an unchanged politics, when politicians themselves

have sought so hard to supersede their own role by preaching the supreme virtue of
market values, and then repudiating the consequences of the way these developments
work themselves out in the world.
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Comments in chronological order (Total 61

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paticus
17 June 2007 4:30PM
One doesn't have to agree entirely with Jeremy Seabrook's analysis to find his overall
description of the contemporary cultural scene vis-a-vis childhood and youth getting to
the hub.
His aducing of classical backing in the shape of Thompson and the Hammonds serves
his long-term view well. What he omits any mention of here, however, is the direct role
'education/education/education' has played and is playing in the socio-dissociation
amongst not only youth that he defines.
Education seen as and operating as a sifting and sorting, a hierarchical rat-race, will
inevitably produce malcontentment. Alien youth and delinquents are only the more
visible of its manifestations.
When will an enlightened government take off its blinkers on this one?
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Agog
17 June 2007 4:45PM
Jeremy
I don't think "the market" can be blamed for problems with kids except insofar as it
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limits parental involvement and influence in the pursuit of money.

The shaping of behaviour remains the same. There is more info available than ever
before on how to do this successfully in child rearing. Priorities are paramount for
parents!
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marksa
17 June 2007 5:13PM
Interesting article. Maybe off topic, but how come the old school left never predicted
profits would be enhanced via outsourcing. Did they understand anything about
manufacturing at all.
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tommydog
17 June 2007 6:55PM
marksa. an interesting comment. I would suggest that the old school left have almost
made it a point of pride not to understand how businessmen think or the risks they face,
other that to rail that it is all about profit. That much is true; businesses will seek to
control costs and seek a satisfactory rate of return. Management will be fired if they
don't.
However, seldom is there recognition of just how much uncertainty businesses face in
trying to ascertain whether their endeavors will actually be successful, not to mention
the intense pressure investors can place on management. Business failure is more
common that many on the left would think. This refusal to understand manufacturing or
finance in general left them unable to anticipate moves. Refusal to even consider how
the other side thinks can leave you vulnerable.
The consumer or market economy has been around in an intense manner since the
1950s, going on 60 years now. I also certainly remember binge drinking, drugs were
everywhere, and the celebration of celebrity back in the late 60s and 70s. Is it really all
that different today?
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boldscot
17 June 2007 7:00PM
Edakashun is the clue. Mrs. Thatcher thought there was no society.
'The Blairs' have taught a generation of children that you can get away with 'anything
you can get away with' - ie there is no morality. Lie, cheat, steal (or whatever) to the
limit and with a bit of savvy there is nothing to stop you.
Another part of the legacy, that's all.
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ThomasReturns
17 June 2007 7:10PM
It is the unfairly low minimum standard of living in the UK that produces the problems
in society we now see. In terms of say marriage/social partnerships, the income of both
the average British man and woman combined, cannot easily provide the financial
security required to ensure a stress-free, happy lifestyle for both they and their family.
The result being, lots of angry people, lots of arguments, and the type of behaviour
people complain about on Big Brother from disallusioned young people with no
prospect of owning a house unless they find someone rich to marry if they're a woman
(or rob, if they're a man).
Society doesn't have to be like this here, because in terms of GNI, the UK is actually 13th
richest nation in the world. So it is really about Government policy which forces social
problems upon the population, producing things like extraordinary relative poverty, and
increasing crime. Unfortunately, the solution favoured by Blair's New Labour is to
simply fill the prisons with the unhappy poor people, much like the Victorians did in the
past, and pocket the money that should have been used to increase the minimum
standard of living.
And so it's not really surprising to see young people in society (male or female) behaving
as they do on Big Brother. That is what one could reasonably expect the stressful, unfair,
and unnecessary pressures on the UK population in today's society, to produce.
These specific types of social problems hardly exist in the countries of North East
Europe, which take the trouble to invest in their population and ensure a decent
minimum standard of living for all, rather than just televising social problems and
selling them back to the poor down TV company phone lines.
There's more than enough money in the UK to raise the minimum standard of living to
something nearer Scandinavian levels, and solve these social problems if the
government wanted to. And in terms of productivity, a happy nation would probably be
more productive. That would be long-sighted policy making.
But instead, we have the current short-sighted 'smash-and-grab' type of policy making.
For example, a free University education is a measure which helps the long term
economic future of a country, not the loan system devised to make the economy look
good, in the short term.
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israelvisitor
17 June 2007 7:15PM
In the Sixties, teenagers were not killing their fellows at the rate of about one a day.
Whatever the reasons behind it, the appalling murder rate in general is, at its present
level, quite a recent phenomenon.
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JohnCan45
17 June 2007 7:17PM
I think Mr. Seabrook has a salient point, but it's hard to get at through all the neo-left
newspeak. Glad to see he mentioned Orwell though. Perhaps he could re-read his essay
"Politics and the English Language." It might benefit a few of the posters here, too.
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notmelphilips
17 June 2007 7:19PM
A good article in my view. As agog says the market certainly can't be blamed for
everything but it does inevitably encourage the pursuit of individual self-interest rather
than communal/public well-being. In a sense, market individualism has formed an
unholy alliance with (what is lazily called) PC culture stressing individual rights and
feeding the litigation explosion.
I see what has happened in Britain over the last 25 years or so as reflecting a profound
contradiction in the New Right thinking of Thatcherism and taken over by New Labour.
In Thatcherism the idea was that you could have free markets *and* traditional values.
But the former almost inevitably corrodes the latter. The credit-fuelled, anti-social
hedonism unleashed by free markets is surely not what Margaret Thatcher envisaged in
the 80s, yet it was the direct consequence. New Labour's increasing authoritarianism is
an attempt to deal with this but it is surely doomed, partly because the fundamental
neo-liberal premiss remains in play, and partly because you can't patch declining
communal values by State intervention.
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marksa
17 June 2007 7:46PM
TommyDog There were plenty of clues. The principles of industrual management and
industrial engineering (Taylorism etc) were developed around 1910 or so. You could pick
up a entire factory and duplicate it anywhere. Of course things didn't happen that fast
back then, but the impermanence of working class life should have been apparent. EP
Thompson's 'The Making of the English Working Class' is a sociological study of the
English working class, published in 1966. Did these people really have their head in the
clouds.
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Brobat
17 June 2007 7:51PM
I note that some posters have gone to great pains to explain the position about personal
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responsibility vis-a-vis the free market. There is the assumption that people will behave
in a responsible towards one another and towards the free market* as a whole.
Well, "community" has become dirty word - community pressures to behave responsibly
have all but disappeared, as I have said before we have become like chimps fighting over
the supply of bananas. As well as not having society any more, we do not have
something more immediate in terms of our interactions.
As for policing, this is subject to the demands of the "free market", a robbery taking
place at the local Abbey National will no doubt take economic precedence over an
elderly person being beaten and mugged in the high street. So bang goes policing
making a contribution to social cohesion.
*I say to all those right-wingers, you have won, you can have it on a plate, "no such thing
as society..." surely there is something about the right having to take responsibility for
the current decline and decadence in our country.
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logos00
17 June 2007 8:56PM
Thanks Jeremy for one of the best contributions to CIF for a long time.
We are drifting into an authoritarian society. Citizenship is becoming a thinner and
thinner concept/status as the demand for citizenship lessons, citizenship tests and
citizenship rituals grows. Civil liberties are incrementally eroded while creeping dilution
of our legal protections proceeds relentlessly.
Building "cohesive communities" is big on the government's agenda, another verse to
the old song about the loss of a romaticised past. Barra Sing was leading the call for
promoting volunteering, "active citizenship" that will bring us again the rose coloured
benefits of lost community. Of course he did not shirk from the question "Should we
make volunteering compulsory"? This is the spirit of community in 21st century Britain:
a normalised image of the good with a comprehensive system of compulsion and
penalties if, like any right thinking person, we don't behave spontaneously in the
prescribed manner.
Communities are dispersed, dislocated and transformed by socio-economic processes
over which they have no control. When there is a vital and public manifestation of
community, as in the mining communities resisting Thatcherism, it is crushed.
And under New Labour? When a small island community in Scotland organised in
solidarity to oppose plans for a company to profit from their need for a bridge did the
government celebrate the vitality of the community, no they did all they could to
undermine them and clear the way for turning them into a useful source of private
profit.
As Jeremy points out the traditions and social order underpinning agricultural society
were dissovled in the industrial revolution: new conditions of life, new ideologies, new
norms, a new social order was forged that supported the development the factory. The
advent of the consumer-information society has dissolved the conditions of life as they
were.
Neo-liberaL ideologues, in both the now almost indisinguishable labour and
conservative parties, persuade us we have no choice but to obey the global discipline of
the market. Though choice is absent here it is now the principle that drives all reform,
the opening up of every area of life to the profit generating choices of a commodification
that knows no limits, no natural boundaries and that is offered only on condition of
private profit.
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All this is kept out of social policy, it is kept out of debate over society and it's problems.
The neo-liberal creed is the only gospel in town and and consideration of it's impact on
our social lives and problems is displaced and replaced by the language of indivisual
failure and remediation.
Decorated with the rhetoric of community and "right thinking people" a new social
order is being crafted to adapt us to the transformations of global neo-liberalism. It is an
order of growing inequality coupled with authoritarian control. Happy consumers are
like the stoics dog, it runs by the carriage to which it is tethered on a loose leash and
believes itself to be running free. But if the dog tries to diverge from the course of the
carriage it is sharply stripped of it's illusions.
@Jeremy "The shaping of behaviour remains the same. There is more info available
than ever before on how to do this successfully in child rearing. Priorities are paramount
for parents!" Of course there is plenty of material available Jeremy. When else could a
consumer have walked into a bookshop and availed themselves of such a wide range of
the latest professional advice. And of course for those who demonstrate, through their
continued problem behaviour, that they won't or can't take advatage of these widely
abailable resources then we will just have to compel them to take advice through
targeted, compulsory, government programmes.
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questionnaire
17 June 2007 9:12PM
The marketing industry has invaded family life to the extent that most children in a
recent study could say 'McDonald's' before their own surnames, and most six-year olds
showed 'extreme familiarity' with 300-400 brand names yet could name no more than
two or three species of bird.
The traditional British working class that Richard Hoggart and Raymond Williams
taked about in the 1950s has all but evaporated, leaving behind a residue of competitive
individuals climbing over each other for the marks of social distinction that are carried
by consumer products. It's a fake, of course, and as soon as most people have these
marks of distinction they are automatically devalued and the industry moves the
goalposts and moves on to others. A massive confidence trick, imported from the USA
with their standard image of the 'cool individual' making it for himself.
The result is an almost total lack of class-based community, identity and politics and a
decline in the ability to socialise children into the best of traditional working-class
values. All this has been replaced by competing individuals; precisely what the
neo-liberals wanted, even though the competition is criminogenic. So many young
working-class people, directly encouraged by the marketing industry, show contempt for
their 'uncool' parents, who, especialy if they have lousy jobs or are unemployed, are seen
'mugs' and 'losers' who 'can't make it'. Parenting is virtually impossible in some
run-down areas, which leaves schools and social services to mop up the mess.
Consumerism is an unmitigated socio-cultural disaster.
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influence
8 of 26 2/2/11 4:56 PM
17 June 2007 9:43PM

good article, good subject.
the only thing i can suggest as a further consideration is an a couple of possible and
vague ideas that perhaps one smarter than i could weave into an interesting analogy or
metaphor - or alternatively could call a load of bullshirt.
citizens subsidise interational war export application taking the hit through taxes or
diminished service or provision.
citizens subsidise international "marketing modality" [wrt values etc] export application
taking the hit here through family community societal externalities and break downs.
the uk, or west if you like is not the target market, just the amplifyer or gravity
accellerator [mars for jupiter] liquidising asset power, for those in the club, to influence
those it would like to co-opt.
i.
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questionnaire
17 June 2007 9:59PM
Wazpy:
"There's a greater level of consumerism and competition in Japan than there is in
Britain but they don't seem to have as many problems so that is not the underlying
reason for the deterioration of British society."
Wrong, I'm afraid.
Since Japan's export-driven economy declined and it was forced to move towards the
consumerist model there have been rises in the crime and murder rates, and rates of
mental ill-health, homelessness and family breakdown. Even Japan, steeped in the
family values of 'ie', has no immunity to the destructive effects of consumerism and the
hyper-competitive individualism that is its principal dynamic force.
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north
17 June 2007 10:28PM
Wazpy is entirely correct. The problem is that we now have had several generations of
parents, many of whom were or are utterly irresponsible. When you become a parent
you must give up aspects of personal freedom and fulfilment in order to properly parent
your children. You cannot expect your life to continue as it was before you had kids. Far
too many of today's parents simply do not recognise this; from 'you can have it all' post
feminist mums to immature 'retread teenager' dads. Advertising and the mass media
certainly do not help but the main responsibility must lie with parents who have
completely failed to supply decent role models to their offspring. As a teacher I've had to
deal with far too many of these self indulgent and self obsessed twerps over the pasr 30
odd years. They make awful parents.
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questionnaire
17 June 2007 11:59PM
Wazpy:
"questionnaire, the murder rate in Japan is 0.00499933 per 1,000 people...The murder
rate in Jamaica is 0.324196 per 1,000 people and in Venezuela it is 0.316138 per 1,000
people."
Completely inappropriate comparisons. Firstly, the Japanese murder rate is small; but it
has still risen from an even smaller figure 10 years ago, and, as I said, all the other
indicators have risen. The rises are small, but Japan is on its way.
Secondly, most developing nations have higher murder rates than developed nations,
because conditions in urban areas are desperate. Most crime in these nations is what we
call 'social crime' predicated on grossly unequal social relations and genuine poverty at
the bottom. Crime in developed industrial societies seems to have different motives,
based on the struggle for identity and social position via consumer products. Having
said that, as consumerism becomes global the second type of crime is also appearing in
the urban areas of some developing nations to compound the problem. Read Messner
and Rosenfeld's work on 'Crime and the American Dream'.
Secondly, let's look at a more appropriate comparison. The murder rates in Western
Europe average less than 2 per 100,000 with a small prison population. The murder rate
in the USA is over 5 per 100,000 with a huge prison population. Guns? Canada and
Austria have higher gun ownership, but very small murder rates. The USA is the most
consumerist, hyper-individualist society in the West. General crime and violence rates
have also risen markedly in Britain since the 1980s, although we have kept down the
murder rate - however, we have the highest imprisonment rate in Western Europe, so,
as we follow the American model, we suffer similar problems.
"I think that is the result of the counter-culture movement that occurred from the sixties
onwards that tried to to say that the traditional British way of life was rubbish and that
people didn't need to get married to have children, they didn't need to practice sexual
responsibility, they were supposed to rebel against authority rather than respect it,
etc...Those are all things that people on the left pushed for. Not people on the right and
not the market."
Complete rubbish. The 'counterculture' was a product of the marketing industry aided
by the libertarian Right. It had nothing whatsoever to do with the traditional Left. Most
of the famous counterculture figures - Abi Hoffman, Felix Dennis and the rest - were
cunning entrepreneurs who became very well off on the back of the so-called 'cultural
revolutiom'. Even Richard Branson identified with the 'counterculture'. The whole thing
was a fake, a marketing scam. Read Thomas Frank's 'The Conquest of Cool'.
North: yes, we know that personal responsibility is on the slide. You keep on repeating
that banality as if it were a revelation and as if it explains anything. Why can't people
look after their kids? Because the marketing industry has since the 1960s infantilised
generations and driven a wedge between parents and offspring.
I tell you what, do your own research with these parents, and you'll find out for yourself.
Most of them are completely absorbed in consumer imagery to the detriment of
everything else. It's more than a contributory cause, its the main cause. Read Ben
Barber's book 'Consumed'.
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tommyjimmy
18 June 2007 12:11AM
The trouble with Seabrook's quasi-Marxist analysis is that it fails to recognise that
society exists separately from both the state and the economic system. The market was
much freer in Victorian Britain than it is today, but its society and its families were
strong enough to stand up to it. Parents were emphatically in charge of their children
and could say no. Pester-power is not a product of economics, but of society.
Parents now feel they have much less authority, and less right to refuse their little
darlings something that they want. This is part of a much broader change in values and
ethics, more egalitarian, more permissive, less judgemental and less certain. Some of
this has been good, some bad. But it's Britain's culture and society that is responsible for
this consumerisation of childhood, not the market.
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Fandang
18 June 2007 12:18AM
There are two main areas of change in modern life where the interests of big business
are also served by "left wing" ideology.
A) Immigration to lower labour costs and hence increase the returns to capital. Leftists
often decry those who criticise this as racists.
B) Increasing the rate of participation of women in general and mothers in particular in
the workforce, increasing productivity. The left often decries the role of the housewife or
the traditional nuclear family as outdated and oppressive.
Where capitalism once broke through mercantile guilds and the like with the market
now we are seeing the market destroying the nation state and the family, cheered along
by "the left". Indeed with the breakdown of marriage even human interpersonal
relations are becoming increasingly commoditised and transient.
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EdinburghMan
18 June 2007 12:25AM
Fandang you are spot on: why does embracing the move to gender equality in the
workplace have to mean that we forget that kids grow up better if there's a parent or two
around?
SOMEONE needs to be home and not totally knackered otherwise kids grow up
understimulated (due to a lack of conversation), under-loved (due to feeling like a
burdon on their over-worked folks), undernourished (due to there being no time to cook
dinner in the evening)...
Give the kids a chance! Both parents working overtime 6 days a weekis not the route to
happy families, guys - If mum goes back to work, dad has go to go part time (at the very
least)!
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logos00
18 June 2007 12:32AM
@tommyjimmy - "The trouble with Seabrook's quasi-Marxist analysis is that it fails to
recognise that society exists separately from both the state and the economic system."
The trouble with that comment is that it is totally wrong. The state, economy and society
are inextricably linked.
As for your comment about Victorian Britain all I can say is you need to read a bit of
history. Babies were given laudanum to make them sleep, children were killed in
factories, workers struggled to create unions, the streets were far more dangerous than
today, there were bread riots, children were punished like adults etc etc etc.
The victorian era was also the great era of public works. Birmingham's mayor Joseph
Chamberlin was a leading advocate of public works like parks and libraries. With tax
payers' money he compulsorily purchased competing gas companies to ensure a good
service for the people of the town. Similarly he used public money to bring decent water
to the city as disease from filthy water was a common problem. Doesn't sound much lik
etoday's free market does it.
Get real
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Fandang
18 June 2007 12:42AM
notmelphilips
"A good article in my view. As agog says the market certainly can't be blamed for
everything but it does inevitably encourage the pursuit of individual self-interest rather
than communal/public well-being. In a sense, market individualism has formed an
unholy alliance with (what is lazily called) PC culture stressing individual rights and
feeding the litigation explosion.
I see what has happened in Britain over the last 25 years or so as reflecting a profound
contradiction in the New Right thinking of Thatcherism and taken over by New Labour.
In Thatcherism the idea was that you could have free markets *and* traditional values.
But the former almost inevitably corrodes the latter. The credit-fuelled, anti-social
hedonism unleashed by free markets is surely not what Margaret Thatcher envisaged in
the 80s, yet it was the direct consequence. New Labour's increasing authoritarianism is
an attempt to deal with this but it is surely doomed, partly because the fundamental
neo-liberal premiss remains in play, and partly because you can't patch declining
communal values by State intervention."
-
Good post, but I would also see this as just a chapter in the long march of increasing
liberalism. Both left and right are liberal AND illiberal. The left socially liberal and the
right economically liberal with their illiberalisms being the vice versas. So both the left
and right half won and half lost.
So to blame the right I don't think is correct. The left is just as responsible but in a
different way, and the "profound contradiction" you speak of also exists equally within
the left. BOTH left and right try to combine liberalism with illiberalism.
For example how can you say that individuals are free to do what they like with their
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own bodies sexually without social censure or government restriction and then argue
that the same people cannot trade their labour and possessions freely amongst each
other without social censure or government restriction?
Just as social liberalism follows from economic liberalism so to does economic
liberalism follow from social liberalism.
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Brobat
18 June 2007 12:46AM
"The trouble with Seabrook's quasi-Marxist analysis is that it fails to recognise that
society exists separately from both the state and the economic system"
The trouble with tommyjimmy's post is that he has used the old hat and outmoded word
of "society". I suggest that he ban it from his political vocabulary altogether and get
modern. The Right have won the day. Margaret Thatcher put paid to any suggestion of
this notion. Individuals and families are subject to the pressures of market forces; a
home is no longer a home but part of a 'property portfolio', so bang goes any notion of "a
family home".
As for pester power, that has arisen by the fact that the market has been and is nurturing
narcissistic generations to generate demand - pestering is demand. We no longer live in
the notion of community and therefore no sense of responsibility to it. Bollocks to that.
Who needs community, it's only a left-wing idea of equality.
So tommyjimmy, let's live in a vacuum with the belief that the market is ok, bollocks to
society, bollocks to community because individuals and families can sort out this shit.
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fallonius
18 June 2007 1:13AM
Mr. S--Do you have children? If you did, you would see that it doesn't work quite as you
say. What the parents have to do is say no often, yes sometimes, and actually have a
theory of child-rearing. For example. Do you placate your children in order to get them
to behave? Bad. Do you indulge them from time to time because you love them and like
to give them pleasure? Good. The market is tempting. You don't get them to handle
temptation by not allowing them to give into it, you do so by letting them give into it,
and then come to an understanding of what they are getting for their money. All little
girls get tired of Barbie eventually, and then they do really interesting things with her.
What sorts of things may they ALWAYS have? Books. Music. Art supplies. Opportunities
to engage in sports or to cook. What sorts of things may they never have? Anything
dangerous to others (fireworks, guns). If they insist on having them, well, then you wear
them down with tedium. "Of course you may have that, but you can only shoot ot when
I'm around and after we have talked about it until we are blue in the face." They are
growing up in a market society. They have to learn to handle it, and they can't do that by
avoiding it. Think of the market as the ever-present opportunity to sin or the
ever-present possibility of falling in love. Kids can handle it, if you train them.
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rolledup
18 June 2007 1:30AM
Good post and really enjoyed reading the responses. I think as religion declined in
society, and with it people's aspirations to improve beyond the outward, marketers
found the ordinary person easy pickings.
Human beings are adept at making comparisons. Where before we compared ourselves
to virtuous individuals, now we compare ourselves to celebrities or those we see on
advertisements.
So, instead of seeking inner edification, we consume, lest we fall behind our peers in
outward form.
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Fandang
18 June 2007 1:31AM
questionnaire
"Secondly, let's look at a more appropriate comparison. The murder rates in Western
Europe average less than 2 per 100,000 with a small prison population. The murder rate
in the USA is over 5 per 100,000 with a huge prison population. Guns? Canada and
Austria have higher gun ownership, but very small murder rates. The USA is the most
consumerist, hyper-individualist society in the West. General crime and violence rates
have also risen markedly in Britain since the 1980s, although we have kept down the
murder rate - however, we have the highest imprisonment rate in Western Europe, so,
as we follow the American model, we suffer similar problems."
-
American whites have roughly equivalent murder rates to Western Europeans.
American blacks (12% of the population) commit over half of all murders in the US.
Can we really ignore this, for example, in a comparison with Canada that is 1.9% black?
Now I'm not saying WHY this is but these are just facts. Of course we often discuss black
incarceration rates in the US and the like in other, more sympathetic, contexts, but the
same set of facts don't go away when we discuss things from a different angle.
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influence
18 June 2007 1:54AM
@EdinburghManComment No. 644365June 18 0:25
"SOMEONE needs to be home and not totally knackered otherwise kids grow up
understimulated (due to a lack of conversation), under-loved (due to feeling like a
burdon on their over-worked folks), undernourished (due to there being no time to cook
dinner in the evening)...
Give the kids a chance! Both parents working overtime 6 days a weekis not the route to
happy families, guys - If mum goes back to work, dad has go to go part time (at the very
14 of 26 2/2/11 4:56 PM
least)!"
i:
is that where the change, over time, and present mega differential in housing costs in
comparison to individual wages, comes in. [indeed someone posted a familial
anecdote/testimony about this on cif a few days ago... unfortunately cant remember who
or where but well/interestingly said to them anyhow]
i.
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taster
18 June 2007 2:33AM
Judging from the recent UNICEF report, where Britain is rightfully described as a
dog-eat-dog 'anglo-saxon' community in which children do not trust their families and
friends, the moment has surely come for the realization that classic British hypocricy
will not manage to side step glaring truths. Saying it like it is is step one. Step two is
finding out which interests this new barbarism serves? Warmongers more than likely. A
youth 'with the gleam of the beast of prey in its eyes' Hitler hoped. Legacy Blair? Voila!
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RogerINtheUSA
18 June 2007 5:57AM
Fandang American whites have roughly equivalent murder rates to Western Europeans.
American blacks (12% of the population) commit over half of all murders in the US.
Can we really ignore this, for example, in a comparison with Canada that is 1.9% black?
Now I'm not saying WHY this is but these are just facts. Of course we often discuss black
incarceration rates in the US and the like in other, more sympathetic, contexts, but the
same set of facts don't go away when we discuss things from a different angle.
Hi Fandang,
The UK has a simple approach to dealing with Black people - the police stop them, and
the British "justice" systems throws Black people in jail far out of proportion to their
percentage of the population .
The UK's own enforcers point out that 15 percent of the people in UK jails are Black,
whereas they are only 3 percent of the population. This may be a rounding up - other
sources put the percentage as slightly over 2.
The enforcers stop and search about 1/11 th of the Black population. The figure for
pure-blooded UK whites is one sixth of that.
http://www.cre.gov.uk/downloads/section95_cjs_statistics_0405.pdf
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richardkaz
18 June 2007 7:58AM
15 of 26 2/2/11 4:56 PM
Here in Australia, Kylie Minogue representing the market wants to sell "sexy" bras and
panties for "tweens" ( 8 - 12 yr olds). They are been sold as "fun" and "playful". Except
for an odd debate on TV, there has been no outcry about this outrageous plan.
As parents of an eight year old girl, my wife and I like to think we will continue with our
parenting ways to resist such rubbish the market dishes out. But we are getting tired of
this. What chance do we have to win every fight against the market? and why should we
have to fight the market by ourselves to protect our daughter? shouldn't the government
be helping us instead of siding with the market.
This is just an example of governments allowing the market go wild!
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brown2
18 June 2007 8:26AM
Corporate Pedophilia
That is the other name for McDonaldisastion. http://www.davesez.com/archives
/000364.php
The term 'Corporate Pedophilia ' was first coined in Australia to denounce ads that
exploit children's sexuality for commercial gain
http://sg.news.yahoo.com/061010/1/43ymt.html
But all US, or US-ipsired, corporations are attracted, and try to attract, children,
therefore engaging in Corporate Pedophilia
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Ishouldapologise
18 June 2007 9:48AM
You know you are right Jeremy, but most people seem to think that, as Thatcher said,
"There is no society." That it's all down to individual choice and morality. Well it isn't.
People are social animals.
If you have been mired, steeped,in capitalist ideology and breathe market populism with
every breath and you have your head stuffed full of Americana then perhaps it is not
possible for you to imagine another way of life.
Having lived in the former Soviet Union and visited Cuba with my family, I can say that
it is interesting what happens to people, not as a result of Communist propaganda, but
just as the result of an absence of the complete all out, no holds barred attack on
humanity and human values by a society geared to making products out of people, to
marketing values, advertising and consuming.
Imagine what would happen if there were no billboards, packaging and product
fetishism, no TV advertising, no radio advertising, no product placement, no spam etc...
The strange thing is. The value, real value of everyday objects slowly comes back into
focus. Jam is just jam. Good jam or bad jam.
An immense sense of freedom is born as people themselves become free to assign their
own value to everything that surrounds them without the brainwashing of marketeering
scum. In our society, everything comes with the spurious pre-assigned value that some
Machiavellian little shit has given it. Holidays, experiences, education. You name it.
Moreover, if people are helped to be more social and these values are stressed, as they
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are in many faith schools, then children and young people respond. They help each
other and make sacrifices for each other. They become more human and less
cannibalistic. . . . . But if you are up to your eyebrows in the implied culture of Market
Populism and you have never witnessed anything different, and have no imagination,
then you won't be able to see this. Then your little robot brain will only spew out the
rubbish it knows, to the general edification of all of us here on CIF.
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RogerINtheUSA
18 June 2007 9:53AM
Brown2 posted .....The term 'Corporate Pedophilia ' was first coined in Australia to
denounce ads that exploit children's sexuality for commercial gain
http://sg.news.yahoo.com/061010/1/43ymt.html
But all US, or US-ipsired, corporations are attracted, and try to attract, children,
therefore engaging in Corporate Pedophilia
Brilliant! the Guardianista mind at work. You denounce US advertising, and post a link
to Christian Dior.
I suppose the response would be that Christian Dior SA is US- inspired......
crétain
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Keynes
18 June 2007 9:56AM
In the sixties, unlike the twenties and thirties, governments were not carrying out
massacre by poverty to the extent of one every ten minutes!
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annetan42
18 June 2007 10:09AM
Tommy Dog 'I would suggest that the old school left have almost made it a point of pride
not to understand how businessmen think or the risks they face, other that to rail that it
is all about profit. That much is true; businesses will seek to control costs and seek a
satisfactory rate of return. Management will be fired if they don't'
As what I suppose you would call an old school left, I suggest that it is you who make it a
point of pride not to understand us. We recognise only too well the nature of capitalist
production. It was described by Marx and Engels in the Communist Manefesto 150 years
ago.
Consider this description of the working class in relation to capital:
'a class of labourers, who live only so long as they find work, and who find work only so
long as their labour increases capital'
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This is why capitalism has exported its productive forces to areas of the world where
labour is CHEAPER.
On Globalisation: 'The cheap prices of commodities...compels all nations, on pain of
extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce
what it calls civilisation into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves.'
Further we can now see that when this globalisation is complete and all workers globally
demand higher wages where will capitalism turn? This is already happening, workers in
Mexico are now demanding parity of wages with the US claiming (quite correctly) that
this move would stop the illegal immigration problem. Workers in China and even
Africa will eventually draw the same conclusions.
The increased role of women in the workforce was also predicted:
'the more modern industry becomes developed, the more is the labour of men
superseded by that of women. Differences of age and sex have no longer any distinctive
social validity for the working class. All are instruments of labour, more or less
expensive to use, according to their age and sex.'
The quote below can easily be applied to the rise of the supermarket giants and the
disappearance of local shops:
'The lower strata of the middle class - the small tradespeople, shopkeepers, and retired
tradesmen generally, the handicraftsmen and peasants - all these sink gradually into the
proletariat, partly because their diminutive capital does not suffice for the scale on
which Modern Industry is carried on, and is swamped in the competition with the large
capitalists, partly because their specialised skill is rendered worthless by new methods
of production'
In fact the present situation is just Marxist prediction taken to its logical and terrible
conclusion. The trends were described accurately. Of course Marx wasn't a prophet but
he did describe the capitalist system of his day so accurately that he was able to make
many accurate predictions based on the trends observable at the time.
Marxists understand business very well it has not changed in its essentials since his time
just got bigger and pervades our lives more completely.
In fact, the situation described by Marx has become even more true today as the article
above describes. In the Manifesto Marx and Engels said: '(capitalism) has converted the
physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage
labourers. The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has
reduced the family relation into a mere money relation.
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Gobstar
18 June 2007 10:23AM
I thought this was an excellent article.
What was disturbing however, was the misinterpretation and astounding depths of
ignorance shown by the majority of people posting responses.
Crawl back under your rocks, the world really doesn't need you.
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Mikalina
18 of 26 2/2/11 4:56 PM
18 June 2007 10:28AM

"In this new social order, there is only one thing worse than domination by the market,
and that is exclusion from it, since there is now no other source of knowing who we are."
This bit really got to me. I left the UK because I could see something really sick in my
classroom and couldn't put a name to it. On returning last year for a holiday, it was even
more apparent. I looked at the teenagers in my home town and saw everywhere a 'brand'
different groups had given themeselves in imitation of the commercial world and also, I
believe, in a way to survive - this is how we know who we are - we are a commodity, a
product.
I am working in education in rural china now and the kids here are absorbing this
concept at a frightening pace - bypassing any 'industrial period working class' model.
This article has explained what I knew instinctively but was unable to articulate.
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RogerINtheUSA
18 June 2007 10:33AM
Keynes Comment No. 644677
June 18 9:56
GBR In the sixties, unlike the twenties and thirties, governments were not carrying out
massacre by poverty to the extent of one every ten minutes!
Hi Keynes
But remember that at the beginning of the 60's, a single nation, through Socialism,
killed off between 20 and 30 million of its citizens in 3 years.
Certainly a great leap forward for leftist brilliance.
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north
18 June 2007 10:41AM
Questionnaire, I normally try to remain polite on this site but in your case I'll make an
exception. I may put forward views which you think are banal but I also happen to
notice things which, apparently slip your, oh so acute, attention. We have lived in a
consumer, market oriented society since at least the late 19th century. The ubiquity of
adverising is obvious from photographs and other illustrations of past periods yet
previous generations appeared to avoid the complete abdication of personal and familial
responsibility which is a common part of the social scene nowadays. Likewise, if you
care to look at societies in a broadly similar state of development to Britain, at the
present time,you will notice that they, also, avoid the worst behavioural excesses which
we suffer from. With few exceptions Western European societies have considerably
better indicators of mental and physical health and social adjustment for their young
people than we do. East Asian societies are much better, yet the last time I saw
photographs or film of Seoul or Tokyo's Ginza they appeared to be cosumerist paradises.
What is different about Britain is that we have had a history of some 60 odd years of
progressively removing behavioural and moral responsibility from people. Welfare
systems that have been exclusively about entitlement rather than shared citizenship and
responsibility. Education systems which have abandoned even the pretence of
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maintaining order and discipline inside schools. Police and judicial tructures that are
clearly failing. These things have happened not because of consumerism but because of
a widespread loss of nerve on the part of those who run these structures; plus a weird
view which equates lack of standards with democracy and equality and has led to the
present rather anarchic relativism which seems to have so much regard in certain
sectors of our society.
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sarka
18 June 2007 11:00AM
Fandang "So to blame the right I don't think is correct. The left is just as responsible but
in a different way, and the "profound contradiction" you speak of also exists equally
within the left. BOTH left and right try to combine liberalism with illiberalism."
Very well put. "Right" and "left" seem to be slogging it out over which is totally to blame
for the supposed awful degeneracy of modern youth (or society) but the debate, couched
in these terms, is unrealistic and empty.
Anyway, I'm not quite sure about the awful degeneracy. Drugs, family breakdown,
incivility, soaring(? really) rates of sexual disease, soaring (? really) rates of crime, cult
of celebrity bla bla... Lose the socialist history trappings of this article and Jeremy
sounds a tad like a Daily Mail columnist or mad mullah. All kinds of different problems,
or perhaps non-problems, are lumped together into a frightful vision...but honestly isn't
it all a bit cliche and overdone? At the risk of sounding Polyanna like, I know all kinds of
nice people - kids and parents - of different social classes and while most of them enjoy a
bit of "consumerism", and some have had family problems, and some have had minor
problems with the law, and some get drunk or stoned from time to time, they mostly
have all kinds of "worthy" interests and pursuits...It is notable that the critics of
"decline" and "consumerism" never seem to think of themselves as examples of same.
Jeremy makes some interesting points, but the whole article is overblown and turgid.
And what does "living by the rules of the market" mean? Break it down and it means too
many different things to be explanatory, e.g. 1. Be healthy, diligent, law-abiding, study,
so you can get a good job (response to job market conditions) 0r 2. Try to get rich quick
by illegal means...drug dealing, robbery (response to unofficial market conditions) 3. Act
uncivil, binge drink, do drugs, have multiple partners, get divorced (relationship to
market unclear here...something more to do with either a) being excluded from market
and socially deprived - so depressed and/or bloody-minded, or b) acting as if people
were commodities?? sort of "spirit of the market" thing...or c) acting because of bad role
models in market-driven press, media? or mediated through peer group pressure??, or
because of bad parenting, produced by market (women going out to work???) I am
beginning to struggle to get this clear. It's all so analytically clogged up...I would say we
need a lot more definition of terms like "consumerist" and "market" and less incantation
of same..
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zavaell
18 June 2007 11:23AM
20 of 26 2/2/11 4:56 PM
The basic premise of the article, that we have moved into a state of society that doesn't
have a useful name for us to recognise it by, is pretty sound. My belief is that we are still
in a state of transition, which is why the seeming rule by the market is more apparent.
Whilst the term globalisation is used to define the type of market, I do not believe that
young people have lost their sense of geographical place: the young can be quite
nationalistic and moods of anti-newcomer rhetoric must be acknowledged as an
indication of that. The crux that will determine which way society pans out in this rather
surreal post-modernist, shopping-mall-dominated world will hinge on how well the
'greening' education that does seem to be being given in our schools impinges on the
consciousness of this generation. A greater realisation of the totality of globalisation will
depend hugely on whether 'sense of place' can be tempered by an understanding of how
any individual's action in this country invariably impacts on poorer countries.
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dionysusreborn
18 June 2007 11:24AM
"Jeremy makes some interesting points, but the whole article is overblown and turgid.
And what does "living by the rules of the market" mean? Break it down and it means too
many different things to be explanatory, e.g"
I thought this too, markets vary and all operate under the rule of law. I would support
the amending of laws to reduce advertizing aimed at kids (as Scandinavian countries do)
but I don't think that markets are evil per se. Historically nations that operate market
systems of distribution have prospered especially when markets have been governed by
democratic institutions.
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dreamer06
18 June 2007 11:48AM
Again, an excellent article, Jeremy may be on the right track, but he imo, he hasn't taken
into account the changes that are about to happen in the welfare system, the Welfare
Reform will see even more more people including disabled people and single parents
pushed into even more poverty, blamed for their 'failures' and suffering increased levels
of stress with all the implications that has for alienation, anger, and dysfunction in
families. Oh, and as Notmephilips, Logos, (superb posts) and others note the corrosive
uber free market has no morality, why should people expect children who have grown
up in a time of ruthless turbo-capitalism to have any either. We are heading fast back to
the 19th C with its poverty, inequality, greed and kant, Todays children may be its future
cheerleaders. However, youth has the capacity to change and challenge the status quo as
as we saw in 2003 when tens of thousands of schoolkids self mobilised in many
imaginative ways against the Iraq war, so we shouldn't give up hope just yet.
North , well put arguments, but surely the place for such 'fogeyish' views in the
Telegraph
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vernington
18 June 2007 1:36PM
"A generation has grown, formed within, by and for the market rather than by and for
society. Many unpleasant developments over which the government seeks to reassert its
declining control - binge-drinking, the "normalisation" of drugs, the cult of celebrity, the
supremacy of what money can buy, incivility, absence of respect, obesity, the epidemic
of sexually transmitted diseases - are by-products of childhoods upon which a major
determinant has been a market whose values have been championed above dull politics,
and which have, accordingly, captivated the heart and imagination."
What does this mean? You seem to be blaming the existence of aids on the market,
How?. Not to mention obesity. Obesity is surely the consequence of a richer society;
once only the relatively wealthy could afford to eat so much, now everyone has that
opportunity - a success for the market I would say, although perhaps not desirable.
Drunkenness has always affected Europeans - no change there. The argument is sullied
by introducing all modern ills. You seem to be suggesting that alienation from society
and the tendency to justify so many things terms of their role within the market. I have
some sympathy with this view and suspect most readers do too, but this artical is more
pyrotechnics than substance. Even though it is much harder please use genuine analysis
rather than mere words to impress us readers. Words in this artical are like smoke and
mirrors; they distract us from the lack of real thought, such that we only get a general
feeling that market causes problems but no understanding of why - because the writer
has no understanding of why only a general sense that it is. The guardian is worth more
than this high flown rubbish. Please stop printing these articals.
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Fandang
18 June 2007 1:54PM
RogerINtheUSA
"The UK has a simple approach to dealing with Black people - the police stop them, and
the British "justice" systems throws Black people in jail far out of proportion to their
percentage of the population.
The UK's own enforcers point out that 15 percent of the people in UK jails are Black,
whereas they are only 3 percent of the population. This may be a rounding up - other
sources put the percentage as slightly over 2.
The enforcers stop and search about 1/11 th of the Black population. The figure for
pure-blooded UK whites is one sixth of that."
-
Your point? The picture you paint in terms of facts rather than spin would be consistent
with black people committing a lot more crime combined with the police doing their job
properly.
Notable also is that South Asians are UNDERrepresented in conviction and
incarceration figures in the UK. Are you maintaining that UK police are racist against
blacks while simultaneously being racist in favour of Asians? Sounds pretty far fetched
to me.
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80daysaroundtheworld
18 June 2007 2:01PM
tommydog Comment No. 644038 June 17 18:55 USA marksa. an interesting comment. I
would suggest that the old school left have almost made it a point of pride not to
understand how businessmen think or the risks they face, other that to rail that it is all
about profit. That much is true; businesses will seek to control costs and seek a
satisfactory rate of return. Management will be fired if they don't.
However, seldom is there recognition of just how much uncertainty businesses face in
trying to ascertain whether their endeavors will actually be successful, not to mention
the intense pressure investors can place on management. Business failure is more
common that many on the left would think. This refusal to understand manufacturing or
finance in general left them unable to anticipate moves. Refusal to even consider how
the other side thinks can leave you vulnerable.
The consumer or market economy has been around in an intense manner since the
1950s, going on 60 years now. I also certainly remember binge drinking, drugs were
everywhere, and the celebration of celebrity back in the late 60s and 70s. Is it really all
that different today?
-----------------------------------------------------
Tommydog, have to disagree.
In countries like Germany and Japan, they understand that it's not all about costs and
management/image consultancies, about about investing in quality relaible products
that people will buy, and creating brand loyalty in this way.
British Industry used to be no. 2 in the world after the US after the war, look where it is
today...British management and unions both focused too much time on their war of
attrition with each other, with management not investing enough in modernising
factories and in research, and with Unions concentrating on creating a socialist utopia.
Both were wrong, and as a result there isn't much UK manufacturing left in Uk hands.
Even ICI, a UK global paints leader, is today being bid for by a dutch company. British
run UK industry: RIP. Continental Europeans and Asians understand manufacting,
Anglo-saxon economies don't, ironic given that we invented it in the first place.
Other than that point, I broadly agree with the thrust of the article that the market and
the rising gap between rich and poor are warping the social bonds that used to tie us
together.
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questionnaire
18 June 2007 2:20PM
@Fandang:
"American whites have roughly equivalent murder rates to Western Europeans.
American blacks (12% of the population) commit over half of all murders in the US...Can
we really ignore this, for example, in a comparison with Canada that is 1.9% black?"
No, we can', but - and this answer's Wazpy's point, too - this can be answered very easily
by applying Robert Merton's celebrated analysis of the situation, 'strain theory'. In
essence it's very simple. Consumer fetishism affects us all to some degree. Most people
have deep desires for consumer objects because they carry with them marks of identity
23 of 26 2/2/11 4:56 PM
and social distinction. However, the opportunities to satisfy consumer desires vary
widely across society's class/race structure. Blacks have been at the bottom of the
structure in the USA and Britain for a long time, therefore their opportunities are fewer,
therefore more get involved in crime to earn money to obtain consumer products. US
Dept of Justice statistics show that over 90% of US murders are associated with some
form of property crime or drug distribution. At the same time, black families, as the New
Orleans disaster demonstrated, are living in parlous socio-economic conditions where it
is very difficult to keep families together, and where consumerism is driving the
generations apart, as I have already explained.
Then we have the factor of disproportionate police harrassment of blacks, and many
whites, such as Stephen Lawrence's murderers, getting away with their crimes.
Harping on about black crime without researching its causes is sometimes the product
of plain old-fashioned racism.
@North:
"Questionnaire, I normally try to remain polite on this site but in your case I'll make an
exception."
I didn't notice anything especially impolite about your post: at least not as impolite as
I'm about to be.
"I may put forward views which you think are banal but I also happen to notice things
which, apparently slip your, oh so acute, attention. We have lived in a consumer, market
oriented society since at least the late 19th century."
You don't know what you're talking about. If you read the history of consumerism - the
work of Veblen, Mckendrick, Brewer, Plumb, Britnell, Campbell and many others - you
will find that consumerism and 'conspicuous consumption' have been essential aspects
of capitalism since mercantile times, and its has developed in waves of diffusion as it has
spread from the elite outwards to the rest of society. These waves, in a process of
puctuated evolution, have been occurring since the early 18th century in Britain
"...yet previous generations appeared to avoid the complete abdication of personal and
familial responsibility which is a common part of the social scene nowadays."
Utter rubbish. Family life did not really settle down in the industrial continuum until the
late 19th century. Broken familes were the norm during the massive
industrialisation/urbanisation process 1750 - 1860, in which over 40% of urban
immigrants were young and single, and unable to find secure employment, and the
crime rate between 1780 and 1830 rose over 540%. Prostitution and alcoholism were
rife. I suggest you attend the new Hogarth exhibition for a picture of 'family' life in 'gin
alley' in 18th century London.
"East Asian societies are much better, yet the last time I saw photographs or film of
Seoul or Tokyo's Ginza they appeared to be cosumerist paradises."
I suggest you take a look behind sanitised media images and peruse the indicators of
increasing rates of of crime, debt, family breakdown, mental ill-health, homelessness
and so on. Even in China. The figures are rising slowly, as I have said, but these societies
are just in their first stages of consumerism and the pattern is obvious. Give them 50
years and they'll be like us.
"What is different about Britain is that we have had a history of some 60 odd years of
progressively removing behavioural and moral responsibility from people."
Yes, the 60 years of consumerism. Moral responsibility is declining because
consumerism is an infantilising way of life. Children - or 'adultescents' as the
sociologists call them - are not very good at taking on responsibility. Read Ben Barber's
book 'Consumed', like I suggested.
"Welfare systems that have been exclusively about entitlement rather than shared
citizenship and responsibility."
Rubbish. Canada and Western continental Europe have more generous welfare systems
yet lower crime rates and stronger family/community sructures. In Britain, the Welfare
24 of 26 2/2/11 4:56 PM
State from the National Insurance act in 1911 presided over continuously falling crime
and violence rates, which did not begin to rise until the late 1960s, and spiked up
alarmingly in the 1980s as Thatcher destroyed working-class communities and British
culture.
Education and criminal justice workers cannot deal with overgrown infants, that's
expecting too much. Consumer culture is the main problem.
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Keynes
18 June 2007 4:08PM
80daysaroundtheworld Comment No. 645327 June 18 14:01 ITA
What you are saying is that all Parties abandoned Keynesianism. The labouring classes
lost out.
No point in having the vote if no one bothers to work out how government works, as
Tom Paine said.
NB Neither Paine nor Keynes were against private enterprise!
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GodberVsMacKay
18 June 2007 9:03PM
I appear to have stumbled upon the Grauniad's very own Old Gits column. A curious
variant of the "Why-Oh-Why?" staple of the blue rinse, irritable bowel syndrome right
but this time from a quasi Marxist perspective and for the consumption of ageing, and
apparently no less irritable, soixanthuitarde lefties. Rather than the EU, ravers and
muesli-munching liberal do-gooders, though, the villains in this version appear to be
The Great Satan and its hell-spawn McDonalds, yuppies and, of course, Thatch.
But they both share the same essential theme: lambasting the wayward young'uns of
today with a wistful look back at the Good Old Days where folk could leave their door
unlocked and the commoners passed the time of day chatting merrily about whippets
(or, in this version, debating earnestly about the workers' struggle against cigar-
chomping capitalists) whilst waiting stoically in the bread line for their ration of
No-Name gruel. Still, mustn't grumble! Mustn't we?
Absolutely hilarious. What else can I say: I'm lovin' it.
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questionnaire
18 June 2007 9:36PM
Wazpy;
"Gin Lane was not an accurate depiction of Britain during that time period."
Any historian worth his salt knows that the British working class suffered some of the
worst poverty and insecurity in their history in the period 1780 - 1830.
25 of 26 2/2/11 4:56 PM
Do you want a reading list?

There were some improvements in the late 19th century after the recessions in the
1880s, but things did not improve to an acceptable level until after WW II. Again, any
serious history of the period will inform you. Hannington is very good on the 30s.
Ask yourself a question. Why do you know virtually nothing about the history of the
British working class?
GodberVsMackay:
"...ageing, and apparently no less irritable, soixanthuitarde lefties."
I think Frank Fisher, despite his dodgy politics, might be right. Glib little tossers with no
ideas and nothing to say would be just that little bit less likely to come on the board
throwing around insults if their real names were known.
You've probably got just enough bottle to say that in front of the Islington muesli-
knitters, but I would be 'lovin' it' if you came up North and said it in front of me and
some of the lads who stood alongside me during the Miner's Strike.
Really 'lovin' it'. Really 'lovin it'.
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Children of the market | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2007/jun/17/children...

guardian.co.uk, Sunday 17 June 2007 16.00 BST

So it has been with contemporary discussions on youth, its disaffection, misbehaviour

The "post-industrial" reality of contemporary Britain is not emancipated from industry,

It is a rare hypocrisy that promotes an unchanged politics, when politicians themselves

Comments in chronological order (Total 61

limits parental involvement and influence in the pursuit of money.

17 June 2007 9:43PM

18 June 2007 10:28AM

Do you want a reading list?

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