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 ofchildren 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 The inner decay of democracy has been replaced by the daily plebiscite of the market, in which people vote with their feet; a version of popular participation which contrasts with the apparently sterile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 sensibilityand 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 ofhome.) Ch il dr en of th e mar ke t | Co mmen t is fr ee | gu ar di an .co.uk ht tp: // www.gu ar di an.co .uk /c omme nt isf re e/2007 /j un /1 7/ ch ild ren ... 1 of 26 2/2/11 4:56 PM
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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 ploughedinto 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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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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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 profoundcontradiction 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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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
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"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 ratein 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 - "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 anunholy 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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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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Fandang18 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
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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
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!Recommend (0)
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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 asatisfactory 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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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 toomany 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
Children of the market | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2007/jun/17/child
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"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 analysisrather 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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Fandang18 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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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
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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 thecrime 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
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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 beThe 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