children of the market | comment is free | guardian.co.uk

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Children of the marketSeveral 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 The inner decay of democracy has been replaced by the daily plebiscite of the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.)

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 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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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

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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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 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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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 theprescribed 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


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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 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

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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Fandang18 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

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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 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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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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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


4 of 26 2/2/11 4:56



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


5 of 26 2/2/11 4:56



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!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'


7 of 26 2/2/11 4:56



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 hasreduced 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


8 of 26 2/2/11 4:56



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


9 of 26 2/2/11 4:56



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


0 of 26 2/2/11 4:56



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 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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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


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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


4 of 26 2/2/11 4:56



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

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.


5 of 26 2/2/11 4:56



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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