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This is a pre-production copy. The full reference for the published copy is:

Treadwell, J., Briggs, D., Winlow, S. and Hall, S. (2013) ‘Shopocalypse Now: Consumer culture and the English riots of 2011’, British Journal of Criminology, 53(1): 1-17

Introduction: The English riots and the retreat to safe ground

‘These are shopping riots, characterised by

their consumer choices: that’s the bit we’ve

never seen before’ (Williams, 2011: 8)

In August 2011, ‘riots’ erupted across England. They began in

London and quickly spread across England, becoming the most

destructive civil disorders since the 1980s. They cost the

British taxpayer something like £200 million (Greenwood, 2011)

and around 2500 shops were looted (Topping and Dawdon, 2011).

The trigger appears to have been the shooting of Mark Duggan,

an alleged criminal, by Metropolitan police officers. The

initial micro-political protest against this incident seemed

to precipitate further destructive outbursts in which the

protest was lost, or at least buried beneath the subjective

motivations of those who, as the forces of law and order

retreated, saw the opportunity to do some free shopping. In

this article we will claim that perhaps this rapid

transformation from micro-politics to aggravated shopping

should have been more predictable. Criminology can enhance its

2

ability to explain this important aspect of contemporary

social unrest by placing a little more centrally in its

theoretical canon those social theories that emphasise the

deleterious rather than the progressive and liberating

consequences of consumer culture (see Hallsworth, 2005;

Hayward and Yar, 2006; Hall et al, 2008; Hayward, 2012). Riots

are complex phenomena constituted by diverse participants and

motivations that underlie the violence, looting and

destruction that initially capture our attention. A good deal

of the diversity present in the recent English riots has been

revealed by initial empirical research (see James, 2011).

However, underneath these various motivations and their mid-

range context of social inequality and injustice, we will

argue that it is possible to detect a deeper context: a common

ideological background of neoliberal triumph. The dominance of

consumer symbolism and the absence of unifying politics, cast

against embedded forms of underemployment and worklessness,

have engendered a deep cynicism and inertia that – even though

individuals are always potentially capable of constructing and

acting upon diverse, knowledgeable and ethically-charged

critical interpretations of the world around them – are now

elementary features of contemporary popular culture (Winlow

and Hall, 2012).

Using data gathered from in-depth interviews with difficult-

to-access participants in the riots, which we will analyse by

means of the conceptual resources provided by the new combined

3

critical and cultural criminological theory now gaining

traction in the discipline (see Hayward, 2004; Hallsworth,

2005; McAuley, 2007; Hall et al, 2008; Moxon, 2011), we hope

to develop a reading of the riots that moves beyond the

conservative account of ‘sheer criminality’ and its focus on

faulty parenting and the failures of formal education. We

shall also seek to move beyond those accounts that position

the riots as a collective symbolic protest against social

injustice (see for instance Roberts, 2011; Jefferson, 2012).

Instead, we will frame the riots in a critical account of the

current conjuncture: a world beset by perpetual economic and

political crises as the certainties of modernity disappear

from view; a world in which the political elite seems

incapable of creating the ground for a future beyond

neoliberalism; a world of advanced resource depletion and

growing social unrest as capitalism approaches the objective

limit to its growth (Harvey, 2011; Gorz, 2011; Heinberg,

2011); and a world of individualism, envy and intense social

competition returning to dominate our cultural life as we have

allowed modernity’s politically-centred solidarity project to

be disintegrated by the forces of neoliberalism (Reiner, 2007;

Žižek, 2008; Hall et al, 2008).

Our assessment of the current conjuncture revolves around an

analysis of the evacuation of the political landscape, but we

also hope to offer a preliminary and very basic account of

late-capitalism’s marginalised, post-political Western

4

subject. We will claim that, with only the shallow pleasures

and distractions of consumer culture as compensations, today’s

marginalised subject is beset by the dismal prospect of

cultural irrelevance, driven to compete yet tormented by a

bleak dissatisfaction that cannot yet be discharged in ways

that might relieve a subjective sense of absence, existential

lack, disjuncture and drift (see Ferrell, 2012). In previous

eras, the marginalised subject was able to join and become

active in the broad left’s various yet closely allied and

symbolically efficient political collectives (see Wieviorka,

2009). Therefore, this subject was able to find collective

support as it tried to articulate and discharge such torment

and rage onto the real socioeconomic, ethical and political

causes of dissatisfaction. Symbolically efficient political

narratives provided the subject with the capacity to identify

in a comprehensible socioeconomic framework the real objects

and actual forces and processes that caused marginalisation

and subjective torment. Traditionally, such politics were

orientated towards universalism and solidarity in adversity as

the subject was encouraged to identify commonalities shared

with others subjected to the same pressures and difficulties

(ibid.; Reiner, 2007).

Now, however, in the post-political present, it seems almost

impossible for a potential collective of marginalised subjects

to construct a universal political narrative that makes causal

and contextual sense of their own shared suffering and offers

5

a feasible solution to it. No unifying and readily

communicable political symbolism is at hand to provide a means

of grasping the reality of common stresses and

dissatisfactions, or the enduring sense of precariousness and

lack which frames the marginalised subject’s sense of being-

in-the-world. Instead, subjects are forced to stew over the

bleak reality of their material conditions and their durable

but objectless sense of exploitation, irrelevance and anxiety

in isolation. Unable to divest themselves of torment and

nagging doubt, perpetually marginalised youth populations have

become moody and vaguely ‘pissed off’ without ever fully

understanding why. The end result, we will claim, is the

accumulation of deep-seated, inarticulate and destructive

dissatisfactions amongst subjects who feel trapped in

marginalised social spaces. Unable to either succeed as

individuals or address their situation as a collective,

destined only to fail while the mass media daily inflicts upon

them the symbolic violence of the magical success of consumer

capitalism’s winners, and unable properly to articulate and

communicate the causes and contexts of their dissatisfactions,

these young people had nowhere to take their anger and

resentment but the shops.

A few words on method and theory

The theoretical claims we make in this paper are not just

built deductively upon the notion of the absence of unifying

6

politics briefly outlined above, but also inductively upon

original ethnographic data. We headed out onto the streets to

see what we could find as soon as we heard the initial news

broadcasts about the riots. We spent a great deal of time over

the four-day duration of the riots observing stores being

looted and, when practicable, we spoke at length to those

involved. We were unable to hand out consent forms because, of

course, they would not have been signed, but, after seeking

verbal permission, we recorded some of our conversations using

the Blackberry ‘phone notes’ system. These conversations were

sometimes quite fleeting and, in some situations, phone

recording seemed inappropriate. Therefore, some of our

original data were recorded in research notes written shortly

after the interviews had been conducted. We spoke to over

thirty rioters in Birmingham and London. We also began to

track down others involved in the riots in order to talk at

more length, and slowly we developed a viable sample of young

men willing to talk honestly about their feelings and

motivations. We acknowledge the presence of an important

gender issue in these riots (see Topping et al, 2011), but,

using this snowball sampling method, we could not impose

specific sampling preferences on the initial interviewees on

whose tentative and fragile goodwill we were dependent. Thus,

we had to accept whoever they could recruit to the process.

Whenever possible, we arranged follow-up interviews which

allowed trust to grow as much as the rather fraught context

would allow, and sentiments to be revealed in more depth. In

this paper we include only the data taken from interviews with

7

rioters involved in disturbances in London and Birmingham, and

we supplement this with some notes from our initial

observations of the riots as they occurred in these places.

In many respects this research was framed and influenced by

our previous ethnographic work in areas of socioeconomic

marginality (Hall et al, 2005; Hall et al, 2008; Treadwell,

2011; Treadwell and Garland, 2012; Briggs, 2010, 2012; Winlow,

2001; Winlow and Hall, 2006). We have spent many hours in the

company of both committed and opportunistic criminals, and we

have developed close contacts and a degree of cultural

competence that allows us to converse with our respondents

honestly, in a way that probes underneath the retrospective

justifications and probable ‘techniques of neutralisation’

(Sykes and Matza, 1957) that continue to bedevil

criminological research. Our initial empirical findings seemed

to confirm subjective motivations that we had discovered in

previous studies of criminal life in former working-class

communities in contemporary England (Winlow, 2001; Hall et al,

2005; Hall et al, 2008). Our earlier ethnographic work, when

taken as a whole, is rich in findings that reveal quite

clearly the hollowing out of political subjectivity, the

virtual disappearance of traditional, localised non-

utilitarian aspects of working-class culture, the absorption

of libidinal drive and desire into the surrogate socio-

symbolic life of consumer culture and the rise of a

narcissistic, competitive and deeply insecure subjectivity

8

reflective of post-political capitalist realism (Fisher 2009;

Stiegler 2011).

This previous empirical work has also made us aware that

holding brief interviews with numerous individuals involved in

criminal activity and asking them to reveal motivations for

their actions is unlikely to result in genuine introspection

and self-analysis. Instead, direct questions like this tend to

yield either defensive justifications – possibly contaminated

by the political discourses and associated off-the-peg

explanations that were broadcast ceaselessly by the mass media

during the riots and their immediate aftermath – or answers

that reveal only the more superficial aspects of the complex

overall set of motivations. These narratives can be quite

interesting and revealing in themselves, but they should never

be considered as the basis for fundamental truths relating to

criminal motivations. Where possible, we spent sufficient time

with our interviewees to ensure that we entered a mutual space

that encouraged critical reflection and honesty. In this

respect, although further research might suggest otherwise, we

are not yet convinced by initial empirical accounts of

rioters’ motivations that centralise dissatisfaction with

unequal opportunities, the erosion of welfare or antagonism

towards police (see James, 2011; Younge, 2011; Roberts, 2011).

From our perspective, and in relation to the data we have

gathered so far in this and earlier studies, we cannot yet

assume that these justifications represent the core of the

9

rioters’ complex subjective motivations. Only further detailed

qualitative research can access this complexity, and even when

this is conducted in ways that explore all possible

motivational sources, appropriate grounded theory is still

required in order to contextualise that data and put it to

work explaining the world as it is.

Here we can present only the beginnings of such an in-depth

analysis of a specific aspect of the motivational complexity,

which requires further collaborative research and theoretical

challenges to orthodox assumptions, but we hope that there

will be enough substance to provide at least some initial

encouragement. Our empirical and theoretical orientation is

unequivocally orientated towards a new and revitalised

critical realism that advances beyond 20th century left realism

in terms of the depth of empirical data and theory, the

conceptualisation of harm and the firm contextualisation of

phenomena in the current conjuncture of late capitalism (Lea,

2002; Hallsworth and Brotherton, 2011; Hall, 2012a). We want

to offer an account of contemporary social life that ignores

early critical criminology’s injunction to focus primarily on

the crimes and aggressive labelling processes of the elite.

However, this is not, we must stress, by any means intended to

let the elite off the hook but to move towards an

understanding of the universal subjective motivations that

drive various actions throughout advanced capitalism’s social

structure. Initial formulations of these motivations can also

10

be applied to produce convincing explanations of the crimes of

the powerful (see Burdis and Tombs, 2012). What we want to

retain from critical theory, left realism and the traditional

ethnographic method are the intellectual means necessary to

represent contemporary criminal cultures, markets and

identities in a resolutely realistic way that portrays honestly

the post-industrial city and the harsh reality of social life

in our most marginalised neighbourhoods, all located in the

context of broader socioeconomic structures and cultural

processes (see Hall, 2012a). We acknowledge that the robust

theoretical claims we will develop in this paper are built

upon a small sample, but we present this data as a means of

indicating that there is enough initial validity to encourage

further empirical investigation and the construction of

alternative theories sensitive to the times in which we live.

In the section below we offer some preliminary data before

moving on to outline our core thesis.

Inarticulate voices of the post-political world shout out loud

‘This is what ‘back to basics’ was really about: the

unleashing of the barbarian who lurked beneath our

apparently civilised, bourgeois society, through the

satisfying of the barbarian’s ‘basic instincts’… On

British streets during the unrest, what we saw was not

men reduced to ‘beasts’, but the stripped-down form of

11

the ‘beast’ produced by capitalist ideology’. (Slavoj

Žižek, 2011)

London had already been through three days of disorder when

Birmingham city centre experienced its first night of large-

scale looting. The ‘riots’ in Birmingham had much in common

with other outbreaks in England’s major metropolitan areas.

However, our observations and interviews suggest that engaging

the police in street violence did not appear to be the primary

concern. Killa is 30 years old and his views and activities

exemplify this point quite clearly. He and his friends have

criminal records, mostly for drug dealing, and they are

regular police targets on the streets of north London. Despite

this, their primary concern during the riots was not to exact

revenge upon the police:

Killa: ‘So the man got stabbed [Mark Duggan, who was

in fact shot by metropolitan police officers] and some

of my Jamaican friends knew the guy back in the day,

so we went down Tottenham protesting. Right then we

heard some woman got hurt and that they was trashing

places and, when we heard that, we thought easy money,

quick money. The man who was stabbed was an excuse. It

was there [the opportunity], we need money, we are

going to rob and steal. It wasn’t like I was trying to

get back at society, I was taking what I could’.

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G: ‘Swat is like, bruv. Get me? Opportunities come and

you can’t let them go, know what I’m saying?’

Ten friends of Killa and G split up in two vehicles and went

on a two-day sweep of Tottenham and East Ham, raiding Argos,

Curry’s, and various phone, computer and jewellery shops.

A younger group of interviewees make a similar point. Will is

20 and – together with his friends Craig, 17, and Steve, 15 –

comes from a deprived estate in East London.

Will: So people heard that there was rioting in

Tottenham, yeah? After that, everyone just started

rioting [brings himself forward on the sofa]. Right,

basically people started overhearing the rioting and

we were trying to get the government back in any sort

of way for the killing [of Mark Duggan] because there

was no reason for it and everyone just thought to join

in and take advantage of it.

Interviewer: Yeah?

Will: We have to pay for everything every day, this

happens every day. Payback.

13

Interviewer: Payback against what?

Will: Killing, police, getting the government back in

any sort of way… sort of.

Yet later in the interview, after offering flimsy accounts of

their action against the police, they acknowledge that money

and consumerism were the primary motivations, and suggest that

they made £20,000 between them during the looting.

Interviewer: OK, I am going to challenge you now. You

say it is about the police but you can’t ignore how

much you looted.

Steve: It’s just that guy [Will]. Some people use it

as an excuse. Like dese days, people haven’t got as

much money as they had. I done it because I needed

money. Like, it’s hard to explain. People wanted to

get back at the police, but at the same time get some

bits.

Craig: Money for me was the main reason.

Steve: Like people was using the police as an excuse

because no one wants to admit ‘yeah I am a bit poor’

or ‘I need a bit of money because I am poor’ but they

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do make an excuse that just because that boy died.

When I saw everyone do it, I thought ‘why can’t I do

that?’ I felt a bit jealous. It was like everyone was

out there getting that money and I was sitting

indoors.

Craig: Same here.

Interviewer: But why do you think you need to be part

of it?

Steve: Because I am sitting at home and people are

walking out with big TVs…

Craig: … Clothes…

Steve: £300 pair of jeans and I am thinking ‘hold on a

minute, I am here but I need to get in there’ to be

honest.

The ubiquity of the consumerist motivation is revealed by the

fact that after selling the goods they had stolen, they

returned with the proceeds to the very stores they had looted

to buy legitimate goods. Another of our interviewees, Shaggy,

a 27-year-old Law student ‘from the ends’, with a particular

penchant for ‘Gucci, Fendi and Louis Vuitton’, stole two top-

of-the-range AppleMac laptops from PC World and sold them for

15

£800. He quickly spent the money on his favourite designer

labels, buying a Vuitton Speedy 65 bag for his girlfriend who

is ‘well into dat shit, boy’. Freddie is 20, has a criminal record and

is ‘into’ expensive, limited edition ‘sports clothes’. Despite

initially offering the standard critique of the police, this

was certainly not his primary motivation:

Freddie: Fuck the police, I am going to get what I

can. We arranged to steal stuff. We didn’t just go out

and see what we could get, we got together to discuss

it and which vehicle we would use… we decided on a

Corsa and a White van. It was organised bruv. We

thought by stealing from the shops we’d be getting

back at the police. We did Argos when we found out it

was being raided, then Wood Green JDs [a sports chain

in North London] and then East Ham Foot Locker

[another sports chain in East London]. We sold some

but kept a lot of it ourselves. I had about £1500 in

trainers, but we had electrical stuff, tracksuits,

hats, the lot.

Interviewer: How much did you steal, like what was it

worth do you think?

Freddie: When I worked it out, £7,000.

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All respondents offered similar accounts. Amongst our

interviewees there is a remarkable degree of agreement on this

issue: the riots were about looting, and represented an

opportunity to advance the consumer and financial interests of

the self. However, we suggest that this orientation to

consumerism represented not simply a primary motivation

amongst the others that no doubt exist but a contextual

totality, and, as such, a default position. Despite everything

else – the relative poverty, the unemployment, the injustice,

the austerity, the closure of youth clubs and so on – they

wanted to grab something for free, and felt unable to let this

historic opportunity pass. These consumer drives dominated the

rioters’ reality because nothing else existed – neither a

transcendental ideal, nor a politicised dialectical struggle,

nor resentment against state authority – that might win their

hearts. The brief yet total breakdown of law and order could

lead to nothing more substantial than an armful of consumer

items that could be sold for less than their value or retained

in order to bolster the ornamental identity of the self. The

background dissatisfactions of life on the margins, and the

enduring sense that a better life was being lived by others

somewhere out there, could not be articulated because the causes

of these dissatisfactions could not be adequately objectified,

symbolised and politicised; the symbolism of politics has been

entirely replaced by the symbolism of consumer objects and

individual status.

17

For our interviewees, the initial trigger for the riots was

unimportant. They won no victory from their nights of historic

rioting and transgressing the laws of the capitalist state,

just a handful of souvenirs, a fetishized ‘extreme experience’

to reside in the memory and some cash to fuel further consumer

spending. The need for anonymity meant that even temporary

fame or infamy were not primary motivations. Consider for

example the words of Marcus and Ricky, recorded amid the

tumult of the riot in Birmingham, together with a sample taken

from our observational notes:

A youth clad all in black, his hood up and face masked

by a bandanna, and, carrying a concrete street brick

in his hand, turns to the crowd. The police occupy the

far end of the street. His mate encourages him: ‘come

on, throw it at them [the police]’, he looks at him

and then retorts: ‘Fuck off. I’m gonna need this to

put through a window. I didn’t come here for a

protest; I come here for garms [clothes] man’ (From

Birmingham fieldnotes)

Marcus: ‘I missed out yesterday, but it was a proper

earner. I ain’t going home today until I am sorted. I

can get a good wage here and sort myself for the week

man, maybe a month even. Fuck it, I’m on it’.

18

Ricky: ‘Have we done Black’s yet? I fucking wanna get

some stuff there man, like a North Face or Berghaus…

I’m fucking loving this man... It’s a good day for

shopping’.

In Birmingham there were two notable events not replicated in

other areas: shots were fired from a handgun at police, and

three Asian storekeepers were run over by a car and killed.

However, these incidents aside, the riots appeared to be

charged with the abandon and excitement of the carnival, yet

paradoxically tainted by the stain of nihilism and submission.

Young men and women broke into stores and seemed at once both

joyful and aggressively dissatisfied. With the police

temporarily caught short, the brief breakdown of order carved

out a lawless space in which the rioters could have acted act

out their darkest or indeed their most deeply political

impulses; yet, for most of those involved, the limits of their

desires extended no further than the accumulation of consumer

culture’s symbolic objects. These were consumer riots that

contained no clear oppositional substance and appeared to

endorse today’s pervasive consumer-capitalist ideology in the

most brazen terms. According to Bauman (2011), the rioters

signalled the return of flawed and disqualified consumers

indoctrinated by an ideological account of social value and

cultural relevance, but this account ignores the grim, focused

and often successful resolution not to appear flawed and

disqualified (Hall et al, 2008; Smart, 2010). To these

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interviewees, discarded and left to rot on marginalised

housing estates, unable legitimately to acquire the lifestyle

symbolism validated by consumer culture yet subject to a

ceaseless message that demands allegiance, all values reflect

the power of money. Consumerism, indulgence and excess are the

markers of a good and successful life, and failure to be

actively and continually involved in this symbolic realm

reflects cultural irrelevance and an absence of life. This

means of achieving an identity is so precious yet so

precarious that the subjects themselves have decided that

failure cannot be tolerated.

Committed but resource-poor consumers

The riot could go no further because there was no progressive

political narrative to carry it further. The subjective anger

of each individual involved could not coalesce into a

collective sense of dissatisfaction that might drive a

productive political intervention. No demands were issued, no

articulate account of dissatisfaction was offered and no image

of a better and more just world could be created. Instead,

base pragmatism and instrumentalism worked in the service of

the dominant ideology. However, our previous research has

shown that the subjects of consumer culture do not always show

such an intense enthusiasm for consumerism (Hall et al, 2008).

Most of the time, they show a lazy and disinterested

attachment to consumerism’s symbolic world. Their consumerism

20

functions simply as a means of addressing an issue that cannot

be accounted for in any other way. In its engagement with the

constant battle for social distinction, the marginalised

subject holds on to consumerism’s promise to assuage the

nagging sense of doubt and lack that characterise postmodern

subjectivity (Žižek 2000; 2008). Despite setback after

setback, consumerism’s attractions continue to draw the

attention of the marginalised subject because there is an

almost total absence of an alternative culture with anything

like the same allure that might reanimate political being and

recruit it to the cause of social justice. Consumerism’s

promise to elevate the subject above the everyday social world

and compel others to look on in envy at the symbolic success

of the self is rendered all the more attractive as its vivid,

transformative ideal stands out against the grey background of

marginalisation. This marginalisation could well be permanent

in a socioeconomic system whose core logic and current

trajectory will never again be able to provide full and

guaranteed participation for the growing numbers who are

losing out in the unrelenting struggle of competitive

individuals.

That this underlying disinterestedness punctuated by brief

bouts of excessive pleasure seeking or ‘binging’ is indeed a

consumerist norm (Winlow and Hall, 2006; Hall et al, 2008)

suggests that it would be wholly inappropriate to posit the

riots as an example of ‘transgression’. Postmodernity’s

21

current cultural prohibition slapped on naming and shaming the

system – even the recent revelations of systemic manipulation

of interest rates in the financial industry and up to $32

trillion hidden away in tax havens (Tax Justice Network, 2012)

have not yet provoked articulate mass protest – makes it

appear that only one door is open, and, as we delegate

politics to an increasingly professionalised political class,

the majority tend to follow consumer culture’s injunction to

dedicate their lives to personal pleasures and ‘new

experiences’. However, this removes the possibility of

experiencing real enjoyment (Žižek 2000; 2008). A Symbolic Law

forbidding gratification at least retains the possibility of

enjoyment through transgression, but a ‘permissive’ culture in

which pleasure is compulsory, and in which the laws of

transgression are decreed by the same authority that decrees

the laws of conformity, quickly becomes a culture deprived of

genuine transgressive delight; we cannot enjoy that which we

are ordered to enjoy. Instead, ‘enjoyment’ takes the form of

the ‘sensation’, a distracting burst of sensuous pleasure with

a brief symbolic life, a ‘hit’ of hyper-reality. Surrounded by

gadgets, games and lifestyle accoutrements as we

fetishistically update our social media profiles, we become

bored, disinterested and rather wan, compelled to play the

hedonistic game contest of indulgence but not really taking

satisfaction from the experiences it provides. Hence, making

life ‘live up to something’ becomes futile (Berlant, 2011)

whilst the opportunity to indulge in an excessive bout of

consumption way beyond the everyday norm is the only thing

22

that temporarily stirs the blood, as the field notes from our

observational study in Birmingham suggest:

‘As I stand outside a pub a young man in a bobble hat

strides past swigging from a bottle of wine stolen

from the Tesco store across the road. He smiles at me

and nods, before asking me for a cigarette. I offer

him one and we chat: “Where you from mate? Got

anything good yet?” I tell him I haven’t. He looks at

me in disbelief and tells me, “you’d better get a

shift on son, it’s not like any other day today is it…

not just some normal, routine shit day, same-old-same

old. I mean its mental innit, it’s just crazy, you can

come out, get what you can, it’s like everyone is on

one, it’s just like a party today, you got to join

in!” (From Birmingham Field Notes)

The looting of designer stores and the like is not simply the

triumph of consumerism over the subject and its libidinal

energy. This triumph itself is dependent upon a surrounding

negativity, a social vacuum: the entire absence of anything

else that could possibly win our hearts with the same

intensity of desire. At the core of a system that is now so

obviously run by global financial-corporate elites aided and

abetted by supine politicians, the death of real democratic

politics has carved out a terrifying Lacanian void, the end of

23

history and the subject’s active role in it. ‘There is no

alternative’, ‘this is the only game in town’, ‘this as good

as it gets’ and other associated clichés are the linguistic

assassins that intrude the spirit to suffocate its political

core. However, as belief in post-political socioeconomic

micro-management disintegrates, the libidinal drives of all

but a tiny politically-aware minority are energised and

orientated towards consumer culture as the only substitute

(Stiegler, 2011). This is the sole way the subject can imagine

itself as still being alive as it stares down the dark abyss

of total pessimism; no past, no future, no narrative, no

representation, the rapidly disappearing illusion of the

efficacy of post-political bureaucracies, the lack of

everything that has been labelled dangerous and rendered

obsolete by post-political culture (Hall, 2012a). The primary

politico-subjective drive is not an anti-authoritarian urge to

transgress, but the opposite, the need to solicit some sort of

comprehensible symbolic order to stave off the terror of total

negativity and first construct the self as a subject (ibid;

Hall, 2012b; Johnston, 2008). Reece, one of our interviewees

from Birmingham, describes his motivations:

‘Look man [I went because] I don’t want to be the one

that misses out while every fucker else is on it. What

am I going to do man, sit in my house and smoke while

this goes off? I ain’t got no real grievances or shit;

I don’t buy this conspiracy shit and all the

24

government’s fault thing. It wasn’t to bring down the

fucking government or reclaim the streets or some shit

like them people sat in tents and that [here he is

referring to the Occupy movement]. I went to get me

some of what I’ve seen others getting, because if I

didn’t, man, what would that make me? What else can

you do?’

Our previous ethnographic work with committed and

opportunistic criminals has highlighted the centrality of

consumerist motivations in the establishment and reproduction

of criminal lifestyles, cultures and identities (Hall et al,

2008). As the riots temporarily suspended the operation of

normative cultural insulation and external control systems,

they furnished depoliticised young people with an opportunity

for the concentrated acting out of these drives, giving free

play to the underlying grab-what-you-can ethic that pervades

Western consumer societies. The everyday slow-motion routines

of criminal life on marginalised estates were dramatically

accelerated, temporarily incorporating a wider constituency

into its slipstream:

Interviewer: so what have you lads heard then? Where

you heading?

25

One lad in the group has hidden his face behind a

black scarf and wears a black hooded top and gloves

says. He says: ‘I’ve heard its going off down

Corporation Street now so we are going to go and have

a go at the Rolex place on New Street man, get some

fucking Rolex, get some fucking Cartier (laughs)… I am

here cos I’m a criminal man, fucking, that is what I

do. I ain’t gonna lie to you. We’re not here to fuck

about, are we boys? We want to get some decent

designer gear and make some money’.

We reap what we sow; post-politics and marginality

The rise of neoliberal political economy and the cultural

discourse of liberal-postmodernism, which work closely

together, have separated individuals and communities from

their shared history, ushering us all into a post-political

present that mocks political commitment and erodes traditional

anti-utilitarian aspects of culture. For our interviewees, the

social does not exist as such (ibid.). They immediately assume

that all are out for themselves as they occupy an entirely

unsympathetic and perversely meritocratic dog-eat-dog world.

Our interviewees did not begrudge the super-rich their

success. They expressed no disgust at the indulgent lifestyles

of celebrities or banking elites, and no outrage at

neoliberalism’s great socioeconomic and political failures and

injustices. All of these things simply confirm what they

already know: the world is a lonely place in which only the

26

self can be relied upon, and the only way to relieve forms of

subjective torment and lack is to join the exploiter class and

enrich the self as quickly as possible. All forms of

community, responsibility and obligation are a hindrance

placed upon the interests of the self. All politicians are

corrupt cynics, and the ideal of social justice is absent from

popular discourse. The majority of the people we interviewed

had never heard of Mark Duggan, the man whose violent death

precipitated the riots, but they certainly knew about Prada

and Rolex:

Ty: ‘The only people round me with cars and money,

they’re dealers. Look at the cars on their drives,

man, and it fucking shows crime pays, man. Now I am

gonna have me some of this’.

Jase: ‘I have had jobs, worked in construction

clearing 300 pound a week, man, then all that dried

up, fucking I got laid off, what can I do, man? I’m

not working for shit money. I’m not doing 60 hours a

week in a supermarket to earn less. Fuck that, why

should I? I am here to get me some decent gear. That’s

it, basically’.

Karl: ‘I am 23, never had no job, been in care, in

Brinsford, Glenn Parva. I got fuck all to lose man,

fucking Babylon [police] can't do shit anyway, fuck

27

them. We run this town now, not them pricks man, I am

gonna take as much as I can get. I want to get watches

man, I want me a fucking Rolex’.

In these marginalised spaces crime is now an instrument for

achieving imaginary positions of social distinction and

respect. As the self seeks recognition in the social mirror,

crucial importance is attributed to the symbolism carried by

consumer objects. An ostensible lack of designer jackets,

trainers, wristwatches, electronic gadgets and cars – in some

cases combined with the failure to acquire these symbolic

goods by deploying the robust methods of intimidation and

looting once normalised in hyper-masculine cultures (see

Winlow, 2001) – would ensure erasure from the social map.

Conversely, displaying the latest designer labels validated by

the local culture ensured a degree of respect and went some

way to distinguishing the self as a ‘man to be reckoned with’

(McAuley, 2007; Pitts, 2008; Hayward, 2004). However, the

active participation of a significant number of women in the

riots (Topping et al, 2011) suggests that we must look beyond

the notion that this form of violent unrest is simply another

expression of ‘doing masculinity’. Dexter comments directly on

what he sees as the misdirection of some of the accounts

initially offered by non-conservative academics and

politicians, homing in on both social reality and the true

objects of libidinal drives:

28

Dexter: ‘What is all this shit about protests that is

being talked? The riots weren't fucking protests, but

these pricks like your fucking politicians, and your

university people and that, they talk such shite!’

Interviewer: thanks…

Dexter: ‘Oh, not you, but you are not like them you

know, you get it. All these people though, honestly

giving their opinions, they haven't got a clue.

Fucking protests, what, the riots? Like the lads from

round here are gonna bother going up town for a

protest! It was for 10 pairs of free Adidas. It’s a

fucking joke, anyone can see it’s fucking fantasy.’

Dexter: ‘IF (adds emphasis) they are caught, they are

hardly going to say, “I am doing alright, but I just

thought fuck it, I will go for it, get as much sweet

stuff as I can”. No, they are going to say anything

they can to get people on side, it’s like “oh poor me,

these are all the reasons I did it. It’s cos you took

my EMA [education maintenance allowance, a recently

withdrawn UK welfare payment offered to young people

in full-time education or training] away. It’s the

police, it’s the government”. The truth is though

that’s just shit. They saw a chance to get some nice

gear. That's why I went out… I heard this one lad on

telly, the prick was saying “it was a protest against

29

the government” in a police interview after he had

been lifted. What a dick, why would you say that? You

are not going to get it any easier saying that sort of

shit once you have been lifted are you? He should have

gone “no comment” (Laughs)… Look, Birmingham has poor

kids; it’s got lots of kids who aren’t poor as well

and some of them were looting. I made about a grand

from all the stuff I got, I was hiding things, phones

mainly, in the bags then in a little place I got, then

later I'd go back and pick them up. It was just easy,

everyone was on it. Everyone I know was there, on it.

It was just like a party man, really for two nights

the city was ours, you get me. And I got me some nice

stuff out of it. We just took decent gear, i-phones,

Pandora bracelets, trainers. That is why we done it.’

What we gleaned from the in-depth interviews is the growing

suspicion that early empirical accounts are falling some way

short of penetrating down to what seems to be a deeper level

of attitudes, beliefs, motivations and material realities

associated with marginalised populations. It would take a good

deal of further research and theorisation, but, at the moment,

a good deal of the data from these interviews, and past work

done amongst marginalised populations, suggests that its worth

investigating the possibility that many of the explanations

currently on offer are being are being constructed in close

connection with today’s truncated post-political ideologies or

30

bureaucratic solutions. The case of Dexter provides more

evidence. He comes from a poor estate and has a problematic

family history and a long police record for relatively minor

offences. Yet, despite neoliberalism’s reallocation of money

from the poorest to the richest (Wolff, 2010; Harvey, 2011) he

is not driven by the injustice of his relative poverty or his

position in the social hierarchy. What our research has shown

over the years, confirmed again here, is that current forms of

criminality and social unrest, although without doubt embedded

in neoliberalism’s marginalising processes, are not ‘caused’

simply by relative poverty and the welling up of sentiments of

social injustice. Members of the working class lived with

relative poverty and struggled collectively against social

injustice throughout the era of high industrial capitalism

(White, 1986), during which time crime rates decreased quite

markedly (Lea, 2002; Reiner, 2007) whilst the conditions and

quality of their lives increased as a direct result of that

struggle, a solidarity project that ensued in an era of

continuing economic growth, rising productivity and rising

wages. The extreme objectless anxiety, cynicism and loss of

faith that has afflicted the new ‘precariat’ (see Standing,

2011) from the 1980s onwards were the products of a

socioeconomic milieu in which atomised, depoliticised

individuals and proliferating cultural ‘identity groups’ were

set against each other in a social competition, a reconfigured

‘meritocracy’ ranked not by general industrial productivity

but by the individual’s functional use to the task of adding

symbolic value to products in specific markets as they waxed

31

and waned in advanced capitalism’s unstable consumer economy.

In this competitive, atomised climate, the hope of

politically-centred solidarity disintegrated. The very likely

probability of a futile existence for the losers became the

norm, trapping them without unifying political symbolism and

representation in the inertia of an interminable and unstable

present permanently disconnected from the past and the future.

A world of permanent underemployment and economic insecurity

now must be confronted in the absence of explanatory and

unifying political symbolism, whose potential revival is

actively discouraged by both conservatism and the liberal-

postmodernist faction of the left (Žižek, 2000). In contrast,

to these socioeconomic losers consumerism seems to suffer from

none of this vacuity and treachery, and, even though it is a greater

illusion, it succeeds in its task of providing communicable

social meanings and identities. As Bauman (2011: n.p)

suggests:

‘From cradle to coffin we are trained and

drilled to treat shops as pharmacies filled

with drugs to cure or at least mitigate all

illnesses and afflictions of our lives and

lives in common. Shops and shopping acquire

thereby a fully and truly eschatological

dimension. Supermarkets, as George Ritzer

famously put it, are our temples; and so, I

may add, the shopping lists are our

32

breviaries, while strolls along the shopping

malls become our pilgrimages. Buying on

impulse and getting rid of possessions no

longer sufficiently attractive in order to put

more attractive ones in their place are our

most enthusing emotions. The fullness of

consumer enjoyment means fullness of life. I

shop, therefore I am.’

Of course, it would be naïve to suggest that looting and theft

were ‘new’ features of urban disorder. Looting has long been a

feature of riots and civil disturbance. However, the words of

our interviewees on the streets would seem to underscore the

point made by Moxon (2011: 1):

‘[T]he ‘riots’ that occurred in England during the

early part of August 2011 can only be properly

comprehended if they are located in the context of a

society that is becoming increasingly consumerist in

its orientation. Ultimately, rather than signalling

any breakdown of society or any pathology on the part

of the rioters, the events of August actually

represented conformity to the underlying values of

consumer culture, and showed how far the diktats of

that culture have been internalised by the

participants.’

33

Indeed, neither in the immediacy of the riots nor on the

subsequent day did we encounter much discussion of the riots

as a political or ethical protest. Such explanations were

virtually absent in our interviews, a point neatly captured in

the following exchange:

I stand talking to Frankie outside the local off

licence. Just like on the day of the riots he has a

can of strong lager in one hand, a spliff in the

other, but now he has on a new T-shirt, trainers and

wrist watch. He is still dreaming of the next big

score, or being rich and successful. The riots are now

fading into memory, just a few nights of distraction

and excitement against the general monotony of life in

the post-industrial city. He has been watching the

commentary on the riots and is keen to give me his

take: ‘all these commentators are saying “it’s about

this and that”, fucking big ‘I know’ cunts that don’t

know fuck all mate, they are lapping up the shit they

are being told now the lads involved are saying, “I've

lost me EMA, I am on my arse, it’s the government,

it’s the police, it’s this, it’s that…”.

Interviewer: and what about you mate, what do you

think the riots are about?

34

‘It's none of that shit. Basically, most people think

like me. I want good gear, but I don't want some shit

job, I don't want some fucking training course. I

don't wanna work for some prick. I want to get up when

I want, have a smoke, have a few tots [drinks] and do

fuck all, I don't know man, all this shit about the

causes that gets talked, it’s all bollocks isn't it?

When it comes to the riots most people were there like

me, cos the wanted some free shit and have a bit of a

laugh.’

Time and again we confronted similar evidence, and during our

interviews we had only to look beneath the surface to see that

for the most part, notions of protest or proto-political

rebellion were far-fetched. We would contend that those with

genuine knowledge of such communities will agree that a

significant proportion of England’s youth are are losing faith

in the future imposed upon us by neoliberal capitalism, its

global financial institutions and its post-political social

management systems of left or right. Yet, neither do they see

a political alternative. As the system reaches the objective

limit to the growth required to trigger the central and

commercial bank lending that generates and multiplies the

broad money supply, long term unemployment, underemployment

and their accompanying sense of hopelessness look likely to be

permanent conditions of existence. Seeing potential

compensation only in the highly differentiated availability of

35

consumer symbols, individuals now look to themselves for

solutions to their unrelenting problems.

Conclusions

It is our claim that the on-going debate about the

continuities and specificities of last summer’s riots has thus

far omitted the crucial insights provided by a critical

analysis of consumer culture and subjectivity. Despite the

excesses of the banking industry, the apparent reluctance of

the political class to regulate the elite and represent the

interests of the marginalised, and the injustices exacerbated

or caused by austerity measures imposed on Britain by the

Coalition Government, our data suggest a conclusion that is in

the current political climate pessimistic. Very little outrage

seemed to be articulated and aimed at contemporary Britain’s

widening social inequality and injustice, or the systematic

degradation of democracy and the anti-social behaviour of our

economic elites. Instead, the rioters appeared not to oppose

but to be animated by the ruling ideology: grab what you can,

look out for ‘number one’ and transform the self into a winner

in advanced capitalism’s interminable competition over the

ability to acquire and display symbolically-charged consumer

goods. In keeping with the times, the rioters were energetic

pragmatists and opportunists rather than idealists, and

possessed no discernible political orientation.

36

The individuals to whom we spoke were, by their own admission,

not rioting for the ‘right to work’ in any of the advanced

capitalist economy’s available sectors. Nor did what they say

indicate that they regarded themselves as Bauman’s (2004)

‘flawed consumers’, disenfranchised by the consumerist society

into which they see no legitimate route. On the contrary, they

seemed to regard themselves as an integral part of it. Despite

their obvious economic marginalisation, they remain

incorporated into the competitive individualist culture that

is the system’s core energy source, and accepting of its

corruption, its post-political inertia and its pragmatic

realism, all of which fosters resignation to the edict that no

alternative way of life is possible. They have not been simply

‘excluded from society’, but deeply incorporated into consumer

culture’s imaginary social hierarchy whilst at the same time

discarded by advanced capitalism’s global economic system and

shorn of unifying political symbolism and the type of grounded

political representation that understands their lifeworld,

advocates on their behalf and might inspire them and provide

the confidence required for effective, large-scale political

protest.

However, in the absence of explanatory political discourses

sourced in their own lifeworld and located in the current

socioeconomic structure, recognising the self as economically

discarded in a competitive individualist culture will produce

no ethico-political response, because it is not seen as unfair

37

but, as previous research has indicated (Hall et al, 2008), a

temporary setback for the self in a permanent struggle with

others. The daunting reality we must confront is that this

former class in itself, once potentially also a class for itself, has,

languishing under the dominant forces of mass-mediated

consumer culture and post-politics, disintegrated into an

atomised and alienated milieu of competitive individuals.

Marginalised young people now live in the absence of the

unifying political symbolism that represents a coherent

alternative ideology, a situation reproduced by the cultural

politics of neoliberalism, liberal-postmodernism and

professional centrist politicians. Should such a situation

persist, it will ensure that the atomised remnants of this

former class are unlikely to once again recognise the

structural, objective source of their disenfranchisement,

unlikely to readopt a unifying and militant ethico-political

project forged in the recognition of their own interests and

the objective sources of their oppression, and unlikely to

dream again of taking their destiny into their own political

hands. Thus, when these young people struggle against

consumer-constructed images of each other in a political

vacuum, they realise that they will always fall far short of

the spending power required to live the lifestyle that they

are constantly told they want and feel they must have; this

generates permanent, corrosive and objectless dissatisfaction.

The real lesson for these young people, drawn from their own

experiences, is that, lacking cultural and symbolic capital as

they struggle to find a place in advanced capitalism’s

38

competitive socioeconomic relations, the majority of them are

very likely to be losers and remain so for the rest of their

lives. Thus the condition of ‘precarity’ that mocks the good

life is more real and palpable than ever in the contemporary

moment (Berlant, 2011; Standing, 2011). Our interviewees knew

this all too well.

With that in mind it is difficult to conclude, even in the

midst of an international statistical ‘crime decline’ (see

Knepper, 2012), that the paroxysm of unrest that characterised

one week in August 2011 will be an isolated incident. In the

absence of a unifying political symbolic order based on a

comprehensible alternative ideology and a feasible means of

reorganising the socioeconomic system in a just manner, the

surfeit of anger and dissatisfaction that erupted during the

riots cannot be harnessed to drive forward a revival of

politicised youth culture. All the localised injustices that

culminated in the shooting of Mark Duggan, the myriad

structural and personal inequalities that lead others like him

to live lives of isolated criminality in economically

marginalised and socially disintegrated spaces, and the

diverse reasons why young people took part in the riots and

were allowed to go as far as they did, are important and

deserve our full attention. However, until criminology, and

social science in general, make an effort to incorporate more

completely a critical analysis of consumer culture and post-

political ideology, it will experience difficulty in fully

39

contextualising its understanding of the further eruptions of

depoliticised disorder that await us in the twenty-first

century as the economic growth on which capitalism’s

prosperity and socioeconomic inclusion depend reaches its

objective limit.

Notes

1 An incident that we concur is much in keeping with the

precipitating events of many serious past riots. Indeed, we

would not dispute the claim that the shooting of Mark Duggan

by the police provided a spark or flashpoint against which

subsequent disorder can be understood. However, we also would

argue that reading the disorder that followed in different

geographical locations is problematic, and unlike the view

given by The Guardian, throughout our fieldwork we encountered

far more mentions of designer clothing brand names such as

Gucci and Prada than of the name of Mark Duggan.

2 In this piece we have given all respondents pseudonyms in

order to afford them some degree of anonymity. We have also

made the decision to leave out other background details, such

as age and ethnicity. Those we encountered and spoke to were

quite diverse in terms of race and age.

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