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The London Riots On Consumerism

coming Home to Roost09/08/2011 By Zygmunt Bauman734 Comments

These are not hunger or bread riots. These are riots of defective and

disqualified consumers.

Revolutions are not staple products of social inequality; but minefields are. Minefields are areas

filled with randomly scattered explosives: one can be pretty sure that some of them, some time,will explode but one cant say with any degree of certainty which ones and when. Social

revolutions being focused and targeted affairs, one can possibly do something to locate them and

defuse in time. Not the minefield-type explosions, though. In case of the minefields laid out by

soldiers of one army you can send other soldiers, from another army, to dig mines out anddisarm; a dangerous job, if there ever was one as the old soldiery wisdom keeps reminding:

the sapper errs only once. But in the case of minefields laid out by social inequality even such

remedy, however treacherous, is unavailable: putting the mines in and digging them up needs tobe done by the same army which neither can stop adding new mines to the old nor avoid stepping

on them over and over again. Laying mines and falling victims of their explosions come in a

package deal.

All varieties of social inequality derive from the division between the haves and the have-nots, asMiguel Cervantes de Saavedra noted already half a millennium ago. But in different times

having or not having ofdifferentobjects is, respectively, the states most passionately desired and

most passionately resented. Two centuries ago in Europe, a few decades ago still in many somedistant from Europe places, and to this day in some battlegrounds of tribal wars or playgrounds

of dictatorships, the prime object setting the have-nots and the haves in conflict was bread or

rice. Thank God, science, technology and certain reasonable political expedients this is no longerthe case. Which does not mean though that the old division is dead and buried. Quite on the

contrary The objects of desire, whose absence is most violently resented, are nowadays many

and varied and their numbers, as well as the temptation to have them, grow by the day. And so

grows the wrath, humiliation, spite and grudge aroused by nothaving them as well as the urgeto destroy what have you cant. Looting shops and setting them on fire derive from the same

impulsion and gratify the same longing.

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We are all consumers now, consumers first and foremost, consumers by right and by duty. The

day after the 11/9 outrage George W. Bush, when calling Americans to get over the trauma and

go back to normal, found no better words than go back shopping. It is the level of our shoppingactivity and the ease with which we dispose of one object of consumption in order to replace it

with a new and improved one which serves us as the prime measure of our social standing and

the score in the life-success competition. To all problems we encounter on the road away fromtrouble and towards satisfaction we seek solutions in shops.

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 GeorgeRitzer famously put it, are our temples; and so, I may add, the shopping lists are our 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 theirplace are our most enthusing emotions. The fullness of consumer enjoyment means fullness of

life. I shop, therefore I am. To shop or not to shop, this is the question.

For defective consumers, those contemporary have-nots, non-shopping is the jarring and

festering stigma of a life un-fulfilled and of own nonentity and good-for-nothingness. Not justthe absence of pleasure: absence of human dignity. Of life meaning. Ultimately, of humanity and

any other ground for self-respect and respect of the others around.

Supermarkets may be temples of worship for the members of the congregation. For the

anathemised, found wanting and banished by the Church of Consumers, they are the outposts ofthe enemy erected on the land of their exile. Those heavily guarded ramparts bar access to the

goods which protect others from a similar fate: as George W. Bush would have to agree, they bar

return (and for the youngsters who never yet sat on a pew, the access) to normality. Steel

gratings and blinds, CCTV cameras, security guards at the entry and hidden inside only add tothe atmosphere of a battlefield and on-going hostilities. Those armed and closely watched

citadels of enemy-in-our-midst serve as a day in, day out reminder of the natives misery, lowworth, humiliation. Defiant in their haughty and arrogant inaccessibility, they seem to shout: I

dare you! But dare you what?

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