Generation Buy

- Raymond Salvatore Harmon

[article originally appeared in LSD Magazine #8]

On the night of August 6th a series of events would unfold that would plunge London into 4 successive nights of rioting and looting. Regardless of the causes, the underlying issues and the people who partook of the burning and looting acted under a common social forum. Together as the ‘anonymous’ mob they smashed and looted shops, burned cars and caused possibly hundreds of millions in damage.

Blame ‘big society’, blame 'immigrants’, blame the 'welfare state’, blame rap music, blame whatever thing it is you already don’t like. The left blame the conservatives and the right blame the liberals. Too much, not enough. None of that really matters anyway.

In the wake of these events politicians point the finger at whatever their parties favorite whipping posts are as proof of their own already set in stone opinions about 'reality’. But the reality is that the world has no real political systems: Communism, democracy, socialism, all play the same game - Capitalism. They all get pushed and shoved by banks and corporations, they all do the bidding of their lobbyists, not their constituents. Politicians are vampires that take from the people they supposedly serve and feed the process of making the rich richer via the corporations they own and run.

Society has taught young people today to glorify ownership of goods. They see status in their social circles based on the brand of phone, sneaker and the size of the TV they own. They quantify success based on the ownership of fashionable electronics and clothes. Brand loyalty has replaced gang associations, subculture identity centers on the type of phone chat/messaging system you use. We have, as a culture, created an entire generation whose thought systems are to consume; to buy, to use, to own and to discard.

In a society where consumerism is the new religion the logical “revolution” is the destruction of the ownership paradigm. The only form of attack against the capitalist infrastructure is one in which financial damage occurs. By striking at the economic stability rioters are destabilizing the capitalist government, even if they were just out for a new TV.

It doesn’t matter whether the looters had a revolutionary cause behind them, it doesn’t matter if their actions were simply motivated by greed. They were doing what has come logically to them based on the society we have provided for them to live in. We have made the world in the image of “getting what you can” and they are just doing what comes naturally in their world; in our world.

But we have to consider how we got to this place, how do we live in a world where ownership has become the new spirituality, where smartphones, new sneakers, and maybe a flat screen TV are there for the taking, if only you smash the window and grab it? When did we give birth to this culture of greed, this generation of consumers?

In the post war era, from the late 1940s up until the early Sixties a new generation, much larger in population than any generation before it, came into the world. These baby boomers were the hippies of the 60’s in their teens, the stoned antiwar college kids of the 70s and the corporate execs of the 80s. This generation was fed on the technologies that had bloomed with the wartime of the early 20th century. A generation of prosperity that spoke with a voice, that ‘challenged the establishment’, and yet in the end would eventually become that same establishment which it struggled so long against.

In 1960 the American president Dwight Eisenhower gave a famous farewell speech in which he warned about the coming threat of the growing “military industrial complex” that would use the premise of war in order to generate an incredible amount of money (paid for by taxes), a portion of which it would use to control governments via lobbying.

We live in this future he was talking about, although the corporations who control the government are no longer just those that make weapons, but those that have the funds to contribute to the lobbying of politicians at all levels of government. This is not just happening in America, it happens in all countries on earth.

[link to Eisenhower’s full speech]

The generation that has brought this prediction to fruit is the same that protested the Vietnam War; the same 'counter culture’ that took acid at Woodstock are running today’s banks and corporations. These baby boomers have steered us on a dark path that leads to hooded teens smashing in windows, to violence out of frustration at the limits imposed upon their lives, economic limits that cripple their chances of advancement; of real education; of hope.

The path that led from 1945 to now, from economies being something that was secondary to human action to economies controlling human action is complex to say the least.

Yet put simply, it is the path of the few, taking from the many, and making the many pay the few for that privilege of having their economic value, their wealth, taken from them.

A kind of class warfare, predicated by corporate interests, has created an entire generation of youth who see ownership as the only sign of success. The goal is not education, not better quality of life, but things, disposable objects that act as fetishes for their temporary worship. By creating this ‘underclass’ of economically downtrodden consumerists corporate controlled governments have left these youths no other obvious choice in their eyes than to steal in order to 'advance’ in society.

These young people don’t even realize that they are attacking this consumerist culture, they have no knowledge of the form of insurgency their greed takes, they are simply the unwitting victims of the society that created them. They feel empowered by taking, looting and burning. In a world were there are no true freedoms, where capitalism is the only government, revolution is replaced by theft and vandalism, by economic damage inflicted on the environment that these people have come to feel is a cage around them.









By the second day of rioting the London police were scanning social networks, lurking 4chan, and tapping into supposedly secure private messaging networks on mobile phone systems. Around noon on Friday afternoon local beat cops went into shops along Mare St in Hackney and let store owners know that there was going to be a riot at 5pm that evening and that they should remove extreme valuables and close up shop early that day. This was just a door-to-door courtesy call from the Met, knowing it was going to happen, but not stopping it with force.

At 5 PM it started, as if on cue. Curiously the police only directly protected the dense centers of shopping districts. Protecting the main clusters of shops instead of local housing and other areas where homeowners sat and wondered what was happening through the night. And while looters smashed windows and burned cars the police just stood and watched and did nothing. Insurance would handle the small stuff, and if property owners didn’t have insurance then they were breaking the law.

After more police came and more shops were smashed it quieted down on the 4th day, spreading briefly to other towns in the north and west before fluttering out, the youthful rage expended, the economic damage done.

All told the cost of damage to property, the legal costs of arresting, detaining, convicting and imprisoning the looters, the insurance payouts and random civil suits will cost the UK more than all the combined cuts to youth programs, to social benefits, education and housing. Any money saved by scrapping those programs was wiped away in four nights of angst brought on directly by the cuts to programs in the first place.

Funny the Tories just got back in power and after decades of nothing we have an abrupt return to historic precedent. Every time they come to power people eventually take to the streets. There were riots in 1918, in 32, 58, 74, 81, and not again until 2011. I wonder if this is the “Big Society” that the conservatives were looking for?

Now that Cameron has an Emin and an Eine he is one of the people, right?

The deification of ownership is an ouroboros eating itself. Consumer society is a smoke and mirrors illusion through which corporations distract and repress the people. Capitalism is like an artificial intelligence that is controlling the evolution of humankind. The omnipotent reach of the global economic model affects every person on earth. Money, an abstraction we created in order to exchange the consensual reality known as ‘value’ with each other, has come to control the very way in which we live, breed and die.

The romantic anarchist would have you destroy this model. Would attempt to strike at the base, smashing and grabbing, destroying by taking. While this outlet of rage is a valid expression of the repressed, it doesn’t change a thing.

In order for real change to occur we must once again seize control of the flow of the economy. We must first control our own economic choices, pooling our individual economic flow-through in order to affect change with our own economic value. Voting literally with our dollars, euros and pounds in order to support the kinds of changes we want to see in the world.

Once we have changed the flow of the economy in favor of power that gives a voice to the public, and not to corporations, we can affect the rebuilding of the economic system itself. But until we can control the golden cage of capitalism, until we wield the key to the cage in which we live, we will never be able to truly be free.

- RSH London, Sept 2011

photos courtesy Mario Dos Santos