Crime, Harm and Consumerism

Steve Hall, Tereza Kuldova, Mark Horsley, Steve Hall, Tereza Kuldova, Mark Horsley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9780429755101
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book offers a collection of cutting-edge essays on the relationship between crime, harm and consumer culture. Although consumer culture has been addressed across the social sciences, it has yet to be fully explored in criminology. The editors bring together an impressive list of authors with original ideas and a fresh perspective to this field. The collection first introduces the reader to three sets of ideas which will be especially useful to students and researchers piecing together theoretical frameworks for their studies. New concepts such as pseudo-pacification, the materialist libertine and the commodification of abstinence can be used as foundation stones for new explanatory criminological analyses in the 21st century. The collection then moves on to present case studies based on rigorous empirical work in the fields of consumption and debt, 'outlaw' gangs, illegal drug markets, gambling, the mentality that drives investment fraudsters and the relationship between social media and state surveillance. These case studies showcase the strength of the research skills and knowledge these scholars offer to the field of criminology. Written in a clear and direct style, this book will appeal to students and scholars in criminology, sociology, cultural studies, social theory and those interested in learning about the effects of consumer culture in modern society.

Part 1
Historical and theoretical perspectives

1 Consumer culture and English history’s lost object

Steve Hall

Introduction

Although the motivations behind many serious newsworthy crimes continue to be diverse and individualistic, much of today’s mundane volume crime is driven by consumer desire (Hall et al., 2008). Contrary to the eternally optimistic liberal narrative, there has been no real decline in consumer-driven criminal markets (Kotzé, 2019). Localised criminal markets that expanded during the early years of neoliberalism’s destructive course and operate largely under the statistical radar are now joined by new online markets that supply goods to consumers worldwide – illegal goods such as drugs and weapons, counterfeits such as clothes and image-enhancing pharmaceuticals, or legal goods distributed illegally (see Hall and Antonopoulos, 2016; Large, 2019). As anxious consumers unsure of their identities and concerned about their personal images crave corporate capitalism’s consumer objects as the symbolic props for their very sense of being in the world, the old liberal-leftist idea of ‘resistance at the point of consumption’ now seems increasingly tenuous.

Criminology, still adhering to romantic notions of organic resistance, is short of a convincing theory of late capitalism’s committed consumer subject, and, therefore, unable to either explain the persistence of everyday criminal activity that permeates the social structure, but, more specifically, has in many working-class locales displaced the industrial era’s fragile solidarity projects (Hall et al., 2008; Treadwell et al., 2013; Ellis, 2016; Kotzé, 2019). This brief chapter suggests that, in order to regain its intellectual and political efficacy in difficult times for the left, criminology must reject romantic notions of organically ‘resistant’ consumer subjectivity and misfiring Foucauldian notions of clean cultural/epistemological breaks in history. Instead, it must begin to construct a theoretical framework able to explain the longue durée historical development of modernity’s anxious, apolitical, and – in situations of deprivation or excessive opportunity – crime-prone consumer subject.

What follows defies the postmodernist command to construct historical metanarratives. This relatively modest metanarrative begins in Late Mediaeval England and includes insights into events and processes that might well have been real. I’m not suggesting that this juncture I will shortly outline is an ‘origin’ or a ‘source’ but a point in history that shifted English and eventually European culture, economy, and politics in a slightly different direction. It contributes an important factor in the overall explanation of the country’s early proto-capitalist development – the pseudo-pacified subject, the root of today’s forms of adaptive and flimsily pacified criminality. It does not attempt to displace the standard factors behind the early development of the market economy in the transition from Feudalism to Capitalism – technological developments in production and communication, revival of science, European trading options, production for trade, flaws in the feudal system and so on – but simply draws attention to rather neglected culturo-legal and subjective aspects that might be useful for criminological theory.

Given that over time slightly different directions often become substantially different and enduring directions, we will hopefully gain some insights into how the cultural norms and subjectivity set in motion at that juncture have evolved to the present. History is of course a mixture of continuities and discontinuities, but here I claim that we are looking at a major continuity. The trajectory was set by important shifts in the economic and culturo-legal methods by which key economic players were motivated, restrained, and pacified. The principal shifts can be described in very basic terms as 1) the transfer of the primary economic object of desire and repository of value from land to money, and 2) the transfer of the primary source of social status from the violent defence of land and community to the personal pseudo-pacified struggle for social distinction gauged by the degree of success achieved by the individual in the competitive market economy.

The socioeconomic tumour

Despite the violence and political tyranny that afflicted the English population for two centuries after the eleventh-century Norman invasion, alternative forms of ideology, practice, and subjectivity struggled for breath in the nooks and crannies of everyday socioeconomic life. Named ‘Distributism’ centuries later by G.K. Chesterton (2009), many of these practices drew upon peasant customs yet were also encouraged by some of the more progressive Catholic authorities. In keeping with other European regions, usury – the practice of charging excessive interest on loans, especially personal loans – met with disapproval from the Church. In villages where embryonic Distributist projects enjoyed a brief existence in this period, popular voices concurred with the Church authorities to insist on the tight regulation of usury and the establishment of a ‘just and fixed price’ for goods, initially established by markets but heavily regulated to prevent overcharging, profiteering and hoarding to raise prices. Price undercutting and the expansion of businesses beyond a reasonable number of employees were also forbidden.

These anti-monopolistic regulations allowed the slow but relatively stable redevelopment and expansion of the old Roman production centres and trading arteries, and a more even and inclusive social distribution of labour and business opportunities at the point of production. We can discern the beginnings of a manifested agape, the attempt to diffuse the social ideal of care in the family and community outwards into the broader economy, to operate in the interests of social justice and civility. The Distributist movement did not endure, but its motivating ideals were briefly manifested as a direct and substantive opposition to the harnessed individual greed that drives the current deregulated market, now recognised by some criminologists as today’s primary criminogenic context (Reiner, 2007; Currie, 2015).

However, after the Norman invasion many English kings began to allow usury and the subsequent indebting of subjects in order to raise funds, expand business, and levy taxes on the credit issuers. The imperatives that structured individuals’ lives began to shift from communal relations to financial transactions. This opened the door for the eventual intrusion of the market in most aspects of human life, the establishment of money as the universal unit of exchange, and the application of energy to the constant repayment of the debt that was necessary to expand business and obtain shelter (Horsley, 2015). Moves such as this prepared the way for the dynamic forces of the market to prevail over Distributism’s attempt to combine customs and laws into an ethical socioeconomic project.

The early market economy – production for trade, accounting, the profit motive, mobile labour, and the private ownership of land – benefitted from the active commitment of the more mobile and entrepreneurial peasants. It was in the first stages of its establishment by the thirteenth century (Macfarlane, 1978). The lax Norman warlords were too concerned with war, prayer, courts, and tribute to bother with the everyday details of estate management. This lofty negligence left unattended spaces in which peasants and artisans were able to establish private ownership and administration of the means of production, learning the business skills and accumulating the capital necessary for their eventual entry to the nascent bourgeoisie. It’s quite wrong to assume that most peasants resisted these early moves towards the market economy and remained committed to their traditional lives, or to assume that Late Mediaeval society was so rigid and restrictive that modest forms of social mobility were impossible (Dyer, 2000). As production entered the early stage of privatisation, some of the wealthier peasants bought urban residences in towns to seek opportunities for private wealth accumulation in burgeoning consumer markets. Their rejection of communal village life was firm and enduring.

If we briefly shift the analysis over to the culturo-legal dimension, we can begin to discern an important but often neglected factor that prepared England for the initial transition to capitalism. This factor is a process of what looks like cell division – rather than simple vertical mobility as a means of breaking through the class barrier – which was initiated by the economic ejection of sons and daughters from the family and community and the injunction to seek out a living elsewhere. Macfarlane (1978) posits the initial drive behind English bourgeois individualism as a product of the separation of homo economicus from the traditional productive-defensive unit constituted by families in the geographically bound community. In the twelfth century the introduction of the laws of primogeniture and entail throughout the social structure – in Europe they were confined to the upper class – effectively broke up the family. In this legal system the firstborn inherited the family estate whilst the other siblings lost their guarantee of inheritance. The relations of sociability, security, and love conditional only on the defence of the family’s honour and land were tainted by what could be described as a norm of institutionalised betrayal. Other European cultures were slower to separate economics from morality and politics or eject the individual from the fundamental geographically bound reproductive units of land, family, and community – indeed, some Mediterranean regions still hang on to vestiges of this traditional way of doing things (Tsantiropoulos, 2008).

The process that rests on the splitting of the family and community to produce the insecure, anxious, and ambitious individual could be described as a socioeconomic tumour, a growth produced by rapid cell-splitting spreading from dissolving institutions where hyperactive binary fission creates an eruption too rapid and intensive for the traditional social body to control. The individual experienced this tumour as a traumatising maelstrom of undirected activity, unpredictable in every way except the continuation of its growth and the establishment of its dominance. Familial relations were disrupted to the extent that the death of the father became a literally manifested mythology, a misandristic urge for latter-born siblings to commit parricide; alongside incest one of the two primary Oedipal crimes. Because the early death of the father was common in war-torn times and the mother was the first in line for inheritance and control of family property and business, the leap from misandry to misogyny was not difficult. Siblings lower down the pecking order were totally dependent on either parent’s autonomous and unpredictable generosity or sense of justice. Unpredictability often reached terrifying proportions – a case of dementia afflicting the surviving parent, for instance, could result in the disinheritance of the whole family.

These culturo-legal processes and their impact on the subject’s anxiety, fear, resentment, and desire contributed to the disruption and eventual trituration of traditional communities, further encouraging movement into market towns. As early as the thirteenth century twenty per cent of peasants permanently inhabited towns as entrepreneurs and consumers, developing their tastes for food, clothes, and novelties as status symbols. The nascent urban bourgeoisie began to emulate and compete with the aristocracy. We must accept the fact that, historically, ‘resistance’ has been practiced as a struggle for economic opportunities and social distinction, an escape not only from the clutches of the ruling class but also from the Church, the community, and their embryonic practices of social justice (Hall, 2012, 2014). In this period the rapidly developing market economy became reliant on both domestic and international trade, producing over twenty-five per cent of the GNP (Dyer, 2000). The relative decline of smaller village markets necessitated the transport of goods and coinage between larger towns, which in turn required more effective means of protecting property. From 1285, following the Statute of Winchester, Edward I reformed the criminal justice system and introduced early community policing measures such as watch and ward, hue and cry, and assizes of arms under the control of shire reeves and constables, which combined with measures such as the coppicing of roadsides to increase safety. We can see here the early establishment of the legal and physical infrastructure in which what we will encounter later in this analysis as an anthropologically unique pseudo-pacified subject – economically acquisitive and socially competitive yet physically more pacified – became normal.

In the aftermath of the Plague from the mid-fourteenth century, the rapid population decline caused numerous economic problems in both production and consumption. Aristocrats were forced to make concessions, which increased the flow of entrepreneurial peasants into the market as private producers and traders – accumulating capital, expanding consumption, and fuelling the demand for, and supply of, symbols of social distinction. The Enclosure Movement gathered pace to incentivise producers and revive production. However, the majority who were unable to raise funds to buy land or initiate production centres remained vulnerable to eviction and insecure lives as wage-labourers. This vulnerability fuelled anxiety, envy, and social conflict, and altered the more traditional communal sense of social justice to one associated with the individual’s social mobility rights. Anxiety, opportunism, and the rejection of common fate combined to create the subjective fuel for embryonic capitalism’s destructive socio-economic dynamism.

The fifteenth century saw an upward spiral of production and consumption (Sassatelli, 2007). English manorial estates were full-blown capitalist enterprises run exclusively for profit. Ownership was individualised and legalised, and where wives had rights to one-third of the estate, children still had none and could not prevent either parent selling it. This tense sociolegal situation fuelled a very active market in land. Entrepreneurialism, social climbing by conspicuous consumption, hatred of regulation and taxation, the toleration of non-violent economic crime, and the dismantling of the customary moral authority held by the commons and religious orders combined to establish a proto-libertarian mentality that was to become one of the psychocultural cornerstones in the development of capitalism. Although the post-plague years saw higher wages and job mobility, there was also evidence of de-skilling, the cultural reframing of work as drudgery, and the social diffusion of the appreciation of leisure, luxury, and unregulated enterprise. Class conflict certainly existed as the less successful peasants were evicted or indebted and bought out to be ejected as landless wage labourers, but much of this class oppression and exploitation was the work of the newly mobile peasantry that, together with the merchant class, was ascending the social hierarchy.

In the fifteenth-century gentrification process, successful merchants and entrepreneurial peasants began to identify with the Lords, eventually intermarrying and competing with them in every dimension. Younger, less ruthless and competitive children were often disinherited and cast out into an insecure market where social mobility was expected and vital for survival. By this time the socioeconomic tumour had spread throughout most of the social body. The social divisiveness that now underpins competitive individualism and the class relation was reproduced in the constantly splitting cell of the family itself. Favoured sons and daughters inherited or were able to buy more land whilst disfavoured siblings joined the ranks of the landless labourers, with land rights and subsistence removed, their whole livelihoods dependent on the vagaries of the emerging market economy and the whims of their masters. This familial splitting became a push-factor in emigration, and in the sphere of the market no external structural force oppressed the peasant class. The atomisation of the peasantry into competitive, pseudo-pacified monads that we understood as ‘the bourgeoisie’ was the product of an internally generated process.

For the poorer peasants, initial decisions to migrate to the urban areas were not always the products of free choice. By the seventeenth century the wretched wages and conditions of the putting-out system combined with enclosure to further increase the flow of landless labourers into towns in search of better work, fuelling the early stage of the urbanisation process that was to accelerate in the nineteenth century. However, the new urban labouring class, despite their precarity and the social injustices inflicted on them, was not driven by dreams of solidarity or a nascent organised political opposition but the need to maximise individual opportunities. The precarious mobile worker, denied charity outside the boundaries of his parish of birth, was forced or at least found it wise to develop some degree of personal initiative and financial sense. Immersed in a rapidly developing market system replete with proliferating opportunities as well as injustices, the more alert and enterprising workers quickly learned to operate with varying degrees of success in the world of urban commerce. This process of self-improvement and social mobility was invigorating and to some quite lucrative, but it was also brutally competitive, divisive, and corrosive to the traditional ethico-social customs that acted as impediments to personal success.

The organic intellectual, communicative, and organisational means by which the new urban workers could become a proletariat, a group with the potential to become a class for itself, were simply absent. The urban workers’ failure to construct their own identity was not a product of ‘false consciousness’ so much as the dawning of a cynical consciousness that had become averse to the idea of collectivism, which of course had in their historical memory betrayed and failed them. It had cast them out as indiv...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of contributors
• Introduction
• Part 1 Historical and theoretical perspectives
• Part 2 Contexts and case studies
• Index