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One of the most vexing and persistent questions in western
democratic politics is the growing political disengagement
of a generation. Turnout is falling, and political activism
is negligible, particularly amongst the under 30s; when
challenged, their defence is remarks such as ‘what’s the
point? ’ or ‘it’s all irrelevant’. These are comments on
a perceived lack of purpose and meaning in contemporary
politics. Again and again, New Labour bumps up against this
profound cynicism as Tony Blair or Gordon Brown pour all
their rhetorical powers into infusing purpose and meaning
into the government’s programme. But their efforts rarely
resonate and invariably fail to inspire; they are more likely
to be greeted with dismissive criticism as ‘just spin’.
Labour’s victory was based on grudging resignation.
None of this really stacks up. Politics is as relevant
now as ever, and politics is as much theatre now as ever.
The fascinating questions are, firstly, why is there a perception
that politics been emptied of purpose and meaning? Secondly,
what is this crusade for authenticity, which makes the electorate
so sceptical of the theatre of politics – the spin?
The answers to both these questions lie in the development
of consumer capitalism over the last three decades. Put
baldly, consumer capitalism has appropriated the territory
of purpose and meaning, refashioning them for its own ends.
Its propaganda capacity is huge, using powerful tools of
advertising and marketing, and any challenge to its claims
is swiftly appropriated, or is pushed further and further
to the margins by a loud, insistent conformity. The search
for authenticity was initially a reaction against mass consumer
culture – ‘we want the real thing’ – but was itself appropriated
by consumer capitalism as a selling device: ‘this is the
real thing’. The commercialisation of purpose and meaning
as a means by which to sell products and services generates
profound cynicism – the cynicism born of knowing and secretly
despising our own susceptibility to the meanings we buy.
The triumph of the market in the last two decades has left
the role of the state in question. If the market can run
hospitals and schools, what does a welfare state do? But
the challenge of the market to the state does not only derive
from its alleged efficiency; it has also eroded the sense
of purpose and legitimacy (the meaning) of the state. Indeed
it has gone even further and succeeded in redefining the
territory in such a way that the state and traditional politics
find it almost impossible to compete. Part of this redefinition
lies in how the traditional nineteenth century boundary
between what is public and what is private has collapsed.
The conventional understanding was that you had a public
life – economically productive, a citizen and neighbour
– and a private life – relationships, children, pursuing
the good life (however you chose to define it) . One of
the most curious phenomena of the last fifteen to twenty
years has been the publicising of what was once regarded
as strictly private. So, television programmes are now devoted
to the minute details of couples’ sex lives, neighbours
and disputes, and people are prepared to reveal all to chat
shows and the tabloids. Our culture has become compulsively
self-revelatory and voyeuristic. This publicisation of the
private life is the corollary of the privatisation of public
life which has dominated political debate for two decades.
As privatisation has removed many activities from the public
sphere – for example privatised companies such as BT or
Corus are not subject to the same level of public accountability
and scrutiny as their public predecessors – the personal
has moved in to fill up the space. Our personal preoccupations
are projected into what was formerly understood as public
space. The result of these twin processes has been a transformation
of the terms and understandings which form the national
conversation: put crudely, we’re more likely to talk about
Big Brother around the office coffee machine than
we are to talk about the level of the minimum wage. The
process has been condemned as dumbing down, and lamented
as trivialisation, but such quickness to judge doesn’t shed
much light on why this has happened nor its implications.
The primary beneficiary of these parallel processes has
been capitalism.
Privatisation enabled private companies to take over large
chunks of the economy, and the ‘publicisation ’of private
space has enabled companies to exploit new territory –selling
back to the consumer their own inner world. This latter
has dominated the last twenty years, and is every bit as
powerful a legacy of Thatcherism as privatisation. The left
has been remarkably (inexcusably) blind to the phenomenon.
It has failed to recognise its inherent danger, which is
that, in commercialising our inner world, capitalism offers
a formulation of it which will serve its own ends: namely,
it produces a compliant, hardworking workforce and insatiably
avaricious consumers. What the left has missed is that,
while Marx focused his critique of capitalism in the industrial
revolution on the exploitation of physical labour, the contemporary
parallel, in the information age, is the exploitation of
our emotions and our spirit.
Starbucks, New Labour and consumer democracies
To illustrate this argument, take a hugely successful global
corporation which has thrived on understanding how individual
consumers relate to public space – be it physical or metaphorical
space – Starbucks, which arrived in the UK shortly after
New Labour’s 1997 election victory. If you juxtapose the
rise of Starbucks in the UK and the story of New Labour
in power, you end up not just with a playful conceit, but
with the outlines of a pattern which dominates consumer
democracies, and which is distorting and re-framing the
entire political process. In 1997 Starbucks was virtually
unknown in the UK; by 2001 it was one of the most ubiquitous
brands in prestige retail sites. On dozens of high streets,
its distinctive green and white sign has heralded a revolution
in coffee consumption. We are now drinking more coffee than
ever before, and the way we drink it has been transformed.
In a development that is remarkably similar to the rise
of coffee houses in the eighteenth century, part of the
urban experience in most contemporary Western cities is
going to a shop which sells nothing but coffee.
Coffee may seem a strange subject in a discussion of politics,
but it’s not. The eighteenth century coffee house played
a crucial role in stimulating the kind of political culture
of debate, pamphleteering and newspapers with which we are
familiar. Caffeine stimulates the brain, triggering thoughts
and ideas: it intensifies intellectual experience. Now coffee
is once again contributing and helping to form a political
culture.
The success of Starbucks has been the commercialisation
of the Ne Age. Created in Seattle, it packaged an alternative,
‘ethnic’, friendly feel. The coffee came from all over the
world, and they produced their own Real World Music CD for
customers, featuring musicians from Burundi, Pakistan, Uganda,
China and Spain. It was the coffee shop for those of us
who have never given up our backpacking dreams. It appealed
to that decontextualised globalisation in which all the
world is a sensual feast laid out for western consumers
to experience. We select our Costa Rica tall latte, enjoy
some Afro Celt and lean back on the comfy sofa. It flatters
the consumer ’s sense of being cosmopolitan and broad-minded.
What it also offers its customers is time. The concept is
that you sip your latte and watch the world go by. The warm
colours and the sofas encourage you to pause: you have permission
to stop. Arguably, this was the most revolutionary theme:
it rebelled against several decades of fast food culture
in which brands wanted people in – and out of – the door
as fast as possible. This was building on the Friends
culture of hanging out. What it cannily perceived was that
what a certain type of urban professional wanted above all
else was time – and curiously they were prepared to pay
for it. Of course, you can’t buy time (Starbucks couldn’t
sell extra hours) , but it sold permission to create
time. The reason why this was so seductive was because time
is increasingly now perceived as only available in a neutral
public space. At work, urban professionals are multi-tasking,
reading emails, talking on the phone and surfing the net.
Not only do they not have time, they don’t even have the
chance of concentrating on one thought for more than a few
minutes: office workers check email dozens of times a day.
At home, there’s still the phone, email, PC, plus the TV
and complex, increasingly baffling human relationships.
So you run away from the private spaces of home and office
to find privacy, paradoxically, in a public place.
Finally, Starbucks offers the consumer staple: it offers
comfort and it Features Capitalism and its critics offers
indulgence. The creamy froth and extra chocolate is a pick-me-up
to help you face the office. From shampoo to cream cakes,
brands seduce us by reassuring us that we’re worth it and
deserve our treat. Poor old me, I need it, we say to ourselves
as we fork out £1.75 for a cup of coffee. The therapeutic
culture has put into centre place our emotional needs –
however we wish to define them – and made us all into victims
in need of therapy. Freud and Jung may be turning in their
graves at how their legacy has been remoulded, but the concepts
of psychoanalysis which have passed into mainstream culture
have made us perfect consumers: emotion can be easily manipulated
so that our needs can be endlessly reformulated, ensuring
that we keep buying, and once we see ourselves as victims,
thousands of products offer us therapy, from aromatherapy
bath oil, to cappucino. The duty to oneself – to fulfilling
one’s needs and to healing our victimhood – has mushroomed
into a time-consuming task, which supersedes duties to anyone
beyond our circle of intimates.
These are the elements which make up the emotionally satisfying
experience of drinking coffee in Starbucks; they are not
the result of accident, but of careful corporate planning.
In No Logo Naomi Klein quotes Scott Bedbury, Starbucks’
vice-president of marketing, who admits that consumers don’t
truly believe there’s a huge difference between products,
which is why brands must establish emotional ties. Klein
also quotes Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz, who claims that
people don’t come for the coffee but for the romance of
the coffee experience, the feeling of warmth and community
people get in Starbucks stores. She also quotes Advertising
Age’s analysis of Starbucks success: for devotees, the
Starbucks experience is about more than a daily expresso
infusion, it is about immersion in a politically correct,
cultured refuge. The formula is proving astonishingly successful:
Starbucks arrived in the UK in May 1998 when it took over
the Seattle Coffee Company, it now has 150 stores nation-wide,
and it is planning to at least double that in the next two
years.
People going to a coffee shop for privacy is a neat example
of how we now project into public space our personal emotional
needs, and how the preoccupation with those needs overrides
the political nature of our social experience. So the fact
that Starbucks is deliberately and aggressively squeezing
independent coffee shops out of the market is not checking
the development of its global ambition. The customer, satisfied
by the Starbucks experience, is happy to ignore the political
protests of the Klein-inspired activists. Personal identity
has been recast, primarily in terms of emotional need, and
delinked from concepts such as class, creed or nationality.
This generates a self-referential narcissism, which finds
ample reinforcement in the self-revelatory media; we are
all restlessly, obsessively, looking for ourselves, and
this purpose usually nudges aside any wider, more collective,
goal such as social justice.
Public space, emotional need and sensory experience
Starbucks also illustrates another change in attitudes
to public space –we want a lot from it: it must make us
feel good (satisfying us emotionally) or it must offer a
gratifying experience. This reflects a shift in consumption
from product to experience. You don’t buy a product, you
buy an experience. The travel industry has exploded into
one of the biggest sectors of the world economy; amongst
under-30s and over 50s the amount of income spent on travel
has soared. Jeremy Rifkin points out that in the experience
economy you no longer accumulate possessions as the nineteenth
century bourgoisie did, but accumulate experiences: travelling
to more and more exotic places, eating out frequently and
watching lots of films. In the experience economy, a certain
type of sensory stimulation is elevated over everything:
it has to be easily and quickly accessible and guaranteed
to deliver. The best example of this trend is pornography,
a $10 billion industry, which has grown exponentially in
the last decade, and in the US is now, staggeringly, worth
as much as all the music and entertainment industry combined.
Pornography is no longer a minority interest, but a huge
part of the mainstream; a perfect example of how capitalism
now routinely formulates our inner world – in this case,
sexual desire – and sells it back to us.
This culture of emotional need and sensory experience dominates
public space. Corporations are well able to operate in this
culture (which they have played such a large part in creating)
; that’s why brands are developed with careful marketing
research to build emotional ties, and offer a branded experience,
as the Starbucks president made clear, with their target
market. Because of their success, brands dominate public
space, mediating and interpreting almost all our social
experience; we buy them and we work for them. Increasingly,
brands amount to commercialised meaning. The ideologues
of today – who decide what something should mean – are sitting
in brand consultancies and ad agencies. Traditional politics
is outdone at every turn in this emotionalised, sensationalised
public space: this is the point of my comparison with Starbucks
and New Labour. The appeals to political principles – such
as no rights without responsibility, or equality of opportunity
– don’t resonate with your average Starbucks customer, who
is probably profoundly cynical of politics. Contemporary
emotionalised public culture is totally at odds with the
traditional civic culture, which was characterised by its
grasp of ideology, principle and history. The former is
about emotion and experience, the latter about reasoning
and historical knowledge. In the gap between the two is
New Labour’s biggest problem: the slow but steady disengagement
from democratic politics, particularly amongst the young.
To return to the central themes of the Starbucks experience:
it offers an experience of globalisation as a pleasurable
choice of coffees and music from all over the world. In
comparison, when New Labour talks of globalisation, it is
often frightening – environmental degradation, illegal immigration,
fighting international crime or falling behind in the international
race to economic growth. Starbucks offers time out, while
the near sacred value of work has become a constant theme
of New Labour. Welfare to work was designed to bring more
and more people into the labour market, as work was seen
as the path out of poverty (we are now beginning to doubt
that wisdom, as we develop the US phenomenon of the working
poor) , and we are encouraged to work harder than any other
country in Europe. Both Tony Blair and Gordon Brown conjure
up a global economic race in which Britain always needs
to strain and struggle to stay ahead. Strongly influenced
by the US, and in contrast to European thinking, New Labour’s
claim is that working harder is the way to individual achievement
and fulfilment. Peter Mandelson summed it up recently, ‘There
is a moral duty attached to work. A society where everyone
who can work, does work, not only minimises waste and maximises
prosperity, it is often the best conditions for genuine
equality of opportunity. ’This is a dire utilitarianism:
not working equals waste. But who is to decide what is a
waste or not? Is someone doodling in Starbucks ‘wasting’
their time or enjoying a quiet contemplative moment? Work
is promoted as salvation by a New Labour elite of workaholics.
The dominant tone of political rhetoric is sternly exhortatory:
work harder, be more productive, get ahead in the information,
bio-tech age. If we don’t, the penalties threatened are
dire, so there is no time to question where we are going,
only the imperative of staying ahead. Little of comfort
here. This is an old-fashioned puritanical rhetoric of self-improvement,
totally at odds with the aspiration to hedonism of the time-poor.
How can any political party compete with this therapeutic
consumption? If you primarily look to the public sphere
to make you feel good about yourself, what has politics
to offer? If the acid test of relevance is an individual’s
self-image, then indeed the political process of how collective
interests are negotiated is irrelevant. All politics can
offer the self-image is an association with certain values,
such as equality or racial tolerance. But the question that
an average eighteen-year-old will increasingly ask is, ‘If
I’m buying my fairly traded cosmetics from the Bodyshop
and my fairly-traded organic vegetables, and working for
an ethically audited company, why bother voting? Why can’t
my politics be expressed through my patterns of consumption
and employment?’.
Not only does therapeutic consumption make politics seem
irrelevant, it also distorts it. Therapeutic consumption
has become a significant part of most people’s lives, and
of their internal monologues about their sense of worth,
place and purpose in the world. Several times a day, these
monologues are repeated, over purchases as petty as chocolates,
cream cakes, cigarettes, a new pair of shoes or alcohol.
The key characteristic of the therapeutic culture is how
desire is repackaged as need. I want the new skin product
or car slides imperceptibly into needing them. The need
then becomes compulsion: the must-have purchase. When this
kind of consumer attitude spills into political life, as
it now does frequently, it brings grave distortions. It
is both impatient and demanding; it expects politicians
to solve deeply complex problems and solve them quickly.
It generates an entitlement culture in which there is no
recognised limit to personal need (at least in the marketplace
your financial resources places a limit to your need.) Politicians
and public services can only ever fail such criteria. And,
of course, the trumpeting of their failure in a scandal-hungry
media only reinforces the permanent sense of aggrieved resentment
towards public authority. The coverage of politics and public
services is dominated by the victimhood of the general public
as they suffer from incompetence and unprofessionalism;
human frailty, inadequacy, is treated with a punitive judgementalism.
New Labour and the politics of emotion
New Labour has attempted to accommodate the emotionalisation
of public space in several ways with varying degrees of
success. Firstly, politics has become largely about the
marketing of personalities. The brand of New Labour is less
important than the brand of Tony Blair. That requires the
supporting cast of his wife, children and new baby, however
reluctant they might be. Promoting a politician as a brand
leaves little room for privacy; every personal characteristic
is exploited. Blair has little option but to opt for self-revelation
in a bid to connect emotionally with his electorate; so,
he tells us how he was reading Longfellow when his son Euan
was found drunk in Leicester Square, and when talking of
the incident later, his eyes glittered with tears as he
appealed for understanding of the difficulties of being
a dad. He is photographed lying, open-necked denim shirt,
on the carpet beside his new born son, the perfect image
of informality and intimacy, a world a ay from the images
of authority and power normally associated with political
leadership. Blair has also opted for the humble, frequently
offering apologies and acknowledgements for not having met
expectations. He offers emotional empathy, claiming to feel
the pain or understand the difficulties of, say, farmers
dealing with foot and mouth, or those suffering in floods.
He is a very tough political leader, but in public pronouncements
he underplays much of this authority, and often ends up
sounding like an anxious schoolboy handing in his incomplete
homework.
New Labour sits unhappily between a traditional political
culture of debate and confrontation, and the new emotionalised
public life. In the latter, the primary means of establishing
solidarity is by a non-judgemental emotional empathy which
passively cares and understands rather than doing much about
it. It is relativist – everyone has their own point of view
and all must be listened to with equal respect. One of its
most obvious characteristics is the prevalence of up-speak,
whereby the intonation goes up at the end of every sentence,
making every comment tentative, provisional and seeking
continuous affirmation from the listener. Another striking
feature of the information age is the compulsive urge to
stay connected through mobile phones and email. Rule number
one of this emotional connectivity is to avoid conflict,
and the primary virtue is honesty; on neither of these counts
does conventional politics score well. Its theatre of symbol,
rhetoric and image, and its negotiation of conflicting interests,
are perceived by an emotionally connected generation as
nothing but spin, lies and endless arguing.
New Labour made an ambitious but disastrous bid to capture
the emotional imagination of the electorate. The Dome, the
young country rhetoric and Cool Britannia were all attempts
to revitalise patriotic emotion; they all failed dismally.
Most telling was the failure of the Dome. Here was a public
space, provided through a process of political decision-making
– but what filled the space? Corporations jostled in this
space to promote their own brand: it was a fitting testimony
to two decades of handing over public space to private corporations.
What was lacking was a vision of the good society, which
overarched the competing profit-seeking brands; this is
a vision which only a state can provide. It has to be rooted
in ideology, a set of beliefs about human beings, their
history and purpose – and the role of the state and the
private sector in furthering those beliefs. It is this vacuum
of purpose and meaning which exposes New Labour. It does
not challenge exploitative consumer capitalism but simply
offers to facilitate and manage its continuing development.
It has ceded the ground of identifying the good society
to coffee shops and a thousand other brands.
Blair made this clear when he laid out his government’s
agenda for the future in February 2001. He identified two
themes – opportunity and responsibility: giving them the
chance to develop their potential; insisting on their duty
to make the most of the chance they get. It’s a combination
of stick and carrot which has become a stock in trade of
New Labour. This is bully boy politics. But worse is to
come. What is the goal of the bullying? Blair continues:
And the huge possibility of this agenda is driven forward
by one new political reality. Today, the economic and
the social in politics go together. Human capital is the
key to economic advancement in a knowledge economy. Individual
responsibility is the key to social order. Both depend
on developing the potential of all our people to the full
to provide a more mobile and a flexible economy.
The purpose of the bullying, Blair reveals, is economic
growth. To that end, human wellbeing may have to be subordinated;
the mobility and flexibility of the economy, after all,
depends on that of human beings, their families and communities.
What that translates into is shift-working, short-term contracts
and a pattern of economic growth in which communities may
be destroyed by mass redundancies. Richard Sennett, in The
Corrosion of Character, has charted the personal consequences
of such a work culture, the anomie and the inability to
make long-term commitments. (These in turn feed back into
political life; loyalty becomes redundant in your professional
life, your personal life and your political life.) But the
reason why this paragraph of Blair’s speech so graphically
illustrates New Labour ’s betrayal of its history, is that
he co-opts the social into the task of achieving economic
growth. Human relationships are capital, they are valuable
because they facilitate economic growth – he omits to acknowledge
that human relationships may not be so functional, but may
have worth independent of economic value as the critical
foundation of the good society and of human well-being.
Madeleine Bunting is a columnist on The Guardian.
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