Commodified Communities: Selling the Nation in a Global Age

Patriotism and consumerism appear to have no obvious connection. The nation as a bounded community of people who identify with one another appears to stand in contrast to the workings of global capital which flows across borders in the search for profit not social recognition. Production and trade have been transnationalised to the extent that ‘Buy American’ and ‘Buy British’ is impossible when buying any consumer goods made of more than a few simple parts. A single computer may be designed in Silicon Valley, built in Japan, assembled in South East Asia, and dumped in China when past their sell by date. However, we still see a growing clamour to sell national pride and to commercialise the boundaries of belonging. Since 9/11 Wal-Mart expanded its sale of flag-emblazoned merchandise for sale with “respectful” and “patriotic” flag disposal services in stores for used flags positioned conveniently next to shiny new ones. In 2004, Wal-Mart was voted the most admired company in the US despite facing criticism for its unfair wages for women, de-unionisation, and monopoly practices. Professor Jennifer Scanlon says “the American Public and Wal-Mart are complicit in a performance of patriotism in which consumerism stands in for more concrete and difficult civic work”. It is easier to buy belonging in a community than to work to make it a better place. This is a reciprocal relationship between consumerism and nationalism such that transnational companies sell the nation and the nation buys it. This dynamic where consumerism and nationalism reproduce and reinforce each other is not restricted to the US. In China, Aigo is one of the nation’s leading electronic companies and is now a sponsor of Manchester United FC. The name Aigo in Mandarin Chinese (aiguozhe; 爱国者) means “patriot” and this is not lost on Chinese consumers seeking to “buy Chinese” in an age where their consumer options are transnationalised. One of the most frequent seen adverts on Chinese state television (CCTV) between 2009-2010 was for a medicine brand which ended with the catchphrase “mother I love you, motherland I love you” (mama wo ai ni, zuguo wo ai ni; 妈妈我爱你, 祖国我爱你). Viewers are then left with the impression that loyalty to a consumer brand equates to loyalty to the nation. You can buy belonging in a national-consumer community.

How people choose to spend their money has long been represented by states as linked to their identity as members of the nation. One of the many propaganda cartoons produced by Walt Disney in the first half of the twentieth century represented American consumers as divided between spending and saving. Scrooge McDuck tells Americans they must “save for victory” in World War 2. Spending money was un-patriotic because it helps the rise of Fascism by draining the treasury of tax resources. Of course representations of the nation have changed as capitalism becomes more and more globalised and it shifts from supply-side economics to demand-led. One of the first public addresses by President George Bush after 9/11 was to stress the threat of terrorism to our ever-expanding consumerist lifestyle linking shopping with national security: “We cannot let the terrorists achieve the objective of frightening our citizens to the point where we don’t…conduct business, we don’t shop”. “We” are being defined as shoppers and the threat of terrorism is to our “we-ness” is through the danger presented to our consumer-lifestyles. More recently, David Cameron defined Britishness through our economic behaviour during the “financial crisis”: “Some say that to succeed in this world, we need to become more like India or China, or Brazil, but I say: we need to become more like us. The real us. Hard-working, pioneering, independent, creative, adaptable, optimistic, can-do”. In practical terms Cameron continued to stress we pay off our credit card bills, tying national loyalty to stabilising financial capitalism. It seems patriotism is emerging as a resource our leaders can draw on to demand the economy works in specific ways. “Can-do” or “stiff upper lip” means “flexible” labour protection policy and a “disciplined” labour force in the words of the IMF. Cameron is using patriotism to tell people in Britain that they are not like Indians or Chinese, we are different. We should supposedly keep it that way by paying off our credit card bills and working hard and without question in a labour market that has seen employment slump and benefits slashed since the Conservative Party came to power. To be British means to behave in ways which maintain the workings of capitalism as it currently works- don’t’ complain about anything or you aren’t “can-do” and you aren’t British. For Cameron, it also means we should identify with billionaires within our borders who benefit from inequality instead of Indians and Chinese who suffer from it.

The recent public debates over the wearing of the poppy for Remembrance Sunday are a case in point. Turnouts at the cenotaph for actual remembrance are relatively small and co-ordinated through active organisations such as the British Legion. However, more passive consumers can now purchase all manner of goods from ties to caps to umbrellas to cufflinks to tablecloths in order to display their level of patriotic devotion and stand “shoulder to shoulder with all those who serve”. Judging by the Poppy Shop’s apology on their website in November 2011 that orders would be delayed due to a high volume of orders, it appears the British public are keen to buy their community membership. However, they are less keen to do “concrete and difficult civic work”. Joining a campaign, for example, to give an hour of one’s time to look after elderly veterans who are now in Britain’s understaffed nursing homes would be of more benefit than wearing a poppy. Wearing of the poppy to symbolise national belonging, which involves nothing but a small purchase, has in recent years been mobilised to the extent that it is framed as an issue of national security. The BBC linked tragic deaths of soldiers in Afghanistan, a very real and violent conflict, to the banality of the poppy. On Question Time, the popular British politics ‘debate’ show, Stephen Pollard, journalist and author on Israeli politics and history, claimed burning poppies should be outlawed, regardless of freedom of speech because they go to the heart of “who we are”. Identity here is framed as a security issue such that alternatives to this particular understanding of national identity are to be eliminated through force. David Cameron saw fit to demand FIFA, football’s ruling body, make the exception only for England to allow “political and religious” symbols on national football shirts in their game against Spain because it was a matter of “national pride”. Cameron and other Conservatives stressed that the poppy was “not political”. However, it is impossible to claim England’s supposed symbols of “national pride” are “not political” but those of other nations, which are banned on national football shirts, are “political”. This representation of the poppy as a performance of patriotism may not be new. However, what is new is this vigour that defines purchase and display of a poppy as the very heart of “who we are” and a symbol which is unquestionable and beyond politics. The English national football team have played on the 11^th November many times over the years and haven’t worn or asked to wear poppies on their shirts. This is but an example how of national communities become a commodified mode of self-understanding where alternatives are deemed ‘outside’ the boundaries of community. This follows the framings of how we organise capitalism and how we spend our earnings as security issues at the heart of our national identities. There are many ways to interpret why wars happen and whose interests they serve. However, the voices of those who see the First World War as a human tragedy which saw states across the world needlessly send millions of working class humans to their death are being excluded as un-patriotic because they don’t wish to wear the poppy. The poppy is said to represent them but it does not represent their views because it has become a symbol of “national pride” instead of remembering dead human beings. Today, identifying with humans who are victims of wars waged by Britain in Iraq and Afghanistan beyond our borders over those within our nation who send them to war is deemed unpatriotic in the same way that submitting to a flexible, unregulated labour market is essential to being British. Today, capital and people flow across borders but there is still capital to be made by going to war and selling its products under the banner of patriotism.

Apple and the Symbolic Construction of the Self/Other

It is not unusual to send condolences to family and friends of a recently deceased loved-one. What is unusual is when people are moved to grief for someone they have never met. It is not unusual to enquire why this is so. The death of Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple, led to a global outpouring of grief in the form of shrines from Beijing to California and from Seoul to Sydney. However, these are globalised, metropolitan centres where people who can afford to buy Apple’s exuberant products are concentrated. This is not reflective of some human community transcending divisions of geography and social class. These are relatively fortunate people commemorating the death of an incredibly wealthy man. Nonetheless, this public outpouring goes way beyond brand loyalty or the usual arguments that Macs are faster than PCs. These are highly symbolic rituals which tell us about who and what we value and who and what we do not. Jonathan Jones of the Guardian gushed that Apple products “made the world more beautiful” and “more human” such that Steve Jobs changed how “we” see the world. “We” refers here to people in metropolitan centres with enough disposable income to be part of this in-group. The inevitably corresponding “they” are the rest of the world, “outside” this group and presumably less human for their inability to enjoy these products.

It is tempting, as Alex Massie does in The Spectator, to dismiss these outpourings of attachment, grief, and worship for the CEO of a company whom they never met as "members of a cult that's just as stupid as any other and equally deserving of scorn and pity". However, this downplays the social significance in terms of both sheer numbers of people involved and the transnational scale on which unbridled admiration for the contribution of Apple to people’s lives we have witnessed. Massie also called this phenomenon iReligion and this seems a fairly accurate description given the blind faith and ritualised shrines we have witnessed. The Apple logo and Steve Jobs have become powerful symbols people express loyalty to and through which they identify themselves as free-thinking, modern individuals. Apple personifies something people want to be. The long running Mac advert series on UK TV exemplified this personification of the brand. It successfully anthropomorphised PCs to be like their users: old, traditional, and behind the times. Mac users then are symbolically articulated as young, fresh, and driving the times. The argument here is not to say Apple products are not fun to play with. They are. The argument is to say people in positions of relative fortune are investing their self-identifications in such products. These self-identifications are to the exclusion of the poor, globally marginalised Other. Ironically, these identifications are ultimately to the detriment as opposed to the enrichment of the individual.

Anthony Cohen’s 1985 classic The Symbolic Construction of Community applied decades of fieldwork in social anthropology on the intersection between social and personal identities. He produced a compelling argument to explain traditional community and nationalist loyalties. However, it equally illuminates why in the contemporary world when people are bombarded by commercial advertising demanding brand loyalty, and where struggles over local, ethnic, religious, national, transnational, and global forces regularly spill over into violence, we are still constantly trying to discover and rediscover where “we” belong and who “we” are:

“(symbols) ‘express’ other things in ways which allow their common form to be retained and shared among the members of a group, whilst not imposing upon these people the constraints of uniform meaning. Because symbols are malleable in this way, they can be made to ‘fit’ the circumstances of the individual. They can thus provide media through which individuals can experience and express their attachment to a society without compromising their individuality…what is actually held in common is not very substantial, being form rather than content.”

Apple and Steve Jobs like all the most socially effective symbols have no fixed content. They are pure form and they are malleable. They mean everything because they mean nothing. They are so abstract and open to interpretation that they are a marketing dream. Apple allows the individual to feel as if they retain and even enhance their individuality while at the same time spending more and more of their income on products they do not need and even worshipping at shrines of a dead man they did not know. The Apple logo perhaps speaks for itself. It is just an apple, it imposes little if any content yet people wear clothes and bags emblazoning the symbol on their journeys to find who they are. The soundbites of Steve Jobs, which appeared in their thousands across Facebook and Twitter on the day of his death, are a case in point. So devoid of content are they that people can imbue their own significance in them, participate in a social ritual, yet believe they retain some sense of individuality at the same time. “Stay hungry, stay foolish” is so open to interpretation that, as Cohen says, what is being shared by repeating it across the internet is insubstantial; form rather than content. This was of course a remarkably skilful and rhetorical manipulation of human needs for social and individual identities on Jobs’ part. People could be Apple users, a group, yet imbue their own supposed individuality on what that means. All the while Jobs got richer and richer. The most powerful of all the soundbites was perhaps “don’t waste time living someone else’s life”. In other words, buying Apple products, a socially significant action, allows one to be and become an individual. The irony is staggering when millions of individuals believe that by listening to another individual telling them to be an individual and buy his products he spent his life producing is somehow living one’s own life. Choosing to worship Apple and reproduce its messages across the potentially limitless discourse of the internet is a fundamentally selective social activity. People can say anything on the internet yet they choose to let Steve Jobs speak for them as if they are endorsing individuation. Monty Python once hilariously captured the irony of how groups can be convinced they are individuals in their film Life of Brian yet it seems to have been forgotten by Apple worshippers.

The power of Apple is remarkable. The internet has provided most people with staggering access to instantaneous information. This has led to unparalleled growth in global movements for social justice, human rights, and environmental protection. Yet while Twitter is used to organise the occupation of Wall Street in the world’s most “advanced” capitalist nation, we hear nothing from Apple users of Apple’s deplorable environmental record (reportedly the worst for any foreign firm in China) and disregard for labour rights across the world. Apple’s power is such that this information is freely available yet people choose not to google it and then choose to ignore it when it is presented to them. Karl Marx would say the exploitative social relations behind the product are concealed but here they are not. In today’s world, the information is there, yet most of us choose to ignore it. We do not let this uncomfortable information influence our consumerist decision-making in our supposed struggle to find ourselves and “not live someone else’s life”. The people who suffer due to the policies of Apple most notably in China are simply not part of the “we” that people are choosing to become, otherwise “we” would not allow it to happen. The environmental damage and exploitation would simply not be allowed if it was in “our” country or “our” community. Where Marx was right (Capital Volume I and III) is that commodity fetishism links the subjective aspects of economic value and objective reality. The value groups assign to material objects are transformed from arbitrary social impositions into very real social forces in the form of prices, which for Apple are sky-high. Marx argued that “primitive” societies fetishised unexplainable phenomena as magical and thus they became sacred or taboo. Under capitalism, people attribute special powers to objects and imbue them with symbolic meaning which then became part of an objective reality reflected in prices. What Marx did not predict was that people would attribute special powers to brands and individuals who are powerful agents in reproducing the exploitative and environmentally destructive social relations, which Apple users celebrated on the 6^th October 2011. Globally dispersed shrines to Steve Jobs do not merely fetishise products they fetishise a brand and a person as symbols of who we are and the world we want to live in. This is a world which celebrates gadgets and instantaneous yet transient pleasure to the detriment of the lives and life opportunities of the poor and globally marginalised.

It is appropriate in all discussions of identity to ask where we-ness comes from, who it includes, and who it excludes. Here, we turn to the ancient Tibetan philosopher, Nagarjuna:

“The essence of entities

Is not present in the conditions,

If there is no essence,

There can be no otherness-essence.”

There can be no Self without Other and there can be no Mac user without a PC user to define itself against. Our identities have no essence. They can only be defined by what they are not. We are who we become and how we define ourselves to the exclusion of others. We can choose to become globalised citizens who take responsibility for our actions or at the very least acknowledge their implications. We are choosing not to. There is little about the symbolism of Apple which is young, fresh, and innovative. Apple is reflective of far older forms of community boundary drawing which divide people into us and them through the manipulation of symbols which demand loyalty and convince people they are all individuals. Steve Jobs was a smart man. He once said "Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life". If only those worshipping at his altar could heed this advice when they ask “who am I?” and “what type of world do I want to live in?”. When we face death Apple will provide no solace.

The End of Community?

Nearly forty years ago Maurice Stein’s classic book The Eclipse of Community stimulated a debate on the meaning of community. This followed from his argument that in contemporary or post-modern times we are witnessing the end of community as we know it. More recently Anders Breivik, the far right, self-proclaimed “Marxist hunter”, guilty of the murder of 69 Norwegians, proclaimed the 1950s as a time of community: “Our homes were safe…public schools were excellent…most men treated women like ladies”. It seems every generation melodramatically and conservatively laments the end of familiar forms of social organisation and ways of life to which they are accustomed. People seem to fear social change and they imbue the idea of community with a comfortable and wholly positive familiarity. However, social anthropologists such as Anthony Cohen, have long told us that while community consists of a sense of belonging and inclusion we think of as positive, it is at the same inherently exclusionary. People who do not live in Birmingham are excluded from the local community of Birmingham, those who don’t attend church are necessarily excluded from church going communities, and non-Europeans are excluded from the European community if indeed there is such a thing.

Reviewing the media response to the August riots across England we hear constant references to community and multiple overlapping uses in the same news story. For example in the one place, we have heard of the Sikh community (religious), the Punjabi community (ethno-linguistic), the Southall community (regional/residential), the British community (national), and the civilised community (ethical). It sounds like we have a lot of community rather than a lack of it. Old and new media alike are littered with references to the response of “the community” with regard to the clean-up of Britain’s streets by ordinary people following the riots. Here, as in general popular usage, community is seen as something inherently positive, inclusionary, and something of which we generally morally approve. However, this conceals that belonging and social bonds are often formed through ways of life which we do not approve of and amongst individuals we may detest. One thing overlooked in popular debates on the riots is that gangs are a type of community: social groups with a sense of belonging, cohered through face-to-face contacts and the use of Blackberry messenger services in this age of global communications. As far back as 1927, sociologist Frederic Thrasher wrote in The Gang: A Study of 1,313 Gangs in Chicago that gangs were characterised by “meeting face to face, milling movement through space as a unit, conflict, and planning. The result of this collective behaviour is the development of tradition, unreflective internal structure, esprit de corps, solidarity, morale, group awareness, and attachment to a local territory”. Group awareness or belonging, solidarity, and attachment to a local territory are perhaps the fundamental bases of community. The speed by which gangs were able to move from one looting site to another in huge numbers connected through Blackberry exhibited both organisation and solidarity. What appeared to be gangs on Bethnal Green road chanted “Bethnal Green” as they looted Tesco. Residents of Ealing Green recounted in interviews how gangs from other, less leafy parts of Ealing chanted the names of their housing estates as they set fire to local pubs. It’s just that the media don’t feel comfortable calling gangs a community because their behaviour is often illegal, seen as negative, and in conflict with other, more ‘palatable’ forms of community, such as church-goers. One may be uncomfortable with the behaviour of ‘gangs’ but we cannot say these examples do not display a sense of belonging and attachment to where one is from. It displays a pride in one’s ‘roots’ albeit in a very different way from those who chose to sweep the streets of Britain’s city centre shopping districts following the riots.

It would seem a huge impediment to understanding why this happened as it did and when it did if we fail to look at how this sense of belonging emerges, how it brings people together, and why people choose it over other communities. Prior to the riots, Barbara Wilding, chief constable of South Wales police described entrance to these gang communities: “In many of our larger cities, in areas of extreme deprivation…many have experienced family breakdown, and in place of parental and family role models, the gang culture is now established". In other words, people have a need for belonging and when they do not find it at home or are excluded from it elsewhere due to deprivation they will form their own community based on its own rules. Joining a gang and partaking in its communal rituals of violence cannot simply be attributed to bad morals (they are at best a symptom not a cause). It is how some people who have to survive or feel they must succeed in specific social environments fulfil their need for belonging when other outlets are unavailable. It may be reassuring to ‘blame the parents’ such that it absolves oneself of blame but people would be less likely to join a gang if their social environment was such that they were included in communities of a different kind.

In many interviews with local residents of riot-affected areas we heard BBC and Radio 5 live presenters ask “what are the community doing?” as if there is only one community and if one does not adhere to its rules then one is not a member. Exclusion from a sense of community has contributed to getting us into this predicament and this exclusionary language is unlikely to help us out of it. My answer would be that some communities were looting and destroying private property while other communities were cleaning up private property. Many will say this type of focus on language, spending time discussing the meaning of community, is merely academic or beside the point. However, by failing to consider how to define contested concepts we allow the media to do so for us. We don’t always even notice they are using politically loaded definitions as they do not explicitly justify their perspective. This then shapes how we think about these matters because they are not explicit. We all say “one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter” but how many of us stop to consider the implications of this every time the word “terrorist” is used? The interviewer on Radio 5 live (10/8/11, 12:50) interrupted an interviewee referring to people who participated in the riots as “protestors” to say “don’t call them protesters, they aren’t protesting against anything”. One can argue this is indeed the case but why do we allow supposedly ‘neutral’ interviewers to determine the way ordinary people are allowed or not allowed to describe events and people as they see them? How can we debate if we are not allowed to describe things as we see them? Are we not allowed to even debate what terms we are allowed to use and how we use them? We see a policing of language and drawing of community boundaries through the popular media, which no one complains is academic because it is seen as in favour of the all positive, inclusive community: looters = scum, street-cleaners = community. We heard many a caller and indeed many a volunteer street-sweeper refer to ‘looters’ as ‘scum’ but without intervention or even comment. Now “scum”, defined as “refuse or worthless matter” appears to be the very antithesis of inclusion and membership in community; the refuse we must get rid of. We are allowed to use this term to describe someone stealing a mobile phone from a shop but are we allowed to call executives of Vodafone scum for dodging £4.8 Billion in taxes if we so desired? I doubt it. Yet in my book this was theft of £4.8 Billion from our public services which pales in comparison to the theft of a mobile phone. Some people do indeed call Vodafone executives scum in private but given that we do not hear such references on our airwaves my guess is that we are not allowed to in public debates because they are in positions of power and their theft goes on outside of our vision; they are inside the ‘civilised’ community we are all supposed to be loyal to yet “looters are scum” and must be excluded even if they stole a single mobile phone.

The popular media don’t simply ‘report’ the news, they make the news. By reporting news in a specifically framed way they determine how we are publicly permitted to debate and think about power and violence in Britain. We can see how power works when 16 and 18 year olds are prosecuted and charged for attempting to encourage riots on their facebook pages. Yet at the same time, I lost count of the number of people posting on the same site demanding violence against or even the death of the “looters”. They both incite violence but one is a call from a marginalised community and one is from a powerful one. The law either prosecutes on the basis of codified rules or it shouldn’t prosecute at all. Permitting the promotion of violence against looters but not against private property cannot be justified by reference to verifiable rules. It reflects an ideological commitment to a singular, un-contestable community which, if you are not part of, you are “scum”. One may not like the new forms of community emerging in today’s world but this does not mean we can dismiss them or exclude them without any reasoned debate. Exclusion got us into this mess and this exclusion will make things much worse.