Page 271 - Cultural Theory

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••• Nick Stevenson •••

whereas citizenship requires public forms of deliberation and shared concerns. That
is, citizenship requires a republican ideal that puts active engagement and the com-
mon good at the heart of society. The pleasures of consumption, the declining power
of nation-states, privatization of common resources and rituals, increased mobility
and short-term contracts, and market uncertainty all undermine the pursuit of a
common citizenship. A new republicanism is however only possible once people are
free from uncertainty and the threat of poverty. It is the recovery of social solidarity
through a basic income (guaranteed to all irrespective of capacity to work) and new
global republican institutions that stand the best chance of recovering the ethical
life. The aim here being to reintroduce the possibility of other styles of living other
than one of hyperconsumption. Arguably, this only becomes possible in a society
that has not only become more just through the reduction of inequality, but has also
become more stable and less uncertain and fearful. Such a society would need to
introduce a substantial amount of social equality rather than simply expanding the
equality of opportunity. Citizenship would need to embrace substantive social rights
(not merely cultural rights), promote the possibility of active citizenship, and help
devise public places that enabled people to rub shoulders with people who were
unlike themselves. That is, as David Miller (1997) has proposed, a society where cit-
izens have few meeting points with each other will find it difficult to sustain soli-
darity across status and class divisions. Again a republican citizenship would require
both the reduction of material inequality and more convivial common public places.
The concern here is that those that can afford to do so will permanently withdraw
from public places and institutions into more exclusive environments. Without more
substantive features, expecting citizens to consume less and deliberate more con-
sumerism will continue to dominate over citizenship.

Consumer Culture as Citizenship

In certain circles it has been precisely the ‘demonising’ of consumer society that has
led to the marginalisation of progressive political forces. In Britain, a number of fresh
perspectives around the journal Marxism Today during the 1980s sought to rethink
the Left’s response to consumerism. These voices sought, in the language of the time,
to reject a form of Left moralism, and to engage with the ways in which consumer
society had sought to create a new popular common sense. These viewpoints were
tied to the analysis of a particular political terrain that saw the exclusion of Left gov-
ernments from political power throughout most of the 1980s. While this is not the
place to review the success or failure of such ‘rethinking’, a number of more populist
ways of viewing consumption became evident within this literature. Such perspec-
tives, I shall argue, continue to have relevance for the links between consumption
and citizenship.
Particularly important here was the analysis by Stuart Hall (1988) of Thatcherism
as a political and cultural hegemonic project. Thatcherism was of special interest due

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