On Post-Modern Consumerist Societies, Crime and Violence

This article aims at exploring the connections between the rise of consumerist values and problems of crime and violence within the framework of a post-modern society. Besides exploring consumerism as such, this article will show that there is a pattern of continuity that runs from the consumerist society depicted by Colquhoun to the current culture of consumption that features late modernity. The culture of control and punitiveness that characterise post-modern market societies will be linked to those processes of otherization and exclusion of the lowest strata of the population which is caught between consumerist goals and lack of adequate resources. Under powerful macro-structural forces and socio-political dynamics, the bodies and souls of members of the underclass are ghettoized and need to find a way to both reassert their wounded identities and fight against their deprivation and misrecognition. It is within such a framework that criminal behaviour, violence and delinquency can be explained.