"Violence is hidden within democratic structures because they are not radically democratic - Western democracy is merely a domestic convenience of consumerism"
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Edward Bond argues that liberal democracies mask coercion beneath procedures and consumption. When power is not genuinely shared, when citizens do not shape the institutions that govern their lives, violence does not vanish; it migrates into laws, markets, borders, and habits. Elections, rights talk, and parliamentary rituals can sanitize force by translating it into bureaucratic neutrality. Property is defended by police, borders by militarized security, and inequality by policies that seem technical. The harm is often slow and dispersed: eviction, hunger, precarious work, punitive welfare, environmental sacrifice zones. Because these instruments are legal and everyday, their violence is harder to name.
Calling Western democracy a domestic convenience of consumerism extends the critique. Citizenship is recast as shopping, public life as brand choice, and politics as lifestyle. Democracy functions like a household appliance that maintains comfort inside the home while outsourcing its mess. The comfort depends on supply chains built on exploited labor, extractive industries, and distant wars. At home, consumer abundance pacifies discontent; abroad, the costs are borne by the unseen. Domestic can also mean national: the freedoms celebrated internally coexist with interventions, sanctions, and border regimes that protect the conditions of consumption.
Bond’s theatre exposes these hidden arrangements by placing brutality in ordinary settings. In Saved, the infamous baby-stoning scene forces audiences to confront social conditions that breed numbness and cruelty. His adaptation of Lear shows how legality and reasoned rhetoric can cloak oppression. The censorship of Saved by the Lord Chamberlain underscored Bond’s point: a self-styled liberal society will curtail speech to preserve decorum, revealing coercion beneath civility.
Radical democracy, for Bond, implies more than periodic voting: collective control over economic life, transparent institutions, and everyday participation that treats people as makers, not consumers. Art helps by stripping away the euphemisms of policy and market, returning violence from the periphery to the center where it must be judged and refused.
Calling Western democracy a domestic convenience of consumerism extends the critique. Citizenship is recast as shopping, public life as brand choice, and politics as lifestyle. Democracy functions like a household appliance that maintains comfort inside the home while outsourcing its mess. The comfort depends on supply chains built on exploited labor, extractive industries, and distant wars. At home, consumer abundance pacifies discontent; abroad, the costs are borne by the unseen. Domestic can also mean national: the freedoms celebrated internally coexist with interventions, sanctions, and border regimes that protect the conditions of consumption.
Bond’s theatre exposes these hidden arrangements by placing brutality in ordinary settings. In Saved, the infamous baby-stoning scene forces audiences to confront social conditions that breed numbness and cruelty. His adaptation of Lear shows how legality and reasoned rhetoric can cloak oppression. The censorship of Saved by the Lord Chamberlain underscored Bond’s point: a self-styled liberal society will curtail speech to preserve decorum, revealing coercion beneath civility.
Radical democracy, for Bond, implies more than periodic voting: collective control over economic life, transparent institutions, and everyday participation that treats people as makers, not consumers. Art helps by stripping away the euphemisms of policy and market, returning violence from the periphery to the center where it must be judged and refused.
Quote Details
| Topic | Justice |
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