ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses the politics in the riots of 2011. In fact, the vast majority of academic articles in the social sciences that address the riots ignore capitalism, consumerism and anything else that might appear difficult and off the beaten track, to focus upon the social context of widening inequalities and falling job opportunities. The tendency to project one's own political yearnings on to marginalised and depoliticised subjectivities reaches its intellectual pinnacle in the work of Akram (2014), who provides the most complex account of oppositional politics in the riots of 2011. The absorption of potentially political young people into the depoliticising surrogate social order of consumer culture appears obvious to us, but Akram refuses to look this painful reality full in the face. Akram draws on the work of Pierre Bourdieu (1990), but she fundamentally misunderstands, or deliberately misinterprets, his central concept of habitus.
