Across the world, dreadlocked, falafel-fuelled protesters are gathering in their dozens to camp out outside stock exchanges and areas of commerce to decry the greed that exists in our Corporate world. It is an injustice that cannot be denied. People lining their pockets with millions while so many struggle to just get by from one day to the next is far from an ideal model of how to run a fair and just society.

That said, it’s not clear what the end game is, not at all clear what success looks like from these makeshift campsites and Dylan songs wafting in the evening air. I popped my head by the Occupy London site at St Paul’s just a moment ago and there is little space for the extra protesters that would be required to turn the efforts into a movement that might actually get somewhere. I’m not being cynical but realistic. These particular efforts look set to come to nothing.

Hopefully a partial solution to the huge profits, salaries and bonuses that do exist out there will come through the Parliament, and particularly through pressure from Labour, the Greens and indirectly from the SNP (or directly through independence, but that’s not what this post is about). One of the big problems with the UK right now is that wealth is concentrated in London and the South East of England. Pulling and spreading that wealth out to other parts of the UK is difficult when the majority of profits come from market sectors that would not leave London for love nor money.

My hope is to see policies such as the following come into being:

(1) No one salary in any organisation being more than 10x to 20x the salary of the lowest paid person
(2) All pensions being of equal size irrespective of the role taken within the organisation.

But, perhaps there is something a bit more radical and a bit more distinctly Scottish that can be done to ensure a bit of financial fairness across the UK, and to give Scotland a jumpstart to its economy: – create a Scottish Stock Exchange.

Edinburgh is reported to be the second largest financial centre in the United Kingdom after the City of London and, this may surprise some people, the fourth in Europe by equity assets. On top of this, it is one of the fastest growing city regions in Europe,[2] with strong rates of growth in banking and financial services at the forefront of this success. It can’t build a tram, sure, but it has a very strong European and even global reputation behind it that deserves to be built upon.

Yes, despite not having a stock exchange to revolve Scottish trade and dealing around, we are beating major cities that do – Stockholm, Vienna, Prague, Copenhagen, Helsinki, Dublin and Oslo to name a few. Even cities like Ljubljana, Bratislava, Belgrade, Podgorica (Montenegro), Skopje and Valletta have stock exchanges while Scotland does not.

We wouldn’t want to occupy an Edinburgh Stock Exchange, but we could own and mould it in the Scottish traditions of equality and fairness that would perhaps please even the most leftist of potential protesters north of the border. The opportunity to create increased activity around start-ups, business angels, joint ventures and mergers & acquisitions with such a centre in Scotland’s capital would be a golden one that could usher in a new great age for Scottish fortunes. It would also help Scotland build a can-do mentality by having one thing that we currently leave to other nations out there.

Can one agree with the #Occupy protests while still argue in favour of a new stock exchange for Scotland? I certainly hope so.

The latest round of budget manoeuvring is seemingly already underway with the SNP firing an opening salvo towards London in a bid for the Treasury’s purse strings to be opened up a little bit more. With a belief that the UK coalition is cutting to deeply and too quickly and John Swinney afforded little flexibility in the block grant that he has available to spend, certainly this side of the Scotland Bill dawdling through Westminster right now, one can understand why the Scottish Government is keen to increase its spend. The key argument though appears to be something that is called ‘plan MacB’. I don’t know if this is a name given to the plan by the First Minister himself or a hackneyed branding by the media but, either way, it seems to involve recognition that Scotland’s economy and employment is currently outpacing the rest of the UK and that is largely down to the advanced capital spend in the current year’s budget.

Now, we can’t keep on continuing to spend tomorrow’s budgets today, that’s how we got into this mess after all, but there is certainly an argument for keeping the economy going while the volatility in the markets continues (and, despite my being on holiday, I did see that the FTSE has been battered down by 2% in this morning’s trading).

Now, forgive my basic understanding of ecnomoics but I understand that there are two opposite ends of the strategy spectrum. At one end is to spend less, hope the private sector fills the gap and save money in order to pay down the debt and/or deficit. At the other end, we could spend more and invest more in order to keep employment high, growth high and risk money that we don’t really have in order to bring in bigger tax receipts and keep the economy moving.

It’s fair to say that Scotland voted for the latter when they largely backed Labour in 2010 and they backed the latter again in 2011 when they largely backed the SNP. George Osborne and, by association, the Liberal Democrats have backed the former strategy which was working well for a while but has gone off the rails somewhat over 2011, whether you wish to blame snow and strikes or not.

Opposition politicians talk about the grudge and grievance of the Scottish Government’s positioning when they disagree with Westminster and I heard Alastair Carmichael make the tiresome soundbite ‘they’re not a Scottish Government, they’re a national embarrassment’ yesterday which is just nonsense really, just words. However, in this instance, it is surely the case that, despite limited powers, the SNP’s pointed deviation from London’s direction is to be welcomed and while there is something of a cross-your-fingers punt at play here with Salmond’s decision, a bet that backs jobs and economic stability and less cuts is surely the one to go for.

That said, I do still worry, a worry that I had before the election, that the SNP is regularly committing to spending money that doesn’t exist and when the flush is busted, London will get the blame but it will be Scots that suffer. It remains to be seen whether this will be the case in the years ahead but a narrative that involves spending more money rather than addressing the painful cuts that will probably need to be addressed at some point, while squaring off the SNP’s manifesto pledges, will be a difficult act.

However, at a broadbrush level, there is little doubt that Scotland has a preference for Salmond’s strategy rather than Osborne’s and I think it won’t be long, whether through convincing arguments, fiscal autonomy or A.N.Other, before the unfortunately entitled ‘Plan MacB’ is simply called Scotland’s ‘Plan A’.

We’ve been spoilt this week with guest posts, and today’s is no exception. Rupert Read is a Green councillor on Norwich Council, Reader in Philosophy at UEA, and blogs here.

Some of the more interesting analyses of the recent British riots and looting focus in on the role played by consumerism, acquisitiveness, materialism etc., in them. See for instance this Guardian piece on Tom Morgan’s research into the riots, and this column of my own.

And this shouldn’t be surprising. We are thoroughly used now to thinking of our society as a ‘consumerist’ society, and of ourselves as, above all, ‘consumers’. This seems to many of us quite now simply an obvious truth, and in some ways a good truth: think of ‘consumer protection’ and ‘consumer rights’ organisations, from Ralph Nader to Which?

But: what if this self-image were in fact both misleading and disastrous? The term ‘consumer’ summons up images of endlessly-open mouths, waiting to be filled with more and more stuff. It evokes ideas of us consuming the resources of the Earth. It figures us as the problem. But what if thinking of ourselves as ‘consumers’ were both to allow and facilitate the consumption of the Earth to continue (even: to mandate its continuation) and to take ourselves as individual consumers to be the primary agents of this consumption? And what if in fact we aren’t its primary agents?

The concept of ‘consumerism’ is extremely useful for those who want to sell us things. Because it then seems as though they are only doing our bidding. We are the agents: they are merely satisfying our wants and needs. This is exactly how mainstream economics characterises the fundamental nature of human exchange: it’s a matter of demand and supply. Supply exists, allegedly, only to satisfy demand.

I say that ‘consumerism’ is a piece of false consciousness, and indeed a tool for our continued and growing enslavement. The real push for us to be ‘consumers’ comes from producers. It is producers who need to sell us stuff, in order to profit – and the most effective way that they can do is to artificially create in us ever-growing ‘needs’. That’s where marketing and advertising come in. Marketing and advertising are the selling arm of the producers’ interests in our society. They are what turns us into consumers. Mainstream economics conceals this truth behind its rhetoric of individual consumers being the ‘pull’ factor at the root of economic exchange. But in fact, it is the ‘push’ factor that dominates – producers push their products at us continually, with thousands of coded messages a day. They even get us to blame ourselves for the disposal of the waste that such endless pushing inevitably creates: you wouldn’t know from listening to government and corporate rhetoric that by far the largest proportion of the ‘waste’ stream comes from corporations, not from households.

Our economy, our system, our world, is not really ‘consumerist’. It is producerist. Capitalism is a producerist system. Its most brilliant product, its greatest — its foundational — achievement and lie, is to produce individuals willing to participate in it, grateful for it, and in ignorance of its real nature. Its ultimate product, that is to say, is: consumers. It makes you and me into/as consumers… Producerism is a system – our system – the crowning achievement of which is to conceal from its workers and its bottom-level clients (those whom it changes in order to sell its products to them – to us) its own real nature, such that it becomes the accepted wisdom – and it even becomes a kind of pseudo-leftist or pseudo-ecological creed – that we live in a ‘consumerist’ society.

Producerism’s greatest product is consumerism itself, as a hegemonic ideology. ‘Consumerism’ conceals the very great extent to which producerism is hegemonic. The production of consumers, of people as desiring-machines always wanting more, with inexhaustible ‘needs’, allegedly fuelling an endless need to expand the economy (and to eat up more and more of our ecosystems in the process): this is really what producerism is all about.

So long as we think of ourselves as ‘consumers’ we are blaming the victim. What we need to do is to slough off the consumerist self-image, and instead to get clear about who is primarily to blame for the waste, the ecological destruction, the ethicless profit-maximisation, the endless commodification of our world. It isn’t us: it is ‘the market’, capitalism, profiteering producers.

Of course, they aren’t even really producers. Unlike plants, they don’t ‘produce’ anything! They just re-arrange bits of the Earth, with (ever-larger) inputs of energy. But that’s a story for another occasion. For now, it will be quite enough of a transformation, of a truth-telling, if we can overcome the idea that the degradation of the Earth is our fault.

Don’t blame yourself. Don’t blame ‘consumers’. Blame those who made consumerism: the ad men, and the ‘producers’ for whom they work.

To say it again, in conclusion: the ultimate product of our times – the ultimate work of ad-man genius — is consumerism itself, and each of us (thinking of ourselves) as ‘consumers’. Strictly speaking we live in a producer-ist, not a consumer-ist society.

It is to producerism, not ‘consumerism’, that we ought to attribute ultimate responsibility for the relevant features of this summer’s looting. Tim Morgan and his ilk ought to look into the mirror rather more, if they want to know where the buck stops…