This study analyzes a particular ideology of austerity as it spreads across Europe and reappears across diverse discourses. This ideology mobilizes the figure of the feckless consumer, who has overspent, who must come to regard their consumption as stupid, and therefore will accept austerity; not just as an inevitable outcome of bad decisions, but as holding the potential for moral redemption. We argue that ideology correlates this micro-frame of the feckless consumer with the macro condemnation of government expenditure and therefore is a hinge upon which the dissemination of austerity turns. The argument is developed by contrasting a Swedish television programme called Luxury Trap with the so-called ‘bail-out’ of the Irish state, as well as broader experiences of a pan-European discourse. Just as Luxury Trap’s hapless debtors are obliged to recognize their own stupidity through a process of brutal mortification, we argue that the Irish population has been mortified by an elite-driven narrative that measures consumption and expenditure as a gross average that reveals universal guilt and consumer excess. We see this powerful narrative implicating entire nations, obfuscating critical political economic analysis, and setting the ideological scene through which deep austerity programmes, ruinous to households and social infrastructures and starkly punitive to individuals, are pushed through. Critical to our argument is the over-determined status of the commodity itself whose invocation is central to the interpellation of a populace as excessive consumers. Instead of analysing social relations and neoliberalism’s contradictions, resentment and critique focusses upon material things, as though, for example, a plasma television was in itself a dangerous problem.

中文翻译：

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指责消费者：意识形态和欧洲紧缩政策

本研究分析了一种特定的紧缩意识形态，因为它在欧洲蔓延并在不同的话语中重新出现。这种意识形态动员了过度消费的无能消费者的形象，他们必须开始认为自己的消费是愚蠢的，因此会接受紧缩；不仅是错误决定的必然结果，而且是道德救赎的潜力。我们认为，意识形态将这种无能消费者的微观框架与对政府支出的宏观谴责联系起来，因此是紧缩政策传播的枢纽。该论点是通过将名为“豪华陷阱”的瑞典电视节目与所谓的爱尔兰国家“救助”以及泛欧话语的更广泛经验进行对比而发展起来的。正如豪华陷阱的倒霉债务人不得不通过残酷的羞辱过程承认自己的愚蠢一样，我们认为爱尔兰人口已经被精英驱动的叙事所羞辱，这种叙事将消费和支出作为总平均数衡量，揭示普遍的罪恶感和消费过量的。我们看到这种强有力的叙述牵涉到整个国家，混淆了批判性的政治经济分析，并设置了意识形态场景，通过这种场景，深度紧缩计划对家庭和社会基础设施具有破坏性，对个人的惩罚性明显。我们的论点的关键是商品本身的过度确定状态，其调用对于将民众视为过度消费者的质疑至关重要。而不是分析社会关系和新自由主义的矛盾，