Empty Streets, Dead Society

I was talking with a Spanish guy from Cadiz the other night, a man who had come here for the work. Though a construction worker by profession, he was working in a local hotel.
He had come to England, because England is where the money is.
What he couldn't understand was why nobody was out in the streets at night. Even in summer the streets of our town are dead in the evenings.
They may be poor back in Cadiz, he explained, but they still went out for a beer or a coffee, walked around town, laughed and smiled and said hello.
Why were the streets of England deserted he asked?
I tried to tell him that where the cancer of capital is at its most virulent, the state replaces society, family, friends, church and charity, that we are all watched by cameras, that we are smothered by regulations, that we are monitored, that we are all suspects, that we are told to lock up behind closed doors, to Be Safe, Feel Safe, to hide alone with our televisions and our computers while vigilante thugs roam the streets, that the law of liberty has been replaced by Control.
In a consumer capitalist commodity world, where people worship things, they lose society. For hierarchy to grow, it needs to ever extend the realm of exchange, the kingdom of reward and punishment. It needs capitalism, the numbering and reification of all things.
All experiences, and life itself, are transformed into commodities, to be exchanged, to be given as reward, or to be withheld as punishment.
Society is in essence the free giving of one person to the next. Abolish the gift, replace it with reward, abolish unconditional love, replace it with conditional love, abolish grace, replace it with works, abolish society, replace it with the state, abolish life, replace it with death.