By John Ballard
The most dangerous creation of any society
is the man who has nothing to lose.
-James A. Baldwin
�History is strewn thick with evidence that a truth is not hard to kill,
but a lie, well told, is immortal.�
-Mark Twain
Readers seeking quick, clever explanations can skip this post and return to whatever cloud you call home. My own views are too complicated to reduce to a few paragraphs, but they start with economic disparities among mixed populations living in close proximity and continue with the unintended consequences of Conservative principles blindly followed.
?Five Quick Points About the Riots by Kenan Malik
- This is not a rerun of the inner city riots that shook Britain in the late seventies and the eighties. Those riots were a direct challenge to oppressive policing and to mass unemployment. They threatened the social fabric of Britain�s inner cities and forced the government to rethink its mechanisms of social control. Today�s riots may have made the Metropolitan police look inept, revealed politicians as out of touch and brought mayhem to some parts of London, Liverpool and Birmingham. But there is little sense that they pose a challenge to social order, in the way that the 80s riots did, or that they are in any sense �insurrectionary"...
- The riots are not about race.
- The polarisation between the claim that �the riots are a response to unemployment and wasted lives� and the insistence �the violence constitutes mere criminality� makes little sense. There is clearly more to the riots than simple random hooliganism. But that does not mean that the riots, as many have claimed, are protests against disenfranchisement, social exclusion and wasted lives.
- We should ignore anyone who talks about what �the community� wants or needs. So called �community leaders� are very much part of the problem.
- Mindless though the rioters may be, those who call for the army to be unleashed, curfews to be imposed, or �robust policing� to be used, are more mindless still, and more dangerous.
More at the link. This writer is new for me. I will be looking forward to how he further develops these five points. The comments thread has a few clues.
?Panic on the streets of London by Laurie Penny
Laurie Penny, 24, journalist, author, feminist, reprobate. Lives in a little hovel room somewhere in London, mainly eating toast and trying to set the world to rights. Drinks too much tea.
I haven't finished reading this piece or the comments thread. The highlightred part caught my attention. I heard the same report she did.
Violence is rarely mindless. The politics of a burning building, a smashed-in shop or a young man shot by police may be obscured even to those who lit the rags or fired the gun, but the politics are there. Unquestionably there is far, far more to these riots than the death of Mark Duggan, whose shooting sparked off the unrest on Saturday, when two police cars were set alight after a five-hour vigil at Tottenham police station. A peaceful protest over the death of a man at police hands, in a community where locals have been given every reason to mistrust the forces of law and order, is one sort of political statement. Raiding shops for technology and trainers that cost ten times as much as the benefits you�re no longer entitled to is another. A co-ordinated, viral wave of civil unrest across the poorest boroughs of Britain, with young people coming from across the capital and the country to battle the police, is another.
Months of conjecture will follow these riots. Already, the internet is teeming with racist vitriol and wild speculation. The truth is that very few people know why this is happening. They don�t know, because they were not watching these communities. Nobody has been watching Tottenham since the television cameras drifted away after the Broadwater Farm riots of 1985. Most of the people who will be writing, speaking and pontificating about the disorder this weekend have absolutely no idea what it is like to grow up in a community where there are no jobs, no space to live or move, and the police are on the streets stopping-and-searching you as you come home from school. The people who do will be waking up this week in the sure and certain knowledge that after decades of being ignored and marginalised and harassed by the police, after months of seeing any conceivable hope of a better future confiscated, they are finally on the news. In one NBC report, a young man in Tottenham was asked if rioting really achieved anything:
"Yes," said the young man. "You wouldn't be talking to me now if we didn't riot, would you?"
?Who are the rioters? Young men from poor areas ... but that's not the full story
Guardian newspaper.
...there's more than brute criminality here. When incidents like this happen the authorities are fond of saying that troublemakers have been bussed in from outside.
But there's none of that here. Neither is there any sign of the anti-globalisation or anarchist crowds.
This is unadulterated, indigenous anger and ennui. It's a provocation, a test of will and a hamfisted two-finger salute to the authorities.
?Twitter Sees All-Time Record Traffic Spike During London Riots
?�Recreational looting� in perspective by John Naughton
4. The spread of rioting from borough to borough and from city to city is clearly viral. The mass media are busy blaming �social media� for this, but in fact the �virus� could just as plausibly have been spread by television images (as it was, for example, in the Watts riots in LA in 1965.
Either way, it�s just a contemporary manifestation of an old phenomenon. It reminds me of the famous psychological experiment in which two identical cars were abandoned, one on a street in Palo Alto, the other in a downmarket part of New York. The New York car was vandalised and stripped instantly, but the one in Palo Alto remained untouched for a week. Then the experimenters smashed its windscreen � with the result that the vehicle was comprehensively trashed in a day. In other words, in normal circumstances, the behavioural barrier to smashing a shop window is quite high. But once one shop has been violated, then the barrier is immediately lowered. When a dozen shops have been done, then effectively all restraints vanish.
And � please note � this is not a justification for the smashing of shop-windows but a plea for a serious attempt to understand what underpins the current crisis. If we don�t learn from it then we�re screwed.
You can apply the highlighted quote from Penny to Kenan Malik for a start off.
ReplyDeleteRegards, Steve
James Harkin, one of the two Guardian journalists whose article was cited above, was interviewed on All Things Considered tonight.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.npr.org/2011/08/10/139421842/whos-behind-the-mayhem-in-london
Check this out by Jonathan Wright.
ReplyDeletehttp://jnthnwrght.blogspot.com/2011/08/thuggery-from-tahrir-square-to-dalston.html
In a sophisticated industrial democracy of the kind Britain claims to be, politicians have a responsibility to set the social and economic parameters that enable parents, schools and employers to bring up, educate and train well-informed and law-abiding citizens who feel they have a stake in their communities and wider society (and ideally the whole world), who are able to contribute and are rewarded fairly for their contributions. If there are thousands of young men roaming the streets without work, without regular incomes, and with no inclination or incentive to improve themselves, then the politicians must share the blame. It may have been the Thatcher government ('there is no such thing as society') or the Blair government, which shared many of Thatcher's emphasis on pleasing the middle classes, but government cannot pass the buck to parents, teachers and social workers. Other governments in Europe have done better, enabling more social mobility and working harder to protect the small minority who, for a variety of reasons, will inevitably not qualify for well-paid employment.
The looters have not helped their cause, with their offhand comments about 'nicking free stuff', taking their taxes back, 'everyone else was doing it', or sticking it to the Feds. It would be reassuring to hear them voice a coherent analysis of their plight and channel their energies into political activism that might ameliorate their circumstances. But that may be a reflection of British society's failure to encourage political participation at the base. Not enough commentators have said much about the elite's condonement of illegal activity by powerful media corporations, members of parliament with their outrageous expense claims, members of the royal family with their dubious money-making schemes, not to mention the bankers who cost the taxpayers many billions of pounds with their reckless lending practices.
To go back to Egypt, the elites in both countries have found a useful word to dismiss those who challenge their cosy world - thugs. In both cases it implies thoughtless apolitical violence by an underclass that does not deserve a hearing. Of course, if we are to live in a state of law, looters and thugs must be arrested and punished. But in the long term, unless we work to create a society without large numbers of people living on the edge, we should not be surprised if the streets erupt from time to time.
Upon further reflection Kenan Malik, cited above, comes up with a more nuanced take on the riots than his initial notes suggest. Noting how the political Right has hijacked the case for morality, he argues that a moral framework is equally important to the Left.
ReplyDeleteThe fact that the right has appropriated the language of morality has led many on the left to ignore moral arguments, indeed often to see such arguments as reactionary. That is a fatal mistake. Morality is as important to the left as it is to the right, though for very different reasons. There is no possibility of a political or economic vision of a different society without a moral vision too.
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There is little doubt that that poverty and joblessness scar large areas of Britain and that the vicious public spending cuts will vastly exacerbate the problem. Tottenham, for instance, is among London�s poorest boroughs, with 54 applicants chasing every registered job vacancy. Britain is less equal, in wages, wealth and life chances, than at any time for a century. A map of the London riots matches almost exactly the map of the most deprived areas in London.
And yet, it is difficult to view the rioters simply as members of an �underclass�. �Many of the people involved�, the criminologist professor John Pitts suggested, �are likely to have been from low-income, high-unemployment estates, and many, if not most, do not have much of a legitimate future�. In fact the rioters appear to be far more socially diverse. Among the first looters who appeared in the courts this week were a graphic designer, a youth social worker, an estate agent, a teaching assistant, a forklift operator, a lifeguard, a chef, a postman, a hairdresser and students. How representative these are of the rioters as a whole remains to be seen. The picture emerging, however, is one of riots in which it was not just the jobless and the poverty stricken who were causing the mayhem.
What the riots revealed was a second kind of poverty that also stalks Britain, that as well as economic poverty there exists moral poverty, too. Television pictures of a group of youths pretending to help a young man injured in the riots while casually, and callously, robbing him were flashed across the world this week, pictures that seemed to express the moral deficit of the rioters. It is striking how little the rioters seemed to care for their own communities and how self-destructive their actions appeared to be.
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Because the right has appropriated the arguments about moral failure, many on the left have rejected moral arguments altogether. The left talks much about the social and economic impact of neo-liberal policies. But little about its moral impact. Such willful blindness is dangerous. The questions about economic and social poverty, about unemployment and the cuts, are closely related to the questions about moral poverty, about the breakdown of social solidarity and the rise of a nihilistic culture. There can be no challenge to mass unemployment and the imposition of austerity without the restoration of bonds of social solidarity. We cannot, in other words, cannot confront economic poverty if we do not also confront moral poverty. We need to remake our own language of morality, reforge our own moral norms.
He concludes by noting it was local people who still retain the makings of what he sees as a nascent but crippled social morality.
Yet another closer look at possible root causes of riot behavior. David Harvey is a Distinguished Professor at the City University of New York (CUNY), Director of The Center for Place, Culture and Politics, and author of numerous books. He has been teaching Karl Marx's Capital for nearly 40 years.
ReplyDeleteBut the problem is that we live in a society where capitalism itself has become rampantly feral. Feral politicians cheat on their expenses, feral bankers plunder the public purse for all its worth, CEOs, hedge fund operators and private equity geniuses loot the world of wealth, telephone and credit card companies load mysterious charges on everyone�s bills, shopkeepers price gouge, and, at the drop of a hat swindlers and scam artists get to practice three-card monte right up into the highest echelons of the corporate and political world.
A political economy of mass dispossession, of predatory practices to the point of daylight robbery, particularly of the poor and the vulnerable, the unsophisticated and the legally unprotected, has become the order of the day. Does anyone believe it is possible to find an honest capitalist, an honest banker, an honest politician, an honest shopkeeper or an honest police commisioner any more? Yes, they do exist. But only as a minority that everyone else regards as stupid. Get smart. Get Easy Profits. Defraud and steal! The odds of getting caught are low. And in any case there are plenty of ways to shield personal wealth from the costs of corporate malfeasance.