Frederick Douglass

"Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did, and it never will. Find out just what people will submit to, and you have found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them..." Frederick Douglass

Wednesday, August 10, 2011

London Update, 10 August

The media continues to cast the revolt as "wanton criminality," and with a good dose of thinly disguised racism thrown in for good measure. One reads the adjective "feral" applied to the young rioters time and again.

No one seemed surprised. Not the hooded teenagers fleeing home at dawn. Not Ken and Tony, who used to live in Tottenham and had returned to stand vigil over the missiles and torched cars littering an urban war zone. Tony claimed to have seen the whole thing coming. “This was always going to happen,” he said.

The police shot a black guy in suspicious circumstances. Feral kids with no jobs ran amok. To Tony’s mind, this was a riot waiting for an excuse. In the hangover of the violence that spread through London, the uprisings seemed both inevitable and unthinkable. Over a few days in which attacks became a contagion the capital city of an advanced nation has reverted to a Hobbesian dystopia of chaos and brutality.


The author goes on to describe the revolt as the "sinister flip side to the Arab Spring," but happy people don't loot. There is no way a capitalist government can concede that the violence going on is endemic to the hierarchical and maldistributive nature of the economic regime, so it has to demonize the rebels by concentrating attention on the worst aspects of the uprising. It simply has no choice but to do so. It cannot ever accept any measure of culpability.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/law-and-order/8630533/Riots-the-underclass-lashes-out.html



Here the author deconstructs the defamation campaign.

London’s feral youth?

The dominant narrative that our establishment figures seem to be offering however is one of out of control feral youths and organised troublemakers looking for an excuse for a rampage. The Deputy Mayor Kit Malthouse commented yesterday that

Obviously there are people in this city, sadly, who are intent on violence, who are looking for the opportunity to steal and set fire to buildings and create a sense of mayhem, whether they’re anarchists or part of organised gangs or just feral youth frankly, who fancy a new pair of trainers.

The image of hoodied no-good yoofs gathered around a glowing smartphone to tweet on the next big opportunity to smash in the windows of a Sports Direct store though seems just a bit simplistic to me.


http://neweconomics.tumblr.com/post/8644354293/londons-feral-youth



Here Michelle Chen (a Clash fan obviously), whose work I commend, lamenting, as I do, that there has been a lack of support and organization.

Police and Thieves: Making Sense of the English Riots

The question of why cuts both ways: systemic ills are undeniably feeding into the unrest. But the assumption that rioting is simply a reflexive manifestation of despair reinforces the stereotype that “anti-social” behavior is endemic to poor youth of color. And while everyone is busy pathologizing youth, they'd do well to examine the prevailing societal attitudes that have quietly aided and abetted the rioters' “crime.”

There's a link between the madness unfolding in the streets and the grand delusion in Parliament that the poor are to blame for their own predicament—a deeply ingrained philosophy that was most recently encapsulated in the “Big Society” austerity cuts.


Well put!

http://www.inthesetimes.com/working/entry/11817/police_and_thieves_making_sense_of_the_english_riots/



Here Hannah extracts the facts from the endless self-righteous squawk.

UK: Protesting, Rioting and Looting Are Not All Equal

But there is precious little nuance in these debates. No one seems willing to separate out the different strands involved: various motivations were in play, from the righteous to the selfish; various tactics were used, from the peaceful to the murderous. And the events themselves can be clearly separated into at least three different categories which must be considered separately.


http://www.alternet.org/newsandviews/article/648043/uk%3A_protesting%2C_rioting_and_looting_are_not_all_equal/



[Bloggers note: Yesterday I made an entry on this topic entitled London Calling...". In it I discussed the media's reportage. Today I received Jerome Roos' newsletter in which there appears a piece (linked below) of the same name. In it he references some of the things I did in mine, and comes to much the same conclusions as I had. I wouldn't blame a reader for wondering if plagiarism had occurred. I assure you I wrote my piece before I became aware of his, and I'm quite sure he didn't plagiarize my blog (if he even knows it exists).

Regular visitors to this blog will note that I link to Jerome's blog, Reflections on a Revolution, quite often, and have spoken in laudatory terms about the work he produces there. He has no need of stealing my work, and I would never steal from anyone. The similarities between our posts at our respective blogs are coincidental.]



Well having just said the above I suppose it may sound self-serving to characterize Jerome's piece as excellent but I'm going to do just that anyway.

London calling: a haunting glimpse into our future?

So when Boris Johnson, as Mayor of London, refers to the social unrest as ”nothing more than wanton criminality,” he engages in an extremely dangerous simplification. After all, violence is a complex phenomenon that arises from an intricate dialectic between behavioral/psychological (individual) factors on the one hand, and cultural/socio-economic (structural) factors on the other. It is in their complex interplay that we must look for answers.


Later.

The numbers, in this respect, are telling. In 2003 and 2004, a whopping 21 percent of children in the UK grew up in households below the poverty line (after housing costs are taken into account, this rises to an incredible 28 percent). One EU study this year found that 17 percent of UK youths qualify as “NEETs” — Not in Employment, Education or Training, “in other words high-school dropouts with no prospects of employment.” The same study found that over 600,000 people under the age of 25 have never had a day of work.

While it would be ridiculous to use such statistics as a justification for the dangerous, irresponsible and anti-social behavior of the rioters, it would be just as foolish to simply ignore this crucial social context and only focus on the “aberrant behavior” of “deviant individuals.” The violence and thievery may be entirely indiscriminate and a-political, but the root causes of it are profoundly political and carry a very clear discriminatory component.

A society where an hour’s bus ride from Kensington to Newham takes you across a six year reduction in male life expectancy – from 78.5 years to 72.4 – is a profoundly sick society. The gap is actually bigger than the one between the US and Nicaragua, with the latter being the second poorest country in Latin America. London, in other words, may be the most expensive city in the world, but it literally contains a developing country within its city boundaries.




This piece explores the pathology of rioting in some depth, and in it Jerome displays an extensive knowledge of social theory. It is much more detailed and insightful than my humble offering of the day before.

http://roarmag.org/2011/08/london-calling-a-haunting-glimpse-into-our-future/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+roarmag+%28Reflections+on+a+Revolution%29



Here's a very good analysis disguised as pleasant comedy.

Love me I’m a looter

As regular readers of this blog will know, I’m from Croydon. Someone has to be.

That's the tone, but there's a good deal of perspicacity in this piece, she writes and thinks very well.

A warning though: In it she uses a word most women find quite objectionable.

http://inanities.org/



Oh I can't resist. Blame Chen.