Police and Thieves: Making Sense of the English Riots

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Police and Thieves: Making Sense of the English Riots

SELECTED EXCERPTS ONLY --

Yet the riots bleakly mirror the state of working-class Britain. The initial demonstrations, over the death of a local young man, Mark Duggan, stoked long-simmering hatred for the police, who are notorious for mistreating black and Asian youth (paralleling the situation in U.S. cities).

At the same time, youth struggle with massive unemployment, especially in poor neighborhoods like Tottenham, and their government coddles big business while slashing basic welfare services. Though it's not inevitable that these trends will provoke disorder, it's clear that youth have little incentive to conform to a social order that makes them feel utterly powerless. Daily Telegraph columnist Mary Riddell warns that “In uneasy societies, people power—whether offered or stolen—can be toxic.”

Yet there's a palpable absence of a coherent left or labor movement to harness this aggression and channel dissent into positive action.

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.

Full article --
http://www.inthesetimes.com/working/entry/11817/police_and_thieves_making_sense_of_the_english_riots/



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Further points from the article --

Social welfare has been under attack by British government -- as well as "equitable opportunities"

for employment and education.

There is a call for young people to unite in a massmovement -- uniting with workers who are

also fighting back --

These riots are seem as echoing earlier history of anti-establishment revolt patterns

There has certainly been a "demonizing of youth" by capitalist press and government --

Primary question: Where is organized labor? And any organized massive movement?

These are the thingsthat politicians fear --

Seems -- like America -- many are suffering "dehumanizing oppression" -- while the

capitalist press encourages "blaming of the victims."



JUST WANT TO MENTION HERE THAT AS I LISTENED TO A BRITISH NEWS REPORT YESTERDAY I WAS

STRUCK BY A COMMENT WHICH MADE ME STOP BREATHING FOR A MOMENT --

SOMEONE WAS NOTING THE LONG TIME ABSENCE OF ANY TRUE AND PERMANENT LIBERAL LEADERSHIP -- !!

JUST THINK ABOUT THAT --

ESPECIALLY SINCE WE HAVE HAD MORE THAN 50 YEARS HERE OF RW POLITICAL VIOLENCE WHICH HAS

REMOVED OUR LIBERAL LEADERSHIP WHICH HAS NEVER RISEN AGAIN --

RATHER, WE CAN ONLY NOTE THAT LIBERAL LEADERSHIP IN AMERICA IS TAKEN OUT BEFORE IT CAN

EVEN ACTUALLY RISE!

WHY DIDN'T IT OCCUR TO ME MUCH EARLIER THAT WHAT IS HAPPENING HERE IS HAPPENING EVERYWHERE?

[starroute]

1. Why is this getting recs but no discussion?

There are a couple of crucially important ideas in your post:

1) The lack of effective leadership and a purposeful movement on the left opens the way for disorder and mindless lashing out at authority.

2) The right has made destruction of any effective leadership on the left one of its chief goals since the McCarthy era and is still doing it.


Organized labor isn't going to help when the real problem is not the working class but the unemployed and marginally employed. The people who really need to be brought together can't be reached through a common workplace but only through their communities.

And the right already knows this and has been preemptively destroying groups like ACORN and demonizing community organizers. But we can't let that stop us -- we have to take it as a sign that this is the direction we need to move.

Not a political movement. Not a protest movement. But a real kickass community-based movement combining a uncompromisingly radical message with effective work on the local level in terms of basic needs: decent housing, healthy food, affordable medical care. A movement that would also create local projects to provide meaningful jobs and work experience.

This is the prospect that terrifies the right. They would rather impoverish people and then institute a police state to keep them down than allow any form of people power to get a toehold. And they will do their best to head off any kind of community organizing that could lead to genuine social change.

But that's our key. We have to be precisely what they hate and fear the most.

[starroute]

2. Oh, yeah -- and about that police state part

This is the other side of the equation. Since the 1970's, our police apparatus has been increasingly militarized and our prison population has soared precisely as the welfare state had been demolished -- and there is a direct relationship between the two.

Welfare empowers people. We've heard a lot of the opposite argument -- that it weakens families, takes any incentive for self-improvement, and so forth. But I would suggest that this is true only when it is deliberately structured to keep the poor helpless and dependent and deny them any effective route out of their poverty.

Specifically, our current system tells people that they can only escape from poverty as individuals -- by getting training, becoming gainfully employed, and leaving the rest of the underclass behind. It completely denies the possibility of helping the poor collectively -- because that would be communism, of course. And it is very effective at humiliating people, making them jump through hoops, and teaching them that they have to be submissive to the social order as it currently exists if they want to survive.

And yet, as distorted and corrupted as our current system is is, welfare is still empowering when compared to the alternative -- which is heavy-handed policing, criminalization of everyday activities like drug use, and the reduction or elimination of citizenship rights for a broad segment of the population.

The only genuine approach to promoting the general welfare, as I see it, would begin with collective and environmental approaches. It would focus like a laser on giving people clean, safe, healthy neighborhoods to live in. And beyond that, it would provide the financial and technological tools for them to improve their own situation -- with necessary protections from organized fraud, but without obsessing about whether particular individuals might be abusing those tools.

If we don't do something like that, if we remain on our present course, the only alternative is one of suppression, continued loss of freedoms we still take for granted, and ever more widespread and more grueling poverty.

Much of the right wouldn't mind that at all. The current push for austerity is designed to produce exactly that result. And we can't stop it at the level of the policy-makers. We have to begin at the grassroots, and we have to begin right now.

[defendandprotect]

3. Fantastic posts ...

a lot to be said for all of your ideas --

As far as "organized labor" -- I think what they mean in Britain is that they are

leaving a void -- they are not telling the world why these protests are happening -- *


Also, no oin should think of "labor" without understanding that we are all labor --

even the unemployed. We've had some kind of an effort here to UNIONIZE them, but

I haven't heard anything about progress made.


If everyone understood that they are labor and would UNITE together simply on that

point, we could pull everyone from their jobs -- sit around a month or so and develop

the UNION scale for every job that we all do -- and offer the services back to

corporations/businesses --

HOWEVER, IT WOULD HAVE TO COME AT OUR RATES AND WITH STATED BENEFITS -- LONGER

VACATIONS, 5 HOUR WORK DAY, AND FORCING THE GOVERNMENT TO UNIVERSAL HEALTH CARE!

You can kill people but it's almost impossible to kill an idea!!



If we also look where our money is going here in America it is to the Military Intelligence

Industrial Complex -- if we want to free up the budget/debt then we have to put an end

to the national security state here.


Don't know where the money is going in Britain, but obviously is falling into hands of

elites one way or another -- either via corporations or monarchy? Whatever?


The anti-war movement has to get united again at our town levels and keep pushing until

we bring these wars to a halt!!

And, it takes nothing but one citizen appearing in a town with a poster which says ....

"End the wars" --




* As for "voids," let's also remember that corporate money buys a lot of silence and

imposes a lot of silence on liberal organizations, from the Dem Party and Dem elected

officials to unions!! Think in order to have sense of what women's groups are saying

you'd have to click on one of their websites!! Certainly women and their concepts of

freedom are always a huge threat to patriarchy/fascism.

[defendandprotect]

4. kr

[defendandprotect]

5. Obviously because of the parallel to our own situation -- few want to face ... !!!