During his recent election campaign, British Prime Minister David Cameron launched a conservative manifesto calling for the advent of a “big society” or in other words empowered the citizenry and a more responsible society. Following rioting in Tottenham and other British suburbs, Cameron was later forced to admit in the House of Commons that the UK is instead of big a sick society.
Honk! Magazine Issue #5, 31 October 2011
Cameron is a product of the Britain upper class, which bases its authority on peerage, gentry, and hereditary privilege. Therefore it is not surprising that the Prime Minister labeled the looting and burning that took place as criminal acts produced by a general national moral decline caused by bad parenting, poor teaching, and a perverse inner-city subculture. However, Cameron is oddly right when he says that this society is sick, but unfortunately, it is not the underclass and those who are marginalized who are ill. Today, it is all of European society that is sick.
Cameron did not understand clearly, however, that today across Europe, there is new serious social unrest, which does not have a single cause. It is fed by three intense factors: the spread of poverty, the retrenchment of social mobility, and a deep distrust, even basic contempt, toward all politics and politicians.
The West, throughout the Cold War, was convinced – and rightly so – of the superiority of its liberal institutions. These were both democratic and participatory. But in time, those without a strong culture of political morality slowly became the convenient home of sleazy profiteers. Cameron forgot to mention that among his closest associates there are a dozen, at the end of the last Parliament, who were forced not to run again. They had defrauded the tax authorities and obtained parliamentary illegal reimbursements. As consequence, Cameron did not blame Britain’s recent tabloid phone hacking scandals and the improper relationships between police and journalists. For this Prime Minister, the moral decline of British society is only the fault of the underclass.
When the British social system clearly went into freefall during the riots, thousands of people living in disadvantaged neighborhoods stormed the stores. As Naomi Klein notes, these people “came out pushing shopping carts overflowing with the goods they could no longer afford—clothes, shoes, electronics, food”. Sneakers and TV’s and mobile phones are not luxury products. It is very hard to argue that excesses of consumerism produced these riots! The rioters did not assault Prada or Harrods.
On the other hand, the ‘condemnation’ of this event by the media establishment was reactionary, a means of escaping and disregarding and excusing the very real and most pertinent questions raised by that outburst of violence. The media simply placed the blame on stereotypical teenagers. British society then reacted through an uneasy populist criminalization of the underclass: Evictions from public housing, threats to cut off communication tools, and outrageous jail terms (three years for a stolen pair of shorts or six months for a bottle of water). Indeed, the government under public opinion pressure wanted and demanded tougher punishments to restore the order.
Ironically, journalists, police officers and politicians – who are now bellowing for more law and order - are those who themselves were caught red-handed, either committing or colluding in systematic criminal acts during the phone-hacking scandal. But in that case, the public opinion did not overreact by asking severe measures against crimes. Why?
For understanding what happened it is important to demystify certain interpretations voiced by the mass media and the ruling classes. Avoiding the political dimensions of any riot is clearly an ideological choice. It is symptomatic of a widespread trend in neo-liberal societies to presume that ‘the political’ has been either altogether displaced by ‘management’ or ‘technocracy’ and that poor people or uneducated minorities are not able to express political actions or ideas.
What is necessary is a broader, more inclusive, concept of the political, which encompasses any and all social actions or has implications for power relations that will allow anyone to see more clearly the true ‘political’ nature of these riots. As Gary Younge on the Guardian argues, “They were looting, not shop-lifting, and challenging the police for control of the streets, not stealing coppers’ hubcaps.”
The British riots and the draconian reactions to them show that today the political class has lost contact with the real conditions of a large part of the population. Prisons won’t teach the underclass to love society. Cuts to their social benefits or public housing evictions will only marginalize them even more. Social peace has already evaporated far too much. The last thing we need is to return to Charles Dickens’s England. Thus the elite consensus regarding the criminalization of riots shows that “there is no longer any language that speaks to a common experience” between the underclass and the wealthier classes. Unfortunately, wealth cannot ever be shared if we do not share the language used to speak about it.
However, if we accept a political point of view when we analyze these riots, are we then saying that violence is acceptable? Smashing a window, looting a store, or assaulting police are all “violent acts”, but they can also be understood as clear, pointed effects of a “systemic violence”. According to Slavoi Zizek, Violence is intrinsic to a political-economic system predicated on inequality of wealth. In short, violence is a key feature of contemporary societies inasmuch as its social disparities are growing in intensity and number. Therefore, the British rioters were reacting to a violent system, one in which the rioters are systemically excluded from equal access to resources. But then what does “equal’ mean? Equal opportunity or equal entitlement and the right to grab what you believe you deserve as politicians and bankers constantly do?
Indeed, Antonio Negri is correct in suggesting the recent London riots should be considered for their “radical” diversity. These riots can be characterized as radical because the youth involved rejected an authority that they simply do not or perhaps will not recognize anymore. And as Ben Whitham has brilliantly observed in a comment: Yes there was “mindless violence” in terms of unplanned resentment that translated into the destruction of property and clashes with the police. Yes, there was “opportunistic” thieving of the most common commodities that range from the cell phone to sportswear. Yes, the rioters were “enjoying themselves”, drinking and dreaming for a night to be stronger than authority power. And no, there were no a political agenda, no leaders, no engagements with the mainstream political discourse. But these riots were not simply “inexplicable.” They can be explained by a collective rejection of the inevitable poverty, unemployment, discrimination and police abuses.
These questions – as we all know – rest not just in the UK. Today all of Western society – and especially Europe – is in serious crisis. The West was entrusted to the myth of endless economic growth, but this system is possible no longer. It is founded on business and consumption, but only fueled huge debt that financial speculators were allowed to use for their own personal advantage. This society was proud of its social status, from cradle to grave, but Europeans now consume more coffins than create cots, and governments grudgingly have to admit that the welfare state is no longer sustainable. So the crisis created by the wealthiest elite can now paying only a small part of the population and not other segments (especially its youth), which has been left sadly sitting ever more hopeless on the edge of society.
The UK riots have unique roots, but British youth’s alienation is similar to the disenfranchisement behind revolts across the Mediterranean. Hence, the recent economic crisis is not just a crisis of one industry. It is a crisis of the entire economic and thus the entire social structure. We are seeing now the collapse of a whole system in today’s society. For us Europeans, in particular, this crisis has largely destroyed our welfare and our culture of social solidarity. In the future it will be even more difficult to face angry mobs and find solutions that reflect social justice.