Is Britain Baffled By Berserk?
By Farooque Chowdhury
12 August, 2011
Countercurrents.org
A single shot – Duggan’s killing – ignited berserk in Britain exposing the advanced bourgeois democracy’s terminus ad quem. Questions haunt the governing system baffled with teenagers’ outburst of rage now impacting British political map.
In London, Manchester and Birmingham, courts with chaotic scenes worked through the night to process the alleged looters and vandals. Police in London raided houses to round up rioting suspects. (AP, “London police raiding houses over UK riots”) About 1,200 people have been arrested. Most of them are poor youths. The court scene followed disturbed streets.
Disordered English cities and towns including London, Liverpool, Birmingham, Bristol, Manchester witnessed scenes resembling war zone: leaping red flames, plumes of black smoke, rocks, bottles and debris littered streets, torched cars and buildings, smashed shops and windows, firebombed police station, thrown Molotov cocktail, and deployed police dogs, horses and armored cars. So many fires were fought in London that led authorities to warn that some customers could face water pressure drops.
PM Speaks
Prime Minister David Cameron vowed on to hunt down the street gang members and opportunistic looters, and acknowledged that police tactics had failed at the start of the rioting. “I say this: We will track you down, we will find you, we will charge you, we will punish you. You will pay for what you have done,” Cameron said in parliament. (Reuters, “British PM Cameron vows crackdown on rioters”)
It now appears that street gang members can outwit or outmaneuver police. Are the police so foolish? Or, is there something else in the agenda?
“This is not about poverty, it’s about culture. A culture that glorifies violence, shows disrespect to authority,” Cameron said.
From where the violence glorifying culture comes? What nourishes that culture? What’s that: subaltern or dominant culture? Has subaltern culture grown so powerful that that can create disturbances with this magnitude in towns and cities?
Cameron proposed more police powers, and said he would consider calling in the army for secondary roles in future unrest. Curbing the use of social media tools would be explored if these were used to plot “violence, disorder and criminality.”
It appears that the “street gang members and opportunistic looters” may turn so powerful that that may require “calling in the army”! Can the looters turn so powerful? It appears that criminal street gangs’ action can impact democratic space. They appear disproportionately powerful! Has the democracy grown that much weak?
Cameron said criminal street gangs were at the heart of the violence. “Territorial, hierarchical and incredibly violent, they are mostly composed of young boys, mainly from dysfunctional homes,” he added.
A few questions can follow the statement: What makes homes dysfunctional? Are not these homes of the poor? Why the society is not taking care of these young boys as they appear powerful to incite incidents that damage private property worth millions of dollars, and require mobilizing police and recalling parliament into special session? Why the democracy is failing to handle these youth without resorting to force? Viewing “the rioters as thrill-seeking thugs who are indicative of a breakdown in Britain’s social fabric and morals” raises questions: why and how the breakdown occurred or what are the forces that breakdown these?
The vows, the statements show state of a democracy, its capacity or incapacity.
Three Versions
Through scores of news, there emerged three raw versions of the Britain berserk:
Cameron told reporters: “This is criminality pure and simple and it has to be confronted and defeated.” “We will do everything necessary to restore order to Britain’s streets and to make them safe for the law-abiding citizens,” he said after the first meeting of crisis committee. “The violence we have seen is simply inexcusable. Ordinary people have had their lives turned upside down by this mindless thuggery,” the police commander said.
All most all authorities forget Robert Kennedy’s observation: “History offers cold comfort to those who think grievances and despair can be subdued by force.”
Tony Lloyd, Labour MP, felt “a sense of outrage and deep frustration” at the destruction. One lady said: “It was just completely lawless.” City councillor Pat Karney “was shocked and horrified to see the ages of some of these hooligans.”
How a decent society generates so many teen aged “hooligans” bent on loot and destruction? What are the roots? Is “something… rotten in the state of” Britain? Is there seed of rebellion in these acts of “mindless thuggery” at social scale?
On the contrary, one British boy boasted: “The streets are ours.” One youth said: “It’s payback for the police p***ing us off.” “There’s been tension for a long time. The kids aren’t happy. They hate the police,” said a teacher.
The contrary-version tells an old “story” well known to but ignored by most of authorities.
An AP news report cited a self-professed anarchist: “This is the uprising of the working class. We’re redistributing the wealth.” At that time, as the report described, a group of youths emerged from a store with chocolate bars and ice cream cones.
The “claim” of “uprising of the working class” and of “redistribution of wealth” is also an old slanted story that has always failed to stand on scientific ground. Working class neither owns the version nor joins the act. Working people don’t enjoy anarchism. Today is not 1917, London is not Petrograd, and London streets are not Winter Palace. Despite the fact, John Reed’s Ten Days That Shook the World describes working people’s attitude and behavior with luxury items of the rich: the working people don’t envy these, with unshakable discipline and sense of dignity the working people don’t touch these, don’t pilfer, don’t plunder these. It is part of working class culture.
There are, a Reuters news report said, “visible inequalities where the wealthy often live in elegant houses just yards away from run-down city estates.” “But occupying the moral high ground is tricky in a country where some lawmakers and policemen have been embroiled in expenses and bribery scandals, and top bankers take huge bonuses even as the taxpayer bails out financial institutions.” (“British PM Cameron vows crackdown on rioters”)
Slashing 80 billion pounds from public spending, rising taxes, modified subsidy program for unemployed, cutting down welfare payments and tens of thousands of public sector jobs through 2015 create a ground for discontent. Prices for everything go up. Tottenham, the place the rage got its first outburst, is said to house 10,000 persons looking for jobs, and each available job has some 54 people vying for the position. In Britain, youth unemployment, in the age group of 16-24 who aren’t in school, is about 20%, the highest rate in 20 years. The inhuman living condition of the marginalized is now again coming out to public view. It is intolerable, miserable, hell-like, and not much different from the living condition of the Third and Fourth Worlds’ poor. Today’s living condition of many poor in the advanced democracy is not much different from the one Engels depicted in his book on the working class condition in that country.
The widespread dissent has unifying causes created over long time: marginalization, deprivation, unheard voices, bankrupt promises, and, in Martin Luther King’s language: “quicksands of…injustice”. Community leaders said the violence in London, the worst for decades in the city, was rooted in growing disparities in wealth and opportunity. The victims of the disparity are, as Martin Luther King once said of an American riot victims, “have been by passed by the progress of the past decade”.
A section of analysts, who likes to forget greed of bankers, speculators and their cohorts, insisted that greed was the “rioters’” only motive.
But no space for greed remains vacant in the human existence whose only driving force is hunger and humiliation. The poor have no power to own the attribute – greed – even in their dreams over their entire life. They lack that capacity. Many of them are completely unaware of the one of the biggest transfers of wealth in history – trillions of dollars for the speculators and cutting public spending for health, education, pensioners, laboring souls. How the poor fed with manipulated feelings and beliefs can nourish greed in their hearts?
A Lost Generation
“Each of the young rioters who clogged Britain’s courthouses painted a bleak picture of a lost generation: a 15-year-old Ukrainian whose mother died, a 17-year-old who followed his cousin into the mayhem, an 11-year-old arrested for stealing a garbage can” worth 50 pounds. The youngster pleaded guilty to burglary. (AP, “Britain's rioters: young, poor and disillusioned”)
The boy, “member of a street gang” is honest enough that he pleads guilty, and he is considerate enough that he has not pocketed billions of dollars of public money to get bailed out of poverty. He has not speculated, has not brought disorder in financedom, and is not sitting on stash of public money handed out to banks.
“Many of the youths themselves struggle to find any plausible answer, but a widespread sense of alienation emerges from their tales”, said the news report. “‘Nobody is doing nothing for us — not the politicians, not the cops, no one,’ said a 19-year-old who lives near Tottenham, the blighted London neighborhood where the riots started.”
“Courts have been running nearly 24 hours a day to hear all the cases since the rioting began. Most cases are heard in a blink of an eye and only give a snapshot of some of the youngsters’ lives. Many of the defendants haven’t had a chance to talk at length with their attorneys, and most can’t be named because they are minors.” (AP, “Britain's rioters: young, poor and disillusioned”)
The brief news report exposes who the “rioters” were. The teenage “rioters” seem have come out from Chaplin’s childhood days, days of cruel civility. (My Autobiography)
Unknown Mutiny Moment
Instances of unorganized public action are centuries-old, when people are frustrated, are in a seemingly hopeless or stifling situation, when pro-people politicians are nervous or indifferent or betraying, and there is absence of organized channels of expression, few of the pre-conditions for unorganized spontaneous civil unrest. Julius Caesar’s cremation stared at an incensed mob attacking the houses of Brutus and Cassius. “Heroes” of the conspiracy were unaware of people’s (in broad sense) pent up anger.
The students’ strike in the University of Paris in 1229 led to its closing for two years. The 13th century student activists were not fully sure of the result of their initiative.
In May 1875, there was outbreak of violence, “plunder of property”, and “murderous assault upon the money-lenders” in two Poona villages. The Government of Bombay appointed a committee on the same year to report on the “riots in Poona and Ahmednagar.” It produced the Report of the Deccan Riots Commission. The committee noted that the outbreak could just as easily have happened at any other place in the “affected area”: “The combustible elements were everywhere ready; design, or mistake or accident would have surely supplied the spark to ignite them.”
Those were the last days of Lord Lytton in British occupied India. Allan Octavian Hume, a retired civil servant in colonial India, observed that the people of India had a sense of hopelessness. He noted “a sudden violent outbreak of sporadic crime, murders of obnoxious persons, robbery of bankers and looting of bazaars, acts really of lawlessness which by a due coalescence of forces might any day develop into a National Revolt.” Hume suggested a safety valve and outlet to avoid further unrest – an Indian association that would give vent to the feelings of the Indians. He formed the Indian National Congress in 1885.
Despite commission enquiries and reports, “safety valve and an outlet” the British colonial masters could not ascertain the moments of outburst of numerous revolts and risings that swept colonial India including the Midnapur rising by people, Solapur Commune by workers, the Khyber revolt by navy sailors.
Elements that feed rebellions, mutinies, civil unrest, etc. – anger, distrust, deprivation, disregard, folly of authority, crack down by authority, and many more – are now known to all. But determining the moment these strike spontaneously – Duggan Moment – is the problem. The moment is unknown. Unknown also is the place of spontaneous strike. It is almost like the Uncertainty Principle. When and where the match of spontaneity will be lighted is known by none but sudden torrent of incidents, incendiary under surface while the surface appears calm.
Britain has faced its Duggan Moment. But why the modern state with its immense intellectual and material resources failed to create a “safety valve and an outlet” in home despite having the experience of one of its civilian officers, who contemplated and materialized such a “safety valve”, etc. in a colony more than a hundred years ago? Similar more questions probably haunt, if not baffle, British elite mind.
The unorganized spontaneous protest in Britain, one of the most violent in contemporary Europe, alert states that nourish billionaire speculators and maintain the political order of financial disorder financial oligarchy creates. With the status quo of stratospheric inequality, mega-corruption, liquidated public services, squeezed down public space in environment, economy and politics, and choked down channels of organized protest unheard voices wait for appropriate moments for more spontaneous violence as that is the only way they are heard by forces of luxury and indulgence.
Dhaka based free lancer Farooque Chowdhury contributes on socioeconomic issues.
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