Photo by Peter Byrne, taken from Cryptome.org
After hearing so much senseless commentary on the recent riots, from politicians, journalists and self-elected nonsense mongers on social networking sites I decided to try and separate the wheat from the chaff and write a small piece on the issue.
It seems to me at the moment there are two central questions surrounding the riots. The first centres around defining their immediate nature, something politicians have been perhaps most fixated on. ‘Criminality pure and simple’ was Cameron’s polished phrase, parroted by many (one wonders if he consulted his good friends Andrew Coulson and Rebekah Brooks on this one) and coupled with constant repetition of his support for the police and tip-toeing around the question of cutbacks not much else was said of any substance. What has been evident though is a deliberate suspension of the question of motivation beyond just restating the desire of the rioters to engage in ‘criminality pure and simple’.
Moreover, any attempt to explore the social origins of the riots has been met with a defamatory response, accusing those who do of somehow engaging in a justification of the actions of those involved. However a point that must be made crystal clear, and one that seems to have escaped so many, is that to ask a question about the social origins of any phenomenon is separate from any question about the phenomenon’s legitimacy or legality. In this sense it is quite possible to explore the social origins of the rioting whilst wholesale condemning the looting, violence and stupidity of what we have seen across Britain in the last week.
As a keen political activist I myself wanted to take stock for a moment about the nature of the rioting rather than just accepting the media’s account of events, since it seemed at first linked more specifically to the shooting of Mark Duggan. However as images and information was circulated in more articulate and trustworthy places it became clear that the rioting did not have an overriding political basis, that is to say that whilst there was certainly a political dimension to the riots (in the sense that all social action of this kind has some link to the political structure of a society) it was not the overriding motivation. Rather the motivation seemed more simple, base and in the end lacking in any substantive value or positivity. It became clear to me that rather than being in any clear sense an opposition to society, the establishment or indeed the rule of capital and profits this was just another expression of it.
The rioters seemed motivated by the very same values (or lack of values) that pervade Neo-Liberal Western societies, a kind of mindless individualism with an entrenched desire for the possession of material wealth and goods. The retort to my thought at this stage would be the overtly violent nature of the rioting, a kind of direct violence that Western societies have long since abandoned.
Governments have developed much more successful and legitimised ways of engaging in violence against people that does not require looting or mugging. The kind of violence we saw in the riots – individuals against individuals, and individuals against property – is something that is not tolerated in Western societies. It is indeed this aspect of the rioting that shocked most people, the indiscriminate valueless nature of the actions.
However both the origins and nature of the riots can be traced back to a key problem of value. However by ‘value’ I do not mean the kind of crass ‘family values’ or ‘good values’ that Cameron often sets his stead by but rather a more overarching lack of value which pervades the whole of society, from corrupt politicians fiddling their expenses, to media phone hacking, to greedy investment bankers.
In a society in which the most pervasive force is the desire for money and possessions, where anything from education to health care is sold off to the highest bidder under the instruction that if it cannot generate a profit then it is failing, then it is no surprise that groups of people who see and grow up in a world of greed, selfishness and violence decide to engage in similar acts of greed, selfishness and violence. In the end though it is not a matter of saying that the rioting was equal to the banking scandal (or any of the other scandals) – both caused the loss of livelihood for lots of innocent people due to the stupidity and greed of others. It is a matter of seeing that in a society in which we have sacrificed any overarching purpose to our existence bar the possession of a car, a mortgage, a big TV and in a sense the possession of money for its own sake, then we are left with a vacuum.
For those that possess all these worldly goods life is satisfactory, we have no need for violence, looting or rioting. But for those that don’t but who share the same stupid selfish base values it is easy to see why they would choose to loot a shop, burn a building or mug someone. In this sense I hope that the only positivity to come out of the riots will be this realisation, that for as long as we have a government, a media, a private and public sector and indeed a world in which the overriding value is greed and the pursuit of material wealth for the individual then we will continue to see individuals and societies in general engage in actions which are greedy, base and lacking in substantive value.
Jonathan Mitchell (Mode)
