But no one will take you seriously if you rely on the Dead Kennedys, so I went back and did what I always do when I think about social justice: re-read the Book of Amos. That is one strange, strange text, and it's foundational to how I think about social justice because some of its most evocative language was used for the U.S. Civil Rights movement. What does Amos say about riots? Or rather, what can I read him as saying about riots? Because of course I don't share any of the referents of the original context, really.
Well... Amos says that the great house shall be smashed to bits, and the little house to splinters. When retribution comes for social injustice, it's not going to be the rich people, or only the rich people, who suffer. The poor suffer even worse. (Dead Kennedys again: "But you get to the place / Where the real slavedrivers live / It's walled off by the riot squad / Aiming guns right at your head / So you turn right around / And play right into their hands / And set your own neighbourhood / Burning to the ground instead.") Here's Amos on people who hope for the day of justice:
Ah, you who wish
For the day of the Lord!
Why should you want
The day of the Lord?
It shall be darkness, not light!
--As if a man should run from a lion
And be attacked by a bear
Or if he got indoors,
Should lean his hand on the wall
And be bitten by a snake!
Surely the day of the Lord shall be
not light, but darkness,
Blackest night without a glimmer.
(translation from Tanakh: The Holy Scriptures_, copyright 1985 by The Jewish Publication Society, ISBN 0-8276-0283-9)
Now, it used to be a staple of stupid leftist talk in the U.S. that some academic or media figure would say that people should have leftist solidarity and join in with rioters (I remember that particularly from an academic whose name I forget during the Washington, DC, Columbia Heights riot) or that rioters should or could act like a leftist rebellion (I remember Michael Moore pointing out where the real slavedrivers live on a map and saying that people should go there after the 1992 Los Angeles riots). I haven't seen anything like that this time. The condescension, hopeful assumption of partial responsibility for the riots (because rioters, after all, aren't ignored like leftists are), and fake solidarity is more subtle this time. Perhaps not even present in some cases. What are some of them?
I'll start with CR. CR is a person who used to comment on a blog we both read, The Valve, and who seems to me to have gotten a lot better, politically, since he started becoming a kind of advisor to student protestors. (I found, from my own student protest days, that it concentrates your mind on what you're really advocating tremendously when people are getting themselves arrested in demonstrations that you set up.) CR seems to have written mostly sensible things about the riots. However, CR also linked to a piece by Owen Hatherley that he found "excellent" and that I thought was pretty noxious. What does Hatherley say? Well, read it yourself, but in part:
Look at the looted, torched places, look at what they all have in common. Look at Bristol, a port where you could walk for miles and wonder where its working class had disappeared to, which seems to have been given over completely to post-hippy tourism, 'subversive' graffiti, students and shopping. Well, those invisible young, 'socially excluded' (how that mealy-mouthed phrase suddenly seems to acquired a certain truth) people arrived in the shiny new Cabot Circus mall and took what they wanted, what they couldn't afford, what they'd been told time and time again they were worthless without.
It's the hippies at fault! No, really, the post-hippies with their tame, scare-quoted subversive graffiti. And wow, the people who went to steal things during a riot would never have known to steal valuable, yet portable objects unless "they'd been told time and time again they were worthless without" them. You see, those chavs can't even *loot* things without being informed by the media-industrial complex in some cultural-criticism fashion that they should desire certain objects to maintain their self-image. Of course, all objects -- even gold bars! -- only have socially-mediated value in contemporary societies, so this isn't exactly new. No one would have blinked if rioters had stolen gold bars. Yet since the shops didn't have gold bars lying around, and did have expensive sneakers or radios or whatever, all of a sudden the rioters are responding to messages about how their worth depends on material objects when they steal them.
I'll move on from there to a post-hippy, Andrew Rilstone (well, really I'd describe him as a classic SF geek, but I'm not sure how that translates into Britishese). His article about the earlier Tesco riot was the best I'd read about it, really. Here's what he writes:
certainly, there were lots of forum comments in the evening post, and on twitter, saying that the people who lived on the croft, the people who objected to tescos, the people who think that chris chalkley's campaign of purposeful graffiti and street art was a good idea were street scum, rats, hippies, crusties, dole monkeys etc etc and that after the riots the next step was to drive us out of the area
just be careful what you wish for, that's all
To make clear one thing that I think is right about Rilstone's account, and bad about Hatherley's: I think that the left should really give up on authenticity via reflexive anti-middle-classism. Did austerity cause the riots? All right. Austerity is a policy pushed by upper class creeps, not by middle class post-hippies, not even really by middle class non-hippies. Hatherley criticises the smug, middle-class people who think that it's better in London than in Paris because London doesn't have banlieues. Well, it is better.
Are the people who care about that really the same people who decided that austerity was what was needed?
What other accounts of the riots did I encounter? Well, CR also links to an article by Michael Sayeau (yes, yes, I know). This article seems a lot more sensible to me. Where it starts to run into problems is here:
Leftists and liberals—of both the “public” and “student activist” stripes —have been incessantly asking themselves questions about the meaning of these riots and the pragmatics of handling them. Should those who have been defending the right to protest in the UK defend the rights of rioters who have looted electronics stores? Would distancing oneself from the rioters imply that previous claims of solidarity with the non-matriculating lower classes and the largely West Indian poor of Tottenham, Hackney, and elsewhere were only valid until the going got rough?
These are good questions, if there is any chance that they will actually be answered realistically. This is the problem of fake solidarity. The left, however defined, is addicted to claims that when students protest, it's really in solidarity with the working class. Or the poor, or at any rate someone other than the soon-to-be-middle-class students. Perhaps it's time to give up on speaking for other people and allow people real choices. Did some of the actual people who rioted actually show up at Sayeau's earlier demonstrations? Then certainly Sayeau should be in solidarity with them, if they weren't among those who committed crimes of violence; they were in solidarity with him. But, from the way in which they appear in this account as an unknown mass, without specific examples of people whom Sayeau knows, I don't think that they did. Why then is it so important for "leftists and liberals" to either defend the rioters or distance themselves? There's a relationship between two distinct groups of people there that seems much more important to those on one side than on the other.
Sayeau writes things that I agree with to a greater extent later on: if you dismantle the welfare state -- if you return to the capitalism of the 1930s -- then you should expect the horrors of the 1930s. That's what I take from my reading of Amos, in any case. The price is going to be paid, even though it's mostly going to be paid by poor people. And he's probably right that "the riots and their aftermath represent a painfully clear illustration of one of the most demonically perverse historical tendencies: that right-wing policies hurt ordinary people and in doing so promote support for right-wing policies." (Is he? Based on American precedents, I suspect that the aftermath of the riots will lead to police training in how not to cause incidents that spark riots. And that austerity of certain kinds may well be backed off on in response to social unrest. Whether the final result will be to promote the right-wing or not is still uncertain.)
I think that Ken McLeod addresses this whole issue more squarely.
The Grand Experiment was, of course, the postwar Keynes-Beveridge full-employment welfare state. Supported by the main parties of left and right, by the end of the sixties it was coming under attack from both flanks [...]
It seems obvious now that the postwar settlement had reached its limits by 1979. But I sometimes wonder if a more rational left than I was part of could have carried it forward, rather than helped to bring it down.
When leftists argue against austerity, they're implicitly arguing for the alternative to austerity, left-liberalism or left neo-liberalism. For Keynes, really, because the social-democratic alternative that doesn't come down to Keynes isn't really there any longer, as best as I can make out. Can there be student anti-austerity protests in favor of Keynesianism? If not, something about the left's myths is perhaps getting in the way. Or it isn't really austerity that's the problem.
P.S. (via Crooked Timber): Science!
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a) I'd say that, yes, the general tenor in the UK right now is frighteningly right-wing, in the wake of the riots. I'm not sure about police training, but there are meatwagons full of cops roving around London (at least) at the moment kicking in doors of the "usual suspects."
ReplyDeleteb) not sure what's representatively "more square" about the Ken McLeon bit. That there were failures on the part of the rational left post 1979? That's not all that interesting a comment. If I limited myself to that pitch of analysis, I wouldn't get around to saying all that much.
c) I'm exactly NOT in agreement with the automatic affiliation of student protestors and the "working class." (First of all, not sure the latter is the right term, at all, for the people involved last week...) Neither are the students. They are for the lion's share incredibly considerate about these issues, and are working to figure out ways to make contact. I'm not sure what the problem with that would be? They most certainly aren't "speaking for" anyone else, though, the students.
Were the "rioters" involved in the student protests? I have no idea. I suppose I doubt that many were. But remember: the students weren't protesting against anything that would harm them directly - their fees are locked, they are grandfathered as it were. They are worried about the next generation of university or - given the cuts - would-have-been-university students. I'm sure many of these were represented in the riots.
d) I don't think Owen's piece is arguing that it's the "hippies" fault. It's arguing that there are urban planning policies in place that are bent on sanitising cities on behalf of gentrifying newcomers and against the poor / working populations that live there. And you have to understand that the "mediatized desires" line is one that Owen and others are deploying at the moment in order to combat something very specific: that is, a frequently registered sense - by both the government and the media - that these riots were simply acts of moral decrepitude that come out of nowhere, that if people were stealing diapers instead of sneakers, well then MAYBE we could understand, but this is just the sign of stupid animals on the loose etc etc etc….
e) as for the overall point. Very few people think that there's anything easily or directly revolutionary about what has happened. (In fact, I can think of a total of one - you don't know him or his work… unless perhaps you've recently read rumors about Lady Gaga and Zizek teaming up). But, sure, there's a yearning to take popular discontent and render it more directly politically viable. I see nothing wrong with this. Activist students did this to discontented but not particularly activist students during the recent protests - this is how movements get made, I imagine. I think you're fighting a strawman here, some sort of imagined "leftist" or "student protestor" who imagines themselves to somehow be instantly and easily affiliated with what has recently happened. I assure you: these simply don't exist.
f) just to be clear - and this is very important to mention - there were no "Sayeau's other protests." This guy Sayeau - hare hare - was in attendance at protests, talked a lot to protestors, bought them some groceries once in awhile, and gave several lectures. He remains in touch with the "movement" such as it is. But he guided nothing, led nothing, organised nothing other than a union meeting in his own department on the subject. After all, he is not a student…..
Thanks for the comment, CR. I should say from the start that you're right that I shouldn't have lazily referred to the earlier protests as Sayeau's, letting one person stand for a group. But I think my basic point is still there: this kind of "defend or distance?" discussion is one that treats the other party as unknown Others, essentially, rather than as Bert, Jane, and Tracy who came to the demo last month and now are in trouble with the police for rioting. If there's distancing, it's already been done. If there's defending, it's a defense that has not convincingly been asked for by people in real solidarity with the student demonstrators.
ReplyDeleteAs for whether the students are trying to speak for someone else, well -- "Would distancing oneself from the rioters imply that previous claims of solidarity with the non-matriculating lower classes and the largely West Indian poor of Tottenham, Hackney, and elsewhere were only valid until the going got rough?" From that quote, there were previous claims of solidarity made. Solidarity with who? With a lower class that existed in the imagination of the students, I'd have to say. Or there really wouldn't be this question of how to respond to the riot; the response would flow from existing relationships. And you can't have solidarity with part of your imagination, so the previous claims have already been made hollow no matter what the new response is.
For the police response, I'm sure that it's right-wing now. But just going on places that I'm familiar with, like L.A., I'd guess that after the initial door-kicking-in, the powers that be are going to reform police operations -- not to make them more humane, to be sure, but to make them less provocative. There isn't really any other possible long-term response, unless they really have the money to make the country over into a police state, which they don't.
About Owen's piece, I think that I understand what you wrote, but I still disagree. He wrote an article about how people *weren't* being forced into ghettos, about how there were attempts made to mix classes together in the same physical space, yet how this wasn't good enough. Sure, it wasn't good enough if austerity measures impoverish the poor anyways. But the people demanding austerity and the gentrifiers really aren't the same people. His piece was a rather arcane example, but still identifiably hippy-punching. The "gentrifiers", in many cases, are the exact kind of people that Andrew Rilstone writes about.
The Ken McLeod piece was short, not an extended analysis, but I think that it does call protests against austerity into question. The opposite of "austerity" is the same left-liberalism that most protestors described as inadequate or actively harmful in previous decades.
a) You seem to be placing everything into impossible to solve double-binds that, were they accepted as the case, would argue for nothing but quietism.
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure - as I said in the piece - that questions of the sort that I described are answerable, or - better - even the right questions to be asked. But to suggest that asking the questions in the first place disqualifies you from the start seems to me wrongheaded. Of course there are class differences, of course the students are aware of them. I don't have time to go into all of the detail about how this plays out (yes - there were students from state secondary schools welcomed into and I suppose willingly fostered by the occupation, yes something called "EMA" (look it up) was a major issue of the occupations, yes they were also tied in with living wage campaigns, union campaigns (including mine, but not just mine - also transit workers, health workers, etc...)
I don't have time to explain all of this, but can just say for now - the students are aware of these issues. Hyper-aware perhaps. Nothing is easy about any of them. But they are braver than most theorists / academics I know, will take them on as they can, and they have to be taken on - your "solution" leads pretty much nowhere. And sure you might be right, it might all lead nowhere. But I'm willing to take the bet for now.
And you can't have solidarity with part of your imagination, so the previous claims have already been made hollow no matter what the new response is.
No, but you can attempt to forge solidarity with those that you imagine might be likely candidates for such. Several hundred people marched up in Hackney yesterday - many of them students. They are looking to work this out, but of course carefully and without illusions.
b) It's the austerity demanders and the gentrification planners that are the same people, not the gentrifiers themselves. Cf the Olympics, a gigantic gentrification exercise, which is almost guaranteed to be a clusterfuck at this point. (If I could place a bet, and get could odds, I'd bet on it not happening at this point...)
c) The opposite of "austerity" is the same left-liberalism that most protestors described as inadequate or actively harmful in previous decades. Huh? Well, sure. So you're saying that they shouldn't protest the rise in university fees (from approximately $4200 to $12600 across the board on the basis that $4200 is a "left-liberal" number? That doesn't make any sense at all, Rich! They - as a matter of fact - would want the fees to be $0, but I'm sure they'd be happy for now with a restoration of the status quo - as would I.
d) There isn't really any other possible long-term response, unless they really have the money to make the country over into a police state, which they don't. Police states effectively operate in lots of much poorer parts of the world, no? I'm not sure that the cost-efficiency argument is a good one. Kleptocracies can pay for the cops that they need.
e) meta-point: seems like your hellbent on nay-saying everything here. We'd all admit, there's nothing happy going on. At least - at the very least - there are two sides in the fight now, even if one is relatively tiny. If someone argues with changed policy, you're basically accusing them of accommodating left-liberalism. So would the answer right now in the USA be to accept any and all Tea Party demands, lest we give in to Clintonian third-wayism? I don't follow....
I don't think that I'm arguing for quietism, or that questions shouldn't be asked -- but I do think that some of these particular questions have pretty much already been answered, and the answer is "The position we [student demonstrators] take on the riots doesn't really matter, because we have no real relationship with the rioters." If people want to forge a relationship, that sounds like an appropriate response. A real relationship will involve giving up on previous illusions of solidarity, though.
ReplyDeleteI guess that my point with regard to austerity is that people should re-evaluate what they do in the future. Certainly I agree that it's better to pay $4,200 than $12,600. But that means that the campaign against left neo-liberalism, or whatever you want to call it, always had something wrong with it.
But that means that the campaign against left neo-liberalism, or whatever you want to call it, always had something wrong with it.
ReplyDeleteAh, I see what you're after here. But no, I don't think the central importance of the riots or the student protests are that they prove or disprove some point about old theoretical arguments... And besides, it's easy enough to think that what we're now seeing is the result of left neo-liberalism.
A real relationship will involve giving up on previous illusions of solidarity, though
You're conjuring up silly spirits here Rich. The student protests weren't a bunch of people sitting around on beanbag chairs, making peace symbols and chanting "Free Palestine." I'm sorry if my article made it sound that way - it's hard to get everything in. Previous solidarity took much more solid forms. I'm not going to keep listing them.
But even still, I'm not sure why it's hard to see that running a major campaign to keep university tuition low isn't already an act of solidarity with - say - poor urban youths. Of course they aren't the PRIMARY demographic at university, but now all access is pretty much blocked for them and thus they are the primary victim of it. Widening (or at least maintaining) access was always at the center of student protestors' minds.
I don't think that a post that rambles this much can really have a claim of central importance. In any case I agree that a complicated series of events like this can't be reduced to some simple answer to some theoretical argument... but I don't think that this is an old, outdated theoretical argument when austerity is what's being protested right now.
ReplyDeleteFor the solidarity bit, I don't mean to pick on the student movement in particular. I think that this is a problem for all of the left, however defined. But in this particular case... is keeping tuition low going to preserve access for all poor people? No, of course not, since there aren't places at university for everyone and won't be whether previous funding is continued or not. It's going to preserve access for that subset of poor people whose skills are such that they can succeed academically. Someone who doesn't have those skills and who wants a good blue-collar job is pretty justified in seeing a campaign to keep tuition low as being students looking out for students. After all, that same money could be spent on getting them a job instead.
The way that the left used to handle this was by insisting that everyone had an overriding class interest and that the left was acting in the interest of the working class. Once it became clear that this was an optional belief, not a matter of inevitable history... well, there are a lot of people on the left who insist that they are in solidarity with other people who they have no real contact with and who have never made a choice to be in solidarity with them. A one-way claim like that works to defend the worldview of the person making the claim, but it doesn't have any necessary relationship to what the absent party wants.
is keeping tuition low going to preserve access for all poor people? No, of course not, since there aren't places at university for everyone and won't be whether previous funding is continued or not.
ReplyDeleteSo wait, that's the criteria for actions-in-solidarity-with? Unless the student protestors come up with a plan that immediately brings ALL poor students into higher education, they ought to knock it off?
It's going to preserve access for that subset of poor people whose skills are such that they can succeed academically.
Yes, and right now that subset is fucked. That is what they are in part worried about.
meone who doesn't have those skills and who wants a good blue-collar job is pretty justified in seeing a campaign to keep tuition low as being students looking out for students. After all, that same money could be spent on getting them a job instead.
Yep - that's the way the Murdoch press likes to play it, in the UK and the USA. Those tax pounds / dollars going to lazy and largely middle class university students COULD be paying to keep you in a job / lower your taxes / whatever. Of course, under no circumstances will they... Obviously, Rich, they haven't defunded the universities in order to redistribute money down the social ladder! Come on, this is spurious shit!
In other words, the students are actually acting AGAINST the interest of the working class because that money COULD but WON'T UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES FORESEEABLE be used in the interest of the latter? Is this what you are saying?
there are a lot of people on the left who insist that they are in solidarity with other people who they have no real contact with and who have never made a choice to be in solidarity with them. A one-way claim like that works to defend the worldview of the person making the claim, but it doesn't have any necessary relationship to what the absent party wants.
So... you're arguing for left groups - say the students - arguing SOLELY in their own interests, never bothering to make (very reasonable!) guesses and assumptions that, say, the starvation of the welfare state will have negative impact on many demographics? That unless the students spend most of their time meeting and greeting people in other communities, they should simply keep their claims to themselves. For instance, the students at my rather elite university shouldn't care what happens at the poor university down the road, as this would be to assume that the students who attend it actually want to attend it when maybe they'd rather - who knows! - not have a place at a university in the first place?
This does remind me of the old days, Rich... you come up with silly arguments that slow everyone down, and while in general you seem to want some sort of left improvment in the world, were people to listen to you absolutely nothing could ever happen ever for all the shoelace checking and underwear adjustment that would have to take place first.
I mean, honestly - just answer this question. The students who occupied my university made several demands in the course of their action. One demand was for a fair wage for janitorial staff. I have no idea how much contact any of them had with the janitorial staff before this - let's assume none for the time being.
ReplyDeleteAccording to your logic, was this some sort of naive / hypocritical act? Who knows - maybe the janitors want to work for less than a living wage! No one bothered to ask, therefore is was a bad assumption? Is that the sort of thing you're arguing here?
I think that it's a safe assumption that anyone working for a wage would rather work for a larger wage. But... really, no contact with the janitorial staff? I realize that the assumption of there being none is just an assumption, a kind of for-the-sake-of-argument example that has no reality to it. But the campaigns for a living wage ("living wage" == the term of art for "fair wage" in the U.S.) that I remember brought in the people affected. In particular, I remember as a student asking the physical plant staff to go along with us on our non-living-wage demonstrations (environmental, in this case). If we're campaigning for them, why shouldn't they campaign for us? If we were demonstrating for lower student fees, and they weren't willing to help us with that, then what basis for actual solidarity is there?
ReplyDeleteWhat I'm saying is that solidarity is based on actual relationships between groups of people, and can't be assumed. The reason that the Murdoch press and other right-wing outlets use the kind of propaganda that you refer to is because it works. Money saved on student fees isn't going to be redistributed down the social ladder, we both agree on that -- it's going to be distributed upwards. But you are developing an argument that you can claim to be in solidarity with people, to be acting in their interests, based on what you think are your reasonable guesses and assumptions about what they want without actually consulting them. You don't think that people resent that?
Meeting and greeting people is a huge part of social organizing. The "shoelace checking and underwear adjustment" is a large fraction of what community organizers do.
Not to get in the way of the debate here; i am just wondering how the long history plays a role in this. We have an understanding of solidarity working for the benefit of the whole across the planet (Poland etc.). We have an understanding that even with solidarity there are elements that, through both malicious and social justice qualifications, have acted in brutal ways towards property and persons (WTO in Seattle?). We have a long and bitterly violent history in Great Britain, dating back millenia, but just thinking more recently of the 50s and 60s riots and unrest (and not including Ireland).
ReplyDeleteSo, getting i think to an authentic point, i ask both of you if you accept that the role of overt violence against authority/corporate oligarchy/government puppets is important?
Sorry not to reply for a while, spyder, but I was distracted by other things. My general impression of solidarity is that it's a word used when people try to convince you to do something because of an identity that they want to push you into, such as when people tell me that I should support Israel's policies because I'm culturally Jewish, or when Christians appeal to Christian fellowship or whatever. It's a convenient package of "I'm speaking for you" and "You should do what I say". People can use the word in a wholly different, authentic context, but then there's a real relationship backing it up.
ReplyDeleteFor your last question, I sort of completely don't understand it. No government puppets were involved when people beat up shopkeepers or whatever. Even the police, tasked to keep people from rioting, wouldn't have done anything else (absent the police brutality) in even the most ideal anarchist society. Because even in an anarchy there are going to be people keeping other people from beating people up, or it's going to be a very short-lived anarchy. The issue of how to handle destruction of property rather than violence against persons might be more complicated, but violence during riots that hurts people really isn't.
I see from recent reports that the government is holding rioters on excessive charges for "looting" a bottle of water or whatever. That seems to me to be an opportunity to build real solidarity between people caught up in an unjust system.
Digby on Solidarity, referencing Chris Hayes..
ReplyDeletehttp://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2011/09/one-big-union.html