Dealing With the Renegades - Revisited

[littlebabyjesus]

No. Look it up and you'll find it's true though.

There was even a thread on here that discussed the subject in the context of something else not that long ago, I seem to remember.

ok, I'll accept that. Certainly the prison population grew considerably in that period.

It is still mostly about money, I would suggest. That plus the single most important and obvious change to the law that would neutralise a lot of gang activity overnight, which is reform of the drug laws.

I would wonder, in fact, how much of that rise in gang behaviour in the 50s to 70s can be attributed directly to the rise in drug use over that period and the opportunities that created for profitable criminal behaviour to flourish. Drug prohibition has been the single biggest social own goal of the past century.

 

[The39thStep]

There's a lot of truth in that article IMO, but this isn't my experience when doing youth work with excluded kids, and doesn't match with the experience of friends still doing this.

For most they sink into that life because they can't see any other viable option, and it's handed to them on a plate. The alternative route of apprenticeships, learning a trade etc by contrast usually seem like an impossible pipe dream, with few opportunities available, little support, and no guarantee of work anyway (particularly in a recession).

There will be some who given all the options would choose a life of dealing, petty crime and likelihood of time in jail, but it's a tiny minority IMO. Fact is the options aren't there for most, so they slip into this life instead. It's almost the inevitable consequence of excluding the number of kids from school that we do in this country combined with the lack of trade type training / apprenticeships and reasonably paid work opportunities etc.

my experience is from oop north though, so this may be more true in parts of london.

You are right about the lack of opportunity but what about those who don't slip into this life? What do we learn from them?

 

[_angel_]

Maybe not, but who's saying it does?

are you trying to start a fight over nowt?

 

[The39thStep]

Sure and who ends up in court might provide some factual information, at least as a starting point, about the composition of the rioters.

Given the fact that here are likley to be up to 3000 there is a research oppotunity up for grabs.

 

[littlebabyjesus]

You are right about the lack of opportunity but what about those who don't slip into this life? What do we learn from them?

That this isn't a case of simple determinism. Create shitty social conditions and more people will choose criminality. That's all. You can't look at an individual and say what their behaviour will be. But you can look at a million individuals and say that it is likely that x percent will behave in a particular way. For example, depending on the social conditions of their upbringing, a person with psychopathic tendencies may go on to become a gang leader or a successful businessman and pillar of society.

This is why there is no contradiction between condemning individuals who commit antisocial behaviour and condemning the social conditions that they have grown up in and which, had they been different, would be likely to have led to different behaviour from that same individual.

It's what Blair meant by 'tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime'. Shame that in reality he did very little to address the latter. The simple reason why he didn't address the latter is, I would say, that neoliberal economic policies are the number one cause of crime.

 

[smokedout]

Not being snidey - but where do you live?

catford

 

[smokedout]

don't you think most of the people arrested for whatever over the last few days.. not all of them are "kids" and mostly just were caught up in the moment, rather than being serious criminals.

yes round here, and not just kids, there was shit all over the street, of course a lot of local people (most of whom are skint) helped themselves to the odd item

 

[dennisr]

Week after a load of the local gang got picked up for drugs offences.

http://www.hackneygazette.co.uk/new...swoop_on_hackney_gangs_in_dawn_raids_1_983079

I lived on the Pembury for about 10 years. Gave up on the shithole and got transfered out eventually - I still get plenty of information on whats going on despite the superficial 'upgrading' of the estate. Like others have said above, I don't think that most of the wee opportunists joining in - and many now paying the price - were conciously 'led' they didn't need to be but, yep, elements on the estate alongside the police have played a big part in creating the situation that has come about.

One of the down sides of going to that demo in Hackney yesterday was the number of idiots from one particular organisation that still think they have the right to pose on the matter or have anything worth saying. They probably live nearby to the places I live but are a million miles away in their feel for estates like mine. One of the 'demands' they are now making, apparently, is 'police off of our estates'. 'Unrealistic' does not quite cover how i feel when I see these idiots. I'm just glad its a fantasy on their parts. Yep, of course i don't trust the police who have used this estate as a holding pen for decades. Its embarrassing being associated with such fools by being in the same vicinity yesterday.

 

[love detective]

There is confusion in it over whether we are fighting structure or a moral battle....

....how does better morality lead to a better fight.....

....Meanwhile it is shot through with the religious notion of the moral good of work....

... This is religion masquerading as politics...

...lots of half assed 'morality.....

Interesting to hear this kind of liberal bleating about the horrors of morality almost immediately after the article butchers posted up from malik pointing out the debilitating dangers of said bleating. On another thread about liberals there was some discussion about the wealth of differences between economic & social/left liberals - but the one thing that they both seem to share is a rejection of anything even approaching what could be described as social morality (another example of the kind of binary approach to politics the liberal left takes - i.e. if the right make use of morality in their arguments then they have to take the opposite view, because it must be nasty & illiberal). Malik sums it up well I think:-

Morality is as important to the left as it is to the right, though for very different reasons. There is no possibility of a political or economic vision of a different society without a moral vision too. Moral arguments lie at the heart of our understanding of social solidarity

The left talks much about the social and economic impact of neo-liberal policies. But little about its moral impact. Such willful blindness is dangerous. The questions about economic and social poverty, about unemployment and the cuts, are closely related to the questions about moral poverty, about the breakdown of social solidarity and the rise of a nihilistic culture. There can be no challenge to mass unemployment and the imposition of austerity without the restoration of bonds of social solidarity. We cannot, in other words, cannot confront economic poverty if we do not also confront moral poverty. We need to remake our own language of morality, reforge our own moral norms.

Personally i'm not so sure that the question of morality is the right thing though - it's about what is required to ensure that the working class, as a class, retains (or recovers) the ability to be a progressive threat to the existing order - a working class that is thoroughly humiliated & debilitated poses no threat to anything, so surely, as the article suggests, the task of anyone supportive of pro-working class politics is to root out and check/reverse the growth of such tendencies that diminishes the ability/potential of the working class to remain (or recover it's ability to be) a progressive, political threat to capitalist social relations

 

[littlebabyjesus]

What do you mean by 'working class' in this context? The last time the working class was able to affect capitalist social relations for the better, I would suggest, was immediately post-war. But far more people self-identified as working class then. I'm far from untypical of 'middle class' people in the UK in that I'm now two generations removed from working class ancestors.

The middle class has grown since the war and the working class has shrunk, yet I would argue that in reality there has been a fuzzy merging of the two and the interests of huge numbers of people who would be called middle class by most people really coincide with the interests of those who would be called working class. To successfully challenge capitalist social relations again, don't these groups need to work together?

 

[love detective]

post 1979, a huge proportion of people who actually self identify as middle class are effectively there through the illusion of credit - once that all comes tumbling down combined with the slow but irreversible shift of economic & political power as a whole eastwards - a rump real middle class will obviously remain and prosper in the ways that they have always done (connections, social capital etc..) - but nothing like the 'we're all middle class now' notions of before and I think there is a huge scope for the fuzziness you talk off to decline substantially - the resentment and anger of the majority who are squeezed out of that once expanded social & economic space will no doubt eventually find a political home somewhere. At present the only game in town in terms of preparing for those changed conditions, and capable of offering an attractive home for that anger, is the far right.

 

[Joe Reilly]

I think you will find when you see the trials over grooming evidence of this sort of behaviour even if the charges aren't rape. Commiting gang rape or group sexual assualt, for young girls being the victim when they join, is very often part of initiation into youth gangs.

Also rape and the threat of rape, is known to be employed as a form of retribution against the female members of someone else family, if they can't, or are too feckless to track him down themselves. But then again, as has been repeated on here endlessly - 'they're just kids'.

 

[dennisr]

At present the only game in town in terms of preparing for those changed conditions, and capable of offering an attractive home for that anger, is the far right.

If that was true they would be doing better than they are. The far-rights support remains, largely, a passive, electoral support. Thats not to ignore the threat it poses - but there is a danger in overplaying the present situation. I don;t think we can say it is the only game in town.

These self-identifying middle classes (and I would agree with your points about their illusions) have, to a much greater extent moved into the trade unions - teachers, civil servants, public sector. Those trade unions may be weakly led and the membership unconfident - but they have to been decisively smashed. I get the impression that one of the ConDems targets are those trade unions.

 

[smokedout]

yet I would argue that in reality there has been a fuzzy merging of the two and the interests of huge numbers of people who would be called middle class by most people really coincide with the interests of those who would be called working class.

i'd suggest that there is also a fuzzy merging between the traditional working class and the underclass described in the op. who buys the nicked iphones, who runs the drugs trade, where do the traditional working class gangsters fall into this spectrum.

i think the piece is overly simplistic on second reading - the distinction between the working and non working class is largely false, there is too much cross over and the idea than someone is instantly delumpenised just because they get a job in tesco is silly. people drift between the two, lots of those gang members have working mums, lots will go on to work themselves, for many its just a youthful rebellion. i also think the piece falls into a bit of a 'kids today' trap, these problems are not new, im not sure thing are that much worse than they were when i was growing up - they may look slightly different, but there were plenty of young people who were a plague on their communities back then as well.

but what we need is not more analysis, but solutions, and ones as LD says which are based not on morality but on what fucking works. working class people know there is a problem, they know where the problem is, we live it, and where i'd agree with the op is that it is 'our' problem, we need to deal with it, but with ever more resources being stripped away that is going to be very difficult.

 

[Joe Reilly]

catford

So if you have large estates round there, then you will have gangs - the type of gangs who in other parts of london kill for infringing a post code. The way you were talking earlier about just 'a small number of viscious gangs' it was if you had been transported back to the '60's. Back then at least the Krays and the Richardson's tortured or killed for a reason. What the article is talking about is significant social change. The gangs are really just the lumpen's crack troops. The tip of the spear.

 

[smokedout]

So if you have large estates round there, then you will have gangs - the type of gangs who in other parts of london kill for infringing a post code.

yes we do, and they are fucking nasty, but id dispute that its mainstream amongst young people, and a lot of what 'looks' like criminal gangs actually isnt

this

Back then at least the Krays and the Richardson's tortured or killed for a reason.

is just romantic bullshit, these kids torture and kills for exactly the same reasons. the likes of the richardsons and the krays havent gone away and their influence is just as destructive as ever

 

[Brainaddict]

On the question of morals, I think that between equals we can and should hold each other to certain standards of behaviour. However in a situation of structural inequality the moralising between people who classify themselves in different groups is actually just another way to destroy the chance of solidarity. I say 'the chance' of solidarity rather than actual solidarity because we must be honest: there is no politicised working class movement in this country. If you think the lumpenproletariat - or whatever you want to call them - are to blame for that failure then your analysis is fucked.

To clarify what I meant about not wanting to rush to give my opinions on the rioters and rioting, I could also put it like this: I would not want to say anything on here that I would not say to the faces of those kids, and I wouldn't say it without wanting their response. While seeing the absolute necessity of an analysis of our structural positions, I would not create a generalising narrative that sums up what the 'problem' is or what the 'solution' is. I would not want to theorise the lives of individuals in their absence in a way that involved me or even us working out what should be done about them.

 

[littlebabyjesus]

I agree with smokedout. I think it's very easy to romanticise the past and demonise the present.

I also agree that fundamentally the social problems of an estate can only be sorted out by those that live on those estates. But they need the resources to do that. And changing the built environment for the better, which is something outside forces - govt, councils - can do, works. In and of itself, it can help change behaviour. As I said earlier, the changes around King's Cross are an example of that.

 

[littlebabyjesus]

a lot of what 'looks' like criminal gangs actually isnt

Yep. There's a danger sometimes that any group of black boys hanging out in the street will get labelled a 'gang'.

 

[love detective]

I say 'the chance' of solidarity rather than actual solidarity because we must be honest: there is no politicised working class movement in this country. If you think the lumpenproletariat - or whatever you want to call them - are to blame for that failure then your analysis is fucked

Are you reading the same article as me?

Much of this destruction can be directly attributed to the 30 year crusade by Reagan/Thatcher/Blair, who, inspired by right-wing think tanks, became convinced they could actually influence how people think. Atomising social relations and fundamentally changing what people had faith in, is, if anyone needs reminding, what neo-liberalism was really about. Having done so successfully, we now are reaping the whirlwind

 

[ska invita]

I think a lot of people found the original article bold and uncomfortable on here and also on other boards. It goes right against the grain of liberal leftism which triumphs the renegades , siding with them as 'victims'. You can see that in the the discussion on here about sentencing of those involved in the looting.

But the sentencing going on does appear to be insanely ramped up, and breaking all existing guidelines. Telegraph's lead story today is that Cameron is going to introduce some kind of 'zero tolerance' punishments on gang crime. This is going to take us down the US path: bigger prison populations with a vicious cycle of criminal behaviour. European countries with low reoffending rates prove that harsh sentencing is not the way to go - rehabillitation, skill building etc. works. Punishing harder is just lazy and easy, but doesn't work. Whatever you may think about 'rioters as victims', more draconian punishment is not the way to go.

What people tend to forget is that those at the forefront of this week's riots are the kind of people who make life in many working class communities a misery, especially for the weakest and most defenceless. For those of us who grew up in the inner-cities, the despicable wanker rifling through the Malaysian student's bag after he'd been attacked is an eminently recognisable character.

Agree there - horrible as the video was, ive seen worse on an average weekday at 4pm on the walworth rd. I was thinking yesterday how this vidclip has become one of the key parts of the media narrative of the riots - if the footage of the 16 year old girl getting lynched by cops in tottenham (the moment that supposedly kicked off the riots) hadn't been so shakey and blury, things might habe been very different, both in media perception and in the intensity of the rioting.

As I said in another thread 'the left' (anarchists included) even were it capable of approaching the rioters, which it isn't, would be met by blank incomprehension if not outright hostility.

a ballsy activist friend of mine who lives off mare street spent a lot of time doing just that, encouraging people not to smash up their neighbourhood - some people listened and talked with her, others didn't. one of the problems with the underclass tag is that it can lead to generalisations such as that these are zombie-criminals beyond engagement. I dont buy that.

 

[LLETSA]

a ballsy activist friend of mine who lives off mare street spent a lot of time doing just that, encouraging people not to smash up their neighbourhood - some people listened and talked with her, others didn't. one of the problems with the underclass tag is that it can lead to generalisations such as that these are zombie-criminals beyond engagement. I dont buy that.

I haven't said that. What I did say was that, whatever the reasons, there are not many on the left liked your 'ballsy activist friend,' and that the traditional message of the radical left is at least as likely to fall on deaf ears among those doing the rioting as it does with the rest of the population.

 

[LLETSA]

yes we do, and they are fucking nasty, but id dispute that its mainstream amongst young people, and a lot of what 'looks' like criminal gangs actually isnt

this

is just romantic bullshit, these kids torture and kills for exactly the same reasons. the likes of the richardsons and the krays havent gone away and their influence is just as destructive as ever

As far as I can see, nobody has said that the gang problem is 'mainstream among young people', but that the gang culture is a destructive influence in working class communities. Nor do I see that anybody has romanticised the Krays or the Richardsons-the point is that when they killed it was about 'business' and not for something as trivial as infringing on a rival gang's perceived territory.

 

[LLETSA]

ok, I'll accept that. Certainly the prison population grew considerably in that period.

It is still mostly about money, I would suggest. That plus the single most important and obvious change to the law that would neutralise a lot of gang activity overnight, which is reform of the drug laws.

I would wonder, in fact, how much of that rise in gang behaviour in the 50s to 70s can be attributed directly to the rise in drug use over that period and the opportunities that created for profitable criminal behaviour to flourish. Drug prohibition has been the single biggest social own goal of the past century.

The problem is that few things ever turn out how the zealous advocates of idealised solutions expect. What you are more likely to get with drug legalisation or decriminalisation is parallel drugs markets, the official and the unofficial, with the latter dealing in new chemical concoctions or stronger strains of those that are avaiable legally, and catering for those for whom the offical channels are for whatever reason closed. The drug gangs aren't just going to meekly walk away and get minimum wage jobs or fall for the polyversity debt trap con. Or else they'll move into something else.

 

[LLETSA]

This is why there is no contradiction between condemning individuals who commit antisocial behaviour and condemning the social conditions that they have grown up in and which, had they been different, would be likely to have led to different behaviour from that same individual.

Who has said there is a contradiction?

 

[_angel_]

The problem is that few things ever turn out how the zealous advocates of idealised solutions expect. What you are more likely to get with drug legalisation or decriminalisation is parallel drugs markets, the official and the unofficial, with the latter dealing in new chemical concoctions or stronger strains of those that are avaiable legally, and catering for those for whom the offical channels are for whatever reason closed. The drug gangs aren't just going to meekly walk away and get minimum wage jobs or fall for the polyversity debt trap con. Or else they'll move into something else.

Yep.

 

[ViolentPanda]

So if you have large estates round there, then you will have gangs - the type of gangs who in other parts of london kill for infringing a post code. The way you were talking earlier about just 'a small number of viscious gangs' it was if you had been transported back to the '60's. Back then at least the Krays and the Richardson's tortured or killed for a reason. What the article is talking about is significant social change. The gangs are really just the lumpen's crack troops. The tip of the spear.

To be fair Joe, one of the reasons, then as now, was "respect". After all, why did Ronnie kill Jack McVitie?

 

[littlebabyjesus]

The drug gangs aren't just going to meekly walk away and get minimum wage jobs or fall for the polyversity debt trap con. Or else they'll move into something else.

I think there's something of a logical fallacy there. Take away the opportunity to make money out of selling drugs and you remove a massive source of potential criminal behaviour. Another source doesn't magically take its place.

 

[LLETSA]

I think there's something of a logical fallacy there. Take away the opportunity to make money out of selling drugs and you remove a massive source of potential criminal behaviour. Another source doesn't magically take its place.

As I said, there will still be opportunities, with the inevitable introduction of new types of drugs not yet legalised (or perhaps never to be legalised), as well as in catering for those for whom the official channels are closed or prove to be not enough. Etc.

Of course, this is all speculation, but no more so than the grand claims made for the supposed cure-all of legalisation or decriminalisation.

 

[littlebabyjesus]

Who said that was a cure-all? IMO drug prohibition has been enormously damaging to our society. Enormously. And reversing that policy is a necessary prerequisite to effectively addressing a whole raft of social problems including pretty much every social problem being talked about on this thread.

You don't agree. Fine. But don't misrepresent my position, please.