Dealing With the Renegades - Revisited

[smokedout]

I think it will be a shame if this gets diverted into a row about drugs.

agreed, im in favour of changing the drug laws, but theres not much we can do about them, this is about bottom up solutions to the situation as it is, not calling on the state to make changes, which should be discussed elsewhere

 

[love detective]

except that's exactly what the artilce does do. Right from the start it hammers home the distinction.

you're conflating the method of presentation/exposition with the method of enquiry

 

[butchersapron]

Ah the old Darstellung/Forschung debate

 

[Pickman's model]

Ah the old Darstellung/Forschung debate

elaborate pls

 

[revlon]

you're conflating the method of presentation/exposition with the method of enquiry

perhaps, but i'm just going off the words that have been written.

 

[GarfieldLeChat]

lumpen is clearly a euphemism for black and is therefore inherently racist in its interpretation of the situation.

 

[butchersapron]

elaborate pls

Not really the right thread, so i'll just post this and leave it: marx identified his method as a process of inquiry/Forschung that builds logically to expostion/Darstellung. Silly post for me to have made when we look like we're getting back to the debate.

 

[Pickman's model]

lumpen is clearly a euphemism for black and is therefore inherently racist in its interpretation of the situation.

not in my experience

 

[TopCat]

it's not beginning from a position of good v bad working class - it's looking at reality and seeing what things are either a help or a hinderence to pro-working class politics & organisation, if as a result of that, the analysis adds other things (i.e. behaviours, tendencies etc, rather than people as such) to what is traditionaly seen as 'bad working class' i.e. scabs, police, bailiffs - then so be it. Let's call it for what it is and the impact it has.

What's the reason for not focussing on behaviour (that you say) can not easily be defined though? That's what in my opinion we should be focused on. And just because it may be difficult to do is no excuse for not doing it and focussing on easy things. Do you really think we need a debate within our communities as to whether we tolerate rapists or murderers?

Again, why do you insist on putting morality as a driving factor here, when it's been explained that it's not a process that starts with morality, but one that starts with hard nose materialist reality looking at what kind of behaviours are detrimental to working class communities, life within them, confidence, and the chance of those communities developing a progressive pro working class political outlook?

What's the point being involved in pro-working class poltics if we focus on the easy to define and obvious and shy away from attempting to even analyse, let alone do anything about, the albeit complex & prickly yet equally destructive tendencies, manifestations & behaviours that if allowed to further take root has the potential take any chance of an emboldened & confident working class political organissation of the table for generations

Well I'm pleased to see the IWCA analysis of "the Renegades" now includes the police and prison staff alongside bailiffs and debt collectors. I would not be happy to have discussions yet again from people who should know better saying that the POA deserve support when in conflict with the government.

This does have the likelihood of getting bogged down on the minutia of what behaviours are detrimental to working class people and communities though as it did before in the other place. .

That some equated possession and sale of home grown skunk to the possession and sale of heroin was disingenuous to say the least. Equally a crew of kids who regularly go out and steal to order from chain stores is not equal to that of a chaotic neighbour who breaks into your house and steals your stuff in order to buy controlled drugs.

 

[TopCat]

you're conflating the method of presentation/exposition with the method of enquiry

Sorry to be rude but have you been studying criminology or similar? Your using terms which are going over my head?

 

[GarfieldLeChat]

not in my experience

you don't see this as another 'black culture' is broken piece...

 

[TopCat]

i heard that something like that led to the death of that man shot in croydon

The people who know are either dead or not telling.

 

[Spanky Longhorn]

you don't see this as another 'black culture' is broken piece...

Definately not - unless you think black people are the anti social element in our communities?

 

[littlebabyjesus]

you don't see this as another 'black culture' is broken piece...

No. Because a lot of what the piece speaks about applies to all kinds of places, including places where there are virtually no black people at all. I don't agree with the piece - I think it has its categories all mixed up - but it is not some kind of dog-whistle piece.

 

[TopCat]

you don't see this as another 'black culture' is broken piece...

No that's not where this is going at all. This is about the culture if you like of a section of society who's behaviour it is suggested is detrimental to the interests of working class people. This section is not (in my experience of debates like this) going to be defined by race/colour.

 

[Pickman's model]

you don't see this as another 'black culture' is broken piece...

no, i don't

 

[GarfieldLeChat]

Definately not - unless you think black people are the anti social element in our communities?

I think that for too long the two have been interchangeable in main stream policy, largley leading to the alienantion which not only the black community feels but also which spreads to their wider community as well as their friends and neighbours. In that you're freinds with a criminal you must be a criminal mentality which has pervaded the areas of social deprivation which haven't got consentual police services but literal police forces...

 

[GarfieldLeChat]

this divide and conqure deserving working class undeserving working class isn't really about solidarity IMHO...

 

[butchersapron]

The article isn't written by people who formulate mainstream policy. You are on the totally wrong track. If you want to talk about people who do formulate mainstream policy then this isn't the thread to do it on.

 

[TopCat]

This was an area which the IWCA had some success with in Oxford yes?

 

[GarfieldLeChat]

The article isn't written by people who formulate mainstream policy. You are on the totally wrong track. If you want to talk about people who do formulate mainstream policy then this isn't the thread to do it on.

I don't see what's been written in the OP as a million miles away from mainstream policy tbh...

 

[love detective]

Sorry to be rude but have you been studying criminology or similar? Your using terms which are going over my head?

Sorry mate - just meant that the process of investigating things like this in real life doesn't start from some abstract/idealist/a prior position of morality as to what is good or bad, but instead is based on the type of on the ground raw experience the IWCA has gained from organisation in and orientation to working class areas & concerns.

So the results & experiences of that activity, appropriately analysed, then feeds into and informs the positions taken in pieces like dealing with the renegades

Some of the criticisms of the article (and by extenstion the IWCA analysis itself) was that 'it' begins from a position of good v bad. But the point I was making that while the article itself may rhetorically begin from the position of good v bad, the process that lead to this type of article being written doesn't begin with any predermined distinction - it only ends with it, as a result of that on the ground experience etc..

Perhaps this kind of article could have 'shown its workings' a bit more to demonstrate how these conclusions have been arrived at

 

[love detective]

@smokedout

it seems we pretty much agree with each other in the detail - but in summary you (mistakenly in my opinion) ascribe a moral position/distinction to what we would see as a empirical/experience based distinction

If time after time you see things from experience that leads to the drawing of the conclusion that it is detrimental to working class interests & organisation, then it doesn't mean just because you then file that thing/behaviour under some generic category and view that as 'bad' and something to be confronted that this is some kind of a priori moral position being taken. However at the same time there's nothing wrong with effectively creating some kind of (temporary) a posteriori social morality based on the conclusions drawn from actual on the ground experience.

 

[Joe Reilly]

lumpen is clearly a euphemism for black and is therefore inherently racist in its interpretation of the situation.

Many years ago, the nascent IWCA in Newtown iniated a campaign against a mugging epidemic in the area. Large two hundred strong meetings were held on the estate. The hugely succesful iniative uniting all sections of the community, was naturally denounced by the police and attacked by sections of the left as 'racist'.

Amusingly, the people laying charges of racism were the only ones making the racist assumptions.

 

[Joe Reilly]

you just did it yourself. there was a well known family who had a couple of clubs where i grew up. they beat and tortured people, i dont know if they ever murdered anyone but do know they were the people you went to to buy a gun. sometimes they beat people up for business, sometimes they did it because one of the younger ones was pissed and someone looked at his pint. i could say the same about certain families in london, i could even name names, but i wont, because im scared of them.

Your totally missing the point of the article. Sure there has always been 'well known famiies' etc but what we are talking about here is scale. The amount of people that operate at that level now, is vast. For example we know how many murder are attributed to Krays, we can, with effort even recall their names. They were grown men, killers and victims alike.

Now guess how many children/teenagers have been knifed/shot in London in the last few years - by other children/teenagers? 60? 80? 100?

Now - name them.

 

[Joe Reilly]

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

Not sure. Didn't they think he was a grass? He did shoot George Cornell, because he called him 'a fat poof'.

 

[elbows]

Your totally missing the point of the article. Sure there has always been 'well known famiies' etc but what we are talking about here is scale. The amount of people that operate at that level now, is vast. For example we know how many murder are attributed to Krays, we can, with effort even recall their names. They were grown men, killers and victims alike.

Now guess how many children/teenagers have been knifed/shot in London in the last few years - by other children/teenagers? 60? 80? 100?

Now - name them.

I don't think the point of the article is being missed. Morality and working class values should apply no matter the scale, and any moral blind-spots that applied to the 'tradition' crime & gang stuff in the past surely have relevance today.

Some of the popular reactions to the whole Raoul Moat thing may present another opportunity to look at the moral/value picture.

I've also long been interested in the 'hatred of students' thing, and how that affects aspirations.

I'm also interested in what proportion of people get stuck in the underclass, as opposed to going through a phase which may involve plenty of the anti-social and criminal behaviour that articles are associating with the underclass. My place of work has quite a lot of people who got in considerable bother in the past, but have now been workers for many years. Im not sure how much a set of values or morality saved them at all. What saved them was the opportunity to work, coming to terms with new family responsibilities, and frankly just getting a bit more chilled out due to getting older. This was quite noticeable as the number of brawls at the factory christmas do really started to fall off a cliff once certain rowdy types reached a certain age.

 

[ericjarvis]

So far as I can see the OP shares the same fault as just about all the political/media bullshit about the riots/looting. In that it's based on an almost complete absence of communication with any of those involved in the riots, and a selective amnesia about British history.

It's nothing new. It's basically what has happened every time the political authority has stopped bothering to put the work in to ensure that policing the law is done by consent rather than force. You cannot police a city solely by force on a long term basis, the law has to basically be agreed between the vast majority of the people and the political authorities. 16,000 police officers cannot control a city the size of London if a quarter of a million of its inhabitants decide the law is unjustly only being applied to them. It has happened over and over again over the last thousand years, particularly in London, whenever politicians and/or police have become popularly percieved as corrupt, repressive or irrelevant.

So trying to analyse this as if it is something unique and new simply won't work.

http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/stand...is-lowest-since-1978-but-gun-killings-rise.do

The Evening Standard as usual attempts to sensationalise the raw statistics to paint a picture of a lawless youth terrifying Londoners, but even so the article shows clearly that Joe Reilly is horrendously misinformed. The thing that differs from the 50s and early 60s is the perception of gang crime more than the extent of it.

Over the next few weeks the post mortem will take place and people will devise plans to make things better. It would be nice to think that they might do so on a basis of fact and objective analysis of reality rather than prejudice and ignorance. I have absolutely no hope that will actually be the case.

 

[The39thStep]

With such a poor reading of just about everything you touched upon in that post the words no hope are the case.

 

[littlebabyjesus]

Putting that article to one side, I think ej is spot on. You have to take a long view of this to understand recent events. Far more people than the usual suspects are falling for the idea that there are some brand new unique dynamics here to be discovered. I think the OP and others on this thread fall into this trap. It's overthinking it, in fact imo.