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Is there a reason for the riots?

David Harvey: Feral capitalism hits the streets

But the problem is that we live in a society where capitalism itself has become rampantly feral. Feral politicians cheat on their expenses, feral bankers plunder the public purse for all its worth, CEOs, hedge fund operators and private equity geniuses loot the world of wealth, telephone and credit card companies load mysterious charges on everyone’s bills, shopkeepers price gouge, and, at the drop of a hat swindlers and scam artists get to practice three-card monte right up into the highest echelons of the corporate and political world.

A political economy of mass dispossession, of predatory practices to the point of daylight robbery, particularly of the poor and the vulnerable, the unsophisticated and the legally unprotected, has become the order of the day.

Does anyone believe it is possible to find an honest capitalist, an honest banker, an honest politician, an honest shopkeeper or an honest police commissioner any more? Yes, they do exist. But only as a minority that everyone else regards as stupid. Get smart. Get easy profits. Defraud and steal! The odds of getting caught are low. And in any case there are plenty of ways to shield personal wealth from the costs of corporate malfeasance.
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Kizmet said:
Exactly.

So who can, directly?
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Directly? Individuals can help other individuals of course. But if there is a systemic failure that leads to gross inequality of life choices, that's never going to be enough. There are plenty of individuals in the US who give their time to helping the disadvantaged, probably more than here - but the problems persist, and will continue to persist, for as long as the macro causes of those problems persist.

Directly, all you can really do is firefighting. The key is to stop the fire from being set alight in the first place, because, to stretch the analogy, while you're pouring water on the fire from your side, the social and economic conditions are pouring petrol on it from the other side. That isn't to say that you shouldn't try to fight the fire. Of course you should. But that's not a solution in the long run on the larger scale.

That's why it irritates me so much when, for instance, Ian Duncan Smith talks up the work of various groups that deal with young black boys who've got into trouble. The fucking cheek to laud these achievements, when it is the policies of his government that make the existence of such groups necessary in the first place.
 
The world is made up of people who fight fires and people who think up solutions to fires.

If the fire is out of control... perhaps there aren't enough firefighters... and too many people thinking of solutions that don't work?
 
Kizmet said:
The world is made up of people who fight fires and people who think up solutions to fires.

If the fire is out of control... perhaps there aren't enough firefighters... and too many people thinking of solutions that don't work?
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Or it means that you didn't implement proper anti-fire bush clearance measures. Or that you built your buildings out of inappropriate materials.
 
Kizmet said:
The world is made up of people who fight fires and people who think up solutions to fires.
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I don't think that second bit is true. The world is unfortunately full of people in power who think up ways of keeping the fires going. You think the Tories want to reduce inequality? Their policies show that thus-far they have been intent on increasing it.
 
littlebabyjesus said:
I don't think that second bit is true. The world is unfortunately full of people in power who think up ways of keeping the fires going. You think the Tories want to reduce inequality? Their policies show that thus-far they have been intent on increasing it.
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Ok.... and people who start fires.
 
littlebabyjesus said:
...
That's why it irritates me so much when, for instance, Ian Duncan Smith talks up the work of various groups that deal with young black boys who've got into trouble. The fucking cheek to laud these achievements, when it is the policies of his government that make the existence of such groups necessary in the first place.
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Interesting post and I agree with a lot of it..

But we have just had some 10 years of Labour government and they didn't tackle inequality either, surely if anyone might have been able to tackle it - it was new labour?

Anyhow, on inequality, you can tax the rich more and instigate minimum wages but depending on how high the minimum wage is there will still be a lot of people at the bottom of the heap.
 
Ms T said:
I do think 24-hour news had some part to play in all of this. But it's here to stay and what are they supposed to do - ignore the riots?
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I'm a bit torn on this one. I watched bbc news coverage of the riots, but I am uneasy about the concept of news helicopters. There is a part of me that thinks that there is no place for them at all, if for no other reason than that they are noisy and intrusive on people's lives.
 
weltweit said:
Interesting post and I agree with a lot of it..

But we have just had some 10 years of Labour government and they didn't tackle inequality either, surely if anyone might have been able to tackle it - it was new labour?

Anyhow, on inequality, you can tax the rich more and instigate minimum wages but depending on how high the minimum wage is there will still be a lot of people at the bottom of the heap.
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New Labour are part of the problem too. That should go without saying, really. All three major political parties advocate policies that increase inequality.

And notice I say inequality here, not absolute poverty. It is the gap between rich and poor that matters. The larger that gap, the sicker the society.
 
Haven't been reading this thread, soz. On the Sunday was it only Brixton which had one? I can't remember. If so I'm wondering if it would have become so contagious if there hadn't been Brixton Splash on. Had it not been on the usual gangs wanting to meet up for a little fight that are sometimes present at such events might not have happened and so there wouldn't have been some hyped up teenagers (and anyone else who took part) already in situ.

Or am I talking nonsense?
 
littlebabyjesus said:
New Labour are part of the problem too. That should go without saying, really. All three major political parties advocate policies that increase inequality.
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So, that suggests that they do not rate it as an issue. I suppose there is relative and absolute poverty. Labour I thought had pledged to reduce relative poverty and then I think they failed against their own measure.
 
grit said:
Absolutely, from anecdotal evidence there does seem to be a disproportionate amount of people likely to get into trouble who had a parent (usually the father) missing from their lives.
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Part of the issue there is that unfortunately there's been far more research in the last 30-40 years into how being raised in a non-standard nuclear family deleteriously affects children than on the sum effect. While the imbalance won't have the effect of rendering the prior type of research invalid, it does mean there not much to measure it against, and therefore the "coms from a broken home" and "child of a single parent family" theses rule the discourse in most of the west, much to the delight of those of a conservative bent.
 
Kizmet said:
The world is made up of people who fight fires and people who think up solutions to fires.
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no, it isn't. the world is made up out of the haves and have-nots, the exploiters and the exploited, the rulers and the ruled.
It's called CAPITALISM, and we are now seeing the payback and blowback off a 30 year process of a naked, unconstrained variant on that which has destroyed all the things which gave british society shape, cohesion and binding values.
 
I've linked to information about inequality rankings before. I might try to find it again later.

The US is worst amongst the developed world. Japan and Scandawegia are best.
 
weltweit said:
So, that suggests that they do not rate it as an issue. I suppose there is relative and absolute poverty. Labour I thought had pledged to reduce relative poverty and then I think they failed against their own measure.
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Nope. One of the major ideological planks of New Labour was the abandoning of the idea that governments should try to reduce relative poverty. That was what Mandleson meant when he said that they were 'intensely relaxed' about the stinking rich.
 
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