Is there a reason for the riots?

[Treacle Toes]

Got to be careful in case you end up arguing for fair competition. Then you're into defending meritocracy and so on.

I wasn't. I was pointing out why a debate about 'competition' in this context is a bit silly given that we know that things are far from fair to begin with.

I am for a fairer, more egalitarian system. That includes the 'value' given to different things/skills/interests etc.

 

[TruXta]

I wasn't. I was pointing out why a debate about 'competition' in this context is a bit silly given that we know that things are far from fair to begin with.

I am for a fairer, more egalitarian system. That includes the 'value' given to different things/skills/interests etc.

Are you arguing that fairness is or should be a necessary part of competition? Your first sentence reads a bit like that to me, but please clarify.

 

[Jeff Robinson]

Horses for courses maybe. I'd disagree that classical Adam Smith type liberalism presents itself as merely scientific, it's deeply embedded in a moral analysis of what ought to be, societally as well as economically. As for monetarism, yeah, maybe you have a point.

I didn’t say that classical liberalism was not a normative project but I do think that what both classical liberalism and particular variants of neo-liberalism such as the Chicago school share in common is the (self serving) treatment of the economic sphere as a natural or quasi natural realm which could be mastered through the correct application of scientific doctrine. The key difference between classical liberalism and neo-liberalism with regard to moral doctrine is that whilst the former recognized tensions between the self interested behavior of the market place and higher moral values of empathy, kindness etc, the neo-liberals collapsed the division by arguing that the self interested drive of the market place embodied the highest moral values of self reliance and prudence and therefore such market rationality should be extended to all aspects of social life. Foucault’s late 70s lectures on this are very interesting.

 

[Treacle Toes]

Are you arguing that fairness is or should be a necessary part of competition? Your first sentence reads a bit like that to me, but please clarify.

When 'competition' exists it should be fair IMO.

Having said that, being 'competative' and the value given to such things is a big part of the problem. If things were 'fairer' in terms of the way that people/skills/ideas etc are valued...I believe there would be less 'desire' to compete and become the 'best/most valued'.

 

[ViolentPanda]

Indeed, Friedman's classic - Capitalism & Freedom puts great emphasis of the freedom part, and the need to create good systems. Sadly he, and others, have been hijacked by a significant minority who believe that the government should be completely omitted from democracy.

Sadly? Even those who were Friedmanites, and attempted to use his prescription as an economic orthodoxy came unstuck, not just those who cherry-picked those parts of his work that fitted with their preconceptions.
Friedman's "freedom" was always biased towards "freedom to" rather than "freedom from".

As far as the riots are concerned, everything is calming down and Parliament can breathe a sigh of relief. Hardly anyone pointed out that the parliamentary sovereignty system left over from the fall of the Monarchy centuries ago is the root cause, and because few people understand this, the needed changes will not be effected - instead we will have ineffectual changes to the details and a lot of guff from people peddling other ineffectual agendas.

Actually, some of us have been saying that "parliamentary democracy" is the problem for years, but you haven't noticed.

 

[peterkro]

I didn’t say that classical liberalism was not a normative project but I do think that what both classical liberalism and particular variants of neo-liberalism such as the Chicago school share in common is the (self serving) treatment of the economic sphere as a natural or quasi natural realm which could be mastered through the correct application of scientific doctrine. The key difference between classical liberalism and neo-liberalism with regard to moral doctrine is that whilst the former recognized tensions between the self interested behavior of the market place and higher moral values of empathy, kindness etc, the neo-liberals collapsed the division by arguing that the self interested drive of the market place embodied the highest moral values of self reliance and prudence and therefore such market rationality should be extended to all aspects of social life. Foucault’s late 70s lectures on this are very interesting.

I believe most of the problem is down to a misunderstanding of self interest,in both economics (as presently interpreted it's neither a science of even a social science) and evolutionary theory. Many academics both present and past see cooperation as the best path for self interest something the most economists and social Darwinists have totally missed.

 

[Jeff Robinson]

I believe most of the problem is down to a misunderstanding of self interest,in both economics (as presently interpreted it's neither a science of even a social science) and evolutionary theory. Many academics both present and past see cooperation as the best path for self interest something the most economists and social Darwinists have totally missed.

I guess it's a matter of how we define these terms but I think rightwingers tend to mean "the pursuit of one's happiness" in and of itself with little regard for anybody else.

 

[ViolentPanda]

I think that monetarism has an aspect of marketising as much as possible...

Monetarism is monetarism. It's a mode of manipulating macro-economic factors via money supply. It has no primary connection to the market, although it's purpose - control of inflation and employment, has an obvious secondary effect.

while the de-regulation of neo-liberalism opens up the markets to anyone who has the capital to invest in them. To all intensive purposes

Intents and purposes.

they are two methods towards the same aim.

Nope, monetarism is a pre-condition of neo-liberalism. Without the control it allowed to be exercised, and especially without the discourse that accompanied it, neo-liberalism would have withered on the vine. Once monetarism, of whatever degree or stripe, became an economic orthodoxy, neo-liberalism could build on the "belief system" that monetarist discourse had produced, and the stage was set for the "reserve army of labour" to be resurrected.

It comes up against the basic public services which an area needs.

Liberalism is just ever improving systems and an accordance with concepts of maximum individual freedom possible, especially as guaranteed by law and secured by governmental protection of civil liberties.. As Gladstone said:

Liberalism is trust of the people tempered by prudence. Conservatism is distrust of the people tempered by fear.

I am always surprised when people use it in the pejorative.

You're talking about classic liberalism and neo-liberalism as if they're remotely the same thing. They're not.

 

[ViolentPanda]

OK. I'm also imagining these hotels' staff having to face ever-more constrained wages and working practices, as each hotel attempts to undercut the other.

Kitchen implements clasped in their etiolated hands, the bleak acceptance of the need for battle etched into their hunger-worn faces.

 

[ViolentPanda]

I have already stated that competition should not be part of public provision.

Yes, so you have.

You haven't explained what you mean by either competition or (to my mind more importantly) public provision, though. Without explanation, all you're doing is farting out commonplaces.

 

[peterkro]

Kitchen implements clasped in their etiolated hands, the bleak acceptance of the need for battle etched into their hunger-worn faces.

Little personal anecdote my mother (whilst working as a cook,she would have been a chef if not for the fact she was female) witnessed a mental patient beat a supervisor to death with a potato masher in the mental hospital she worked in ( Sunnyside ) the patient being forced labour,she was well impressed.

 

[taffboy gwyrdd]

Cameron STFU (please send this viral)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v​=7iWKulQzeYw

 

[butchersapron]

(from an email so not linking)

The following is from a Ford Foundation study of looting during the 1977 New York blackout. They are in turn summarizing a 1968 article entitled "Looting in Civil Disorders: An Index of Social Change," from _The American Behavioral Scientist_, Vol. 2, No. 4 (March-April 1968) by E. L. Quarantelli and Russell R. Dynes,

The Ford book is by Robert Curvin and Bruce Porter, and has the lurid title of _Blackout Looting!_, but is the usual measured Ford Foundation prose within:

In their studies of the numerous riots in the 1960s, Quarantelli and Dynes
have discovered that looting occurred following the initiation of civil
disturbances. The disturbances as a whole, they found, generally
progressed in three stages.

In the first stage, destruction rather than plunder appears to be the
rioters' intent. It is often initiated by alienated adolescents or
ideologically motivated agitators in a specific area.

In the second stage, there is conscious and deliberate looting, and the
taking of good is organized and systematic. This stage is often dominated
by delinquent gangs and theft groups operating with pragmatic rather than
ideological considerations.

In the third stage there is an open, widespread and nonsystematic taking
of goods. At this point, plundering becomes the normative, the socially
supported thing to do; people from all social and income levels who reside
in the community participate.

And the last lot get nicked - hence the last few days pics/stroies.

 

[littlebabyjesus]

Yes I think that looks about right

 

[Streathamite]

I would also factor into the first 'physical confrontation with the manifestations of the Authority of the State (ok, dibble in plain language)

 

[TruXta]

(from an email so not linking)

And the last lot get nicked - hence the last few days pics/stroies.

Nice stuff butchers, I think I've read that paper and a good few more (not on looting) by the same two authors, two doyens of US disaster studies. If anyone wants more I suggest you use this search engine, the Disaster Research Center's digital repository - http://dspace.udel.edu:8080/dspace/handle/19716/35

 

[treelover]

'Little personal anecdote my mother (whilst working as a cook,she would have been a chef if not for the fact she was female) witnessed a mental patient beat a supervisor to death with a potato masher in the mental hospital she worked in ( Sunnyside ) the patient being forced labour,she was well impressed. '

Are you for real?

 

[TruXta]

'Little personal anecdote my mother (whilst working as a cook,she would have been a chef if not for the fact she was female) witnessed a mental patient beat a supervisor to death with a potato masher in the mental hospital she worked in ( Sunnyside ) the patient being forced labour,she was well impressed. '

Are you for real?

Sounds pretty real to me.

 

[peterkro]

Are you for real?

No I made it up to entertain people like you,you fucking daft cunt.
(in case your wondering, in bins like the one involved the only way for patients to get out of their cells was to agree to take part in some menial work and be ordered around by some authoritarian supervisor like the one who pushed the patient to retaliate in the clearest way possible)

 

[Treacle Toes]

(from an email so not linking)

And the last lot get nicked - hence the last few days pics/stroies.

Thanks for that...have shared.

 

[Paulie Tandoori]

Turkish spokesman in Dalston gives his views on the riots, funny enough, I haven't seen much of the slavish press attention given to this rather acerbic address, which attacks the biggest gang on the streets, warns against the dangers of making this an inter ethnic issue and of vigilantes forming (it's worth pointing out that the swappies and CPGB were big organisers of this event, but all the same.....)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aIr0ES-gwhc&sns=fb

 

[butchersapron]

Apols if posted already but here's a new map of unemployment/riots - clicking the markers brings up further info. (Note: this isn't the one based on the deprivation index that was around earlier)

 

[dylans]

Good article here by Naomi Klein. "looting with the lights on" in which she questions this idea that these riots were somehow "unpolitical" because they were primarily about looting. She gives a couple of examples of similar looting based riots in recent years. Most obviously in Iraq after the overthrow of Saddam. She points out that when Baghdad was reduced to an orgy of looting (that even sacked the national museum) Noone questioned the political nature of events.

There was Baghdad in the aftermath of the US invasion – a frenzy of arson and looting that emptied libraries and museums. The factories got hit too. In 2004 I visited one that used to make refrigerators. Its workers had stripped it of everything valuable, then torched it so thoroughly that the warehouse was a sculpture of buckled sheet metal.

Back then the people on cable news thought looting was highly political. They said this is what happens when a regime has no legitimacy in the eyes of the people. After watching for so long as Saddam Hussein and his sons helped themselves to whatever and whomever they wanted, many regular Iraqis felt they had earned the right to take a few things for themselves.

To refute the idea that Iraq was "different" because it wasn't a democracy, she also gives the example of Argentina 2001 after the economic collapse there

How about a democratic example then? Argentina, circa 2001. The economy was in freefall and thousands of people living in rough neighbourhoods (which had been thriving manufacturing zones before the neoliberal era) stormed foreign-owned superstores. They came out pushing shopping carts overflowing with the goods they could no longer afford – clothes, electronics, meat. The government called a "state of siege" to restore order; the people didn't like that and overthrew the government.

Argentina's mass looting was called el saqueo – the sacking. That was politically significant because it was the very same word used to describe what that country's elites had done by selling off the country's national assets in flagrantly corrupt privatisation deals, hiding their money offshore, then passing on the bill to the people with a brutal austerity package. Argentines understood that the saqueo of the shopping centres would not have happened without the bigger saqueo of the country, and that the real gangsters were the ones in charge.

The claims that these riots were not political is itself a political message. When people are blatantly robbed of what little they have by those in power, it is no surprise when the reaction is looting.

Of course London's riots weren't a political protest. But the people committing night-time robbery sure as hell know that their elites have been committing daytime robbery. Saqueos are contagious. The Tories are right when they say the rioting is not about the cuts. But it has a great deal to do with what those cuts represent: being cut off. Locked away in a ballooning underclass with the few escape routes previously offered – a union job, a good affordable education – being rapidly sealed off. The cuts are a message. They are saying to whole sectors of society: you are stuck where you are, much like the migrants and refugees we turn away at our increasingly fortressed borders.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/aug/17/looing-with-lights-off

 

[Kizmet]

So... this is now the propaganda thread?

Shame.

 

[Garek]

Apols if posted already but here's a new map of unemployment/riots - clicking the markers brings up further info. (Note: this isn't the one based on the deprivation index that was around earlier)

Always the same pattern, be it unemployment, smoking related deaths, heart disease, crime etc.

 

[dylans]

So... this is now the propaganda thread?

Shame.

What a stupid comment. The thread asks what the reason is for rioting? How does attempting to answer that question turn this thread into propaganda?

 

[Kizmet]

If you are not very careful that's exactly what always happens.

 

[ViolentPanda]

Little personal anecdote my mother (whilst working as a cook,she would have been a chef if not for the fact she was female) witnessed a mental patient beat a supervisor to death with a potato masher in the mental hospital she worked in ( Sunnyside ) the patient being forced labour,she was well impressed.

How on earth do you beat someone to death with a spud-basher?

 

[dylans]

If you are not very careful that's exactly what always happens.

But what does this dismissal of posts as "propaganda" mean anyway? There is no such thing as a neutral political view. People's answers are always going to be ideologically based. Your dismissal of political opinions of others as "propaganda" itself reveals an ideological perspective. Therefore, the charge of propaganda could apply to you just as much as anyone else. In fact you are saying nothing of substance at all. Your charge of "propaganda" (whatever the fuck that means) is meaningless because you are merely questioning the validity of those you disagree with as a substitute for engaging with the content of their posts. Pretty transparent really

 

[ViolentPanda]

So... this is now the propaganda thread?

Shame.

You need to put more effort into projecting yourself as smug and self-righteous. This current effort is under par.