During social conflicts around debt in the early Roman Republic, the patricians were split between conciliating the plebeians and a more robust approach:
[N]aturally harsh as he was, and rendered even more uncompromising by the hatred of the commons and the fervid support of the nobility, [Appius Claudius] roundly declared that the mob had nothing whatever to complain of: the disturbances were not due to their sufferings but to their disregard for law and order; they were not angry - for they had nothing to be angry about: they were merely out of hand. That, he continued, was the natural consequence of the right of appeal: the appeal had destroyed consular authority; for now that the law allowed an appeal to those who were equally guilty, the consuls could never act - only threaten. -Livy, Ab urbe condita 2.30 (in The Early History of Rome, trans. Aubrey de Sélincourt)
I don't doubt that the Cameroons would now identify some very definite social reasons for rioting in ancient Rome beyond 'disregard for law and order'. But they're Tories, innit: they always accept real social factors a generation after the event. But let's salute them: they've been fighting the corrosive effects of 'liberal dogma' for two and a half millennia. That must take it out of you.
As unexpected as the riots in England's cities were, the response was tediously predictable. Beside the hang-'em-high fulminations of the right-wing press, media consensus from the Guardian to the Telegraph was to deplore 'mindless', 'senseless' violence by 'feral youths', 'thugs', and so on. We're used to this: it's how they've talked about all clashes on Britain's streets since Millbank (and long before that).
The BBC's stance, too, was well-rehearsed. Their reporting was thoroughly on-message, narrowing the issue at stake to 'Is the police response effective or not?' The most distinctive characteristic of such reporting on Tory Britain, however, was that from Diane Abbott to Nigel Farage, anyone who had a microphone shoved in their face was asked to condemn the rioters before anything else.
Those who did not do so with sufficient force ran into trouble with their interviewers, as Darcus Howe found out. It's a test of loyalty: agree with our political elites or become a non-person, an Other as far as the media are concerned. Such ideological rigidity rather gives the lie to our liberal democracy's self-professed openness.
David Starkey's racist comments, on the other hand, were not condemned as vigorously. (Toby Young's incompetent attempt to exonerate Starkey is typical of the 'He wasn't racist' crowd.) I don't think Emily Maitlis gave Starkey a free pass: she challenged him repeatedly. The historian may simply have been ignorant: he confused Jamaican Patois with Textspeak and saw rap as the reason for the riots (one might ask him about the role of rap in 1790s riots).
But there's something more malicious and calculated here. Starkey consistently attempted to racialise the debate, reducing debates about gang culture (valid by themselves) to questions about 'black culture' (and Owen Jones was spot on when he pointed out that by 'white' Starkey meant 'respectable'). Of course, the last forty years have seen a change in the discourse: instead of skin colour the Right now talks about culture, understood as a fixed quality innate to human beings, not a constantly changing process influenced by all sorts of factors, i.e. dialectically. Thus the sign 'culture' still points to the signified 'skin colour', but without embarrassingly blatant racism.
There's the first reason we shouldn't condemn the rioters: the racist vocabulary in which they are being execrated. Starkey is only making explicit what has been implied in much of the condemnation: the rioters are, pardon my Disney, savages, barely even human. Here's Max Hastings's astonishing tirade:
The people who wrecked swathes of property, burned vehicles and terrorised communities have no moral compass to make them susceptible to guilt or shame... They are illiterate and innumerate, beyond maybe some dexterity with computer games and BlackBerries. They are essentially wild beasts. I use that phrase advisedly, because it seems appropriate to young people bereft of the discipline that might make them employable; of the conscience that distinguishes between right and wrong. They respond only to instinctive animal impulses — to eat and drink, have sex, seize or destroy the accessible property of others. (emphasis mine)
Hastings goes on to express regret that looters were not shot, and complains about their antisocial refusal to watch the royal wedding. Disadvantaged young people are constructed as an utterly alien and contemptible Other. This isn't new: the people we now dismiss as 'chavs' were once Burke's 'swinish multitude' and the Victorians' 'vicious, semi-criminal' urban poor. To smear an entire segment of the population as the forces of chaos is hardly ethical.
Thirdly, the condemners keep bad company. The moralism now echoing through the Commons, from people who cheerfully defrauded the taxpayer, is nought but rank hypocrisy. David Cameron enjoyed smashing private property in his youth. The BNP and EDL racists now coming out of the woodwork to act as Freikorps are using understandable fear and anger to preach a message of hate. Frankly, I don't want to agree with these people on much at all.
Lastly and perhaps controversially, looting shows a response to real injustice, however poorly expressed. I hold that any attack on property is political - it claims that 'this should not belong to you'. What sort of politics this expresses depends on the situation: after all, imperialism or the current looting of the public sector are also attacks on the property of others. But the riots attacked a system in which corporations and the rich running them control the vast majority of human wealth, expropriating and withholding them from the majority. Ultimately, looting is an unhelpful, sporadic, localised response to this general malaise: a much better response would frankly be to expropriate all capital.
In refusing to condemn the riots, let's not fall into the trap of claiming they were not terrifying and destructive to many people, few of them wealthy. It's in the nature of riots that most of the people hurt will be subaltern, not the elites. But that doesn't mean we should collude in demonising the rioters: it means that we should argue for better working-class politics and engage with frustrated young people in building resistance movements. Riots are counter-violence, but ultimately they do little to hurt ruling-class violence. For that, we need revolutionary politcs.
Will Hutton thinks that the left needs to smarten up its attitude towards immigration. The argument: the far right is gaining ground across Europe. The notion that 'the left must make the case that immigration is a force for good – it makes Europe richer' is 'denial'. If we are to win the debate on immigration, the left must argue for 'a good capitalism that will drive growth, employment and living standards by a redoubled commitment to innovation and investment' and 'accept that immigration offends basic attitudes to fairness' by allowing immigrants to 'get benefits without paying anything into the collective pot'.
Let's set aside that the likelihood of a 'good capitalism' is slim. Let's also set aside that Hutton is a liberal who has a deep fear and distrust of 'the mob'. His argument is a fairly standard one, one that has been repeatedly touted by the last Labour government and is now being championed by Maurice Glasman: in order to prevent a violent, barbaric racism we must embrace a legal, enlightened racism. In other words, we must wean racists from the racist far right by showing them their demands are being addressed.
But I really feel the need to seize on the term 'host population', which Hutton uses quite casually. It hardly needs saying that this phrase has two meanings, and this ambiguity serves the right. First, a host is someone who puts up guests and looks after them. Second, a host is the victim of a parasite. That, of course, is how the far right (fascist or otherwise) perceives 'the British': as a host body (the nation as an organism) that is being sucked dry by foreign leeches. Using a term like that is to walk right into racist discourse. One can only advise Hutton to stay away from it.
David Blunkett, of cursed memory, has just announced that the Labour Party must learn from the recent election results:
We did do extremely well in areas where we were fighting the Liberal Democrats. The challenge however - given the at least temporary demise of the Liberal Democrats across the country - is to take on the Conservatives. Whilst in cities like Sheffield, we had to fight the Lib Dems, we have got to actually win over Tory supporters and non-voters. That's the challenge. There are some very substantial lessons to be learnt if we are going to win in four years' time.
So Blunkett suggests two priorities: (a) winning over Tory supporters, (b) winning over non-voters. The second is clearly a substantial issue. Labour lost five million voters between 1997 and 2010, the vast majority of them working class. Did these people choose to vote Conservative instead? Hardly; the Conservative vote has not recovered substantially since 1997 (and is in fact in decades-long decline). The majority has, rather, simply stopped voting. So Blunkett is right: the Labour Party, if it wants to get back into power, needs to connect with non-voters. How is it to do this? My suggestion would be to take its own name seriously and actually represent the working class again, to end the abominable situation in which none of the three main parties advocate working-class interests even half-seriously.
But appeal to Tory voters? One is reminded not only of 'Blue Labour', but also of the despicable attempts to appeal to racism during the Blair/Brown years. Not only is this repulsive, it's also pointless: if voters want nasty policies, they'll vote for the Nasty Party, not the semi-skimmed New Labour version. The electoral base of the Tory Party includes groups who are unlikely to ever vote Labour (the upper reaches of the bourgeoisie, the aristocracy, certain petty-bourgeois layers), although there is of course working-class Tory support. I'd suggest that the only way the Labour vote will recover is to become a genuine social people's party. Yes, the great and the good won't like you anymore; but surely it's worth ending the pathetic Milibandian attempt to be against the cuts, but not too much?
I’ve just got back from the great anti-cuts march in London. Estimates of numbers are still confused – the number most often cited is 250,000, although the Guardian claims half a million. One of the most paradoxical aspects of attending a demonstration of this size is that while you’re there, you have no idea what’s happening on a larger scale; it takes leaving and reading the news to gain an impression of the whole. But I thought I should record a few impressions.
We got off the Unison coach at Euston and proceeded to ULU where we joined a students’ feeder march. Upon reaching Embankment, where we joined the main march and the trade unionists, the previously tense atmosphere, changed markedly. The mood was one of cheerful defiance as we moved on to Parliament Square and from there to Trafalgar Square. (Being the largest demonstration I’ve ever attended, it was also the slowest.) The news reports will tell you about ‘protesters’, as if these were isolated people; but the overwhelming impression on the ground was that we were with the working class, union banner by union banner. And what banners! We were near the CWU and (massive) RMT contingents most of the time, and they were not alone in having the most fantastic and individual banners for local sections, clearly painstakingly sewn and painted; many were decades old but clearly beloved. I – and as a child of the bourgeoisie I felt like an imposter – was quite overwhelmed by the pride these workers had in their self-organisation, their struggles and their past: many banners referenced the labour tradition. There was great solidarity between the unions as well, a shared sense of having come here to defend working people. When I say ‘working people’, I include teachers and others in accordance with the Marxian tradition – a sense that will hopefully be revived as all who need to work for their living come together to resist the class warfare of this government.
What I mean to say is that there was love: a recognition that public services are an expression of love for one another, and a willingness to smile and talk to total strangers recognised as comrades. Sure, the usual suspects were around: in Hyde Park the CPGB-ML, the CPB, the SWP and the SP had their stalls quite close together. There were plenty of hooded activists, but the day was not about destruction of property (which I do not oppose), unlike the student demonstrations. Instead, it was dominated by this peaceful celebration of the working class. I hope that the march will have helped create a working-class sense of solidarity that goes far beyond any individual cut but recognises the government as attacking working people as a whole. The fight-back must begin in practical terms very soon. There need to be occupations of government buildings and of public spaces, actual disruption of the smooth running of the machinery of power. Defeating the cuts practically is the only way to honour this country’s great tradition of working-class struggles.
Thilo Sarrazin hat sein Ziel erreicht: er ist zum Impulsgeber für die Politik geworden. Groß war das Geschrei zunächst: krudester Biologismus! Pseudowissenschaftlicher Murks! Fast sofort aber hieß es, der Bundesbanker spreche echte Probleme an: zu schrill sei nur seine Sprache. Angela Merkel verlangte öffentlich eine Debatte ohne Tabus, die sie als Kanzlerin eigentlich führen und nicht bloß fordern könnte. Analysierte der „Spiegel“ letzte Woche noch den „Provokateur“ Sarrazin, fragte das Magazin in der nächsten Ausgabe, „warum Deutschland an der Integration scheiterte“.
Der Konsens, Sarrazins Kritik sei überspitzt, enthalte aber ein Körnchen Wahrheit, ist keineswegs neutral: in ihm spiegelt sich ein Weltbild, das der Wirklichkeit kraß widerspricht. Die Kanzlerin gab den Ton bereits vor. Integration dürfe keine Einbahnstraße sein, sagte Merkel. Die deutsche Gesellschaft habe sich um die Integration ihrer ausländischen Mitbürger bemüht. Die aber sollten nun auch das Ihre tun.
Dieses Schema erinnert verblüffend an das Muster, nachdem eine andere Bevölkerungsgruppe besprochen wird: die Ärmsten. Auch diese gelten der Regierung und der ihr freundlich gesinnten Presse als starrsinnig und kulturell degoutant. In ihrer „spätrömischen Dekadenz“ (so der Außenminister) schlügen sie, trotzigen Kindern gleich, die großzügigen Hilfen des Staates aus, um mit ihren stetig wachsenden Kinderscharen die Sozialsysteme (also Sie, liebe Mitbürgerinnen und Mitbürger!) zu belasten. Sie lebten parasitär in ihren selbstgewählten Ghettos auf Kosten der Allgemeinheit in Saus und Braus. Einwanderer wie Arbeitslose seien undankbar und schotteten sich aus moralischer Verwerflichkeit und zweifelhaften religiösen Vorstellungen von einer Gesellschaft ab, die sie gerne mit offenen Armen aufnehmen würde.
Die Wissenschaft nennt das „negative Integration“: mehrere Gruppen, die eigentlich ganz verschiedene Ziele verfolgen, werden geeint, indem man auf Minderheiten hetzt. Dazu gehört: die gewünschte Gemeinschaft wird als großherzig und hilfsbereit, die Minderheit als feindlich und fremd hingestellt. Was dem Bismarckschen Reich Polen, Sozialisten und Katholiken, das waren der Bundesrepublik nach dem Zusammenbruch des zuvor die Allgemeinheit bedrohenden „Weltkommunismus“ zunächst Asylanten, dann, als deren Zahl ob abschreckender Maßnahmen immer weiter sank, die Nachkommen der Gastarbeiter.
Die bürgerliche Gesellschaft bröckelt. Die sozialen Unterschiede werden immer schärfer. Während wenige an der Spitze sich über staatliche Wirtschaftsspritzen freuen dürfen, schwindet die Mittelschicht, und immer mehr Menschen müssen mit immer weniger auskommen – übrigens nicht nur bei schlechter Wirtschaftslage: schon vor der Finanzkrise stagnierte das Realeinkommen der meisten. Die Schaffung von Randgruppen ist dabei eine bewährte Herrschaftstaktik. Der steigende Druck, die Angst, die Wut äußert sich überall. Da könnten sich die spätrömisch Dekadenten gegen ihre Herren wenden. Lieber schiebt man denen die Schuld zu, die noch weniger haben.
Natürlich ist es Unsinn, den Armen und Arbeitslosen ihre Lage selbst zuzuschreiben. Niemand wird ernsthaft behaupten, Millionen weltweit hätten entnervt gekündigt, als die Finanzkrise begann, nach dem Motto: nun habe ich aber keine Lust mehr. Darauf läuft dieser Randgruppendiskurs aber hinaus. Er grenzt die Verlierer dieser Gesellschaft aus, schiebt ihnen die Ausgrenzung in die Schuhe und verlacht sie dazu noch. Wer so denkt, hilft den Westerwelles und Ackermanns.
