You start with a society in which material wealth is the only way to get ahead. You follow with a culture in which fame and money dominate. You bombard people with images of luxury goods that you tell them they must have. You create a society in which the wealthiest 1% own 20% of the country’s wealth whilst the least wealthy 50% own just 7%. You make that gap wider. You tantalise and take away.
You remove educational allowances from the young. You put a higher percentage of them out of work than at any time in the last century. You tell them that they must sustain £30,000 of debt to go to college to get a degree that isn’t even likely to get them a job. You spend ten billion on a sports event a few miles down the road that they cannot afford to even attend. You talk of Olympic Dreams (TM) as you close their sports facilities. You cut local services and their parents’ jobs to pay for the debts and disasters of your banks. You condemn their lives through your economic ideology as you sit in your cabinet of millionaires. You criminalise them for socialising in groups that you say are ‘anti-social’. You stop and search them over and over and over again and when they react you punish them. You turn one against another. You individualise and marginalise and alienate them from their neighbours. You talk of community but make it an illusion. You give no hope.
You do all this.
And when they come out of the estates to which you confine them, to take the goods they cannot afford, from the shops that won’t let them in, on streets denied to them by the police who harass them, in defiance of the politicians who condemn them, organised on social networks and media from which you have made millions, filmed by your cameras for your corrupt media companies for our consumption; when they do all this, all you can say is: ‘This is sheer criminality’.
You bet it is.
Thursday, August 11, 2011
Sheer criminality
A Fine Lung on the current outburst of free private enterpr Thatcherism deregulated shopping shocking, inexplicable selfishness in England:
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A fine article from A Fine Lung. But I notice that the comments appended to it are the same knee jerk fascist drivel being spouted across the media and in the Commons "debates".
ReplyDeleteIt's interesting - if all too predictable that the two events that triggered this off - the shooting of Mark Duggan and the beating of the 16 year old at a, till then, peaceful demonstration have disappeared down the memory hole.
exactly - and really a certain pseudo-left is leadingy the buring of the racist violence as the cause - making this argument "its the austerity measures" - precisely in order to mystify the nature of the pushback from specific endangered people and the politics of their rejection of all the arrangements of property and power. This "left" is being very deft at removing the racist fascistic violence from the conditions the rioters endure, and they demand acquiescence to their revisionist vision by seeming to offer a "more sophisticated" "structural analysis" - its the same move as "don't blame BP". While every thoughtful commentator (Darcus Howe, for example) is seeking to show the interaction, intersection, interdependence of the racist violence and the ruling class offensive, the pseudo-sophisticated left is trying to prise them apart, pull an academic move of isolating and abstracting, to minimise and indeed erase the violence, the murderous terror people have to endure and the anxiety and fear it causes as well as the politics of a genuinely inimical stance to the status quo and the ruling class and its client population, so that then there can be this argument "but not everybody is reacting to the austerity measures with this mayhem." As if this is reaction to austerity measures, as if they've proven that just by asserting it and insisting it's the most 'sophisticated' analysis.
ReplyDeleteIt's wrong. The racist state terror is not just the pretext, a spark of a tinderbox that could have been set alight by anything, by any number of things. It's a very signficant factor, in these events and in the lives led by protagonists of these events which the white petty bourgeois left is always denying and the understanding of which it is now in high gear discrediting and ridiculing as the preoccupaztions of "identity politics" and evil multicutluralism etc.
oh and thanks to the qlip who posted this.
ReplyDeleteits a good piece but it also succumbs a bit to these preferred explanations that want to transform the rioters into embodiments of msm-academic debates. It's one thing to note the desires of the rioters for usevalues are the same everyone else's, (this is obvious) its another to deny them then any political consciousness and any response to the specific situation, the specific racist fascist terrorism directed at a specific group of people.
Have you seen this, colonel?
ReplyDeletehttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gpvtbRw0AOo
What do you think about this?:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-14513517
i did see the woman, i wonder who she was talking to - did the filmer ask a question?
ReplyDeletestarkey is the well groomed stodgy zizek - he runs exactly the same routine as the zizzians; place his harrangue next to their "multicultural university" joke, culminating in that grotesque mockery of speech, its like a single script. "white people become black" from contagion, and the society becomes degenerate; but its good when "black people become white" (raise to culture, connect with white culture which is "enlightenment", sing the marseillaise to be "empirical frenchmen"), but when white people become black, everything degenrates, alas poor marx! poor england! and ends in some frightful "patois", "loud rap music"....
Great post!
ReplyDeleteYou see Zizek on the riots? It's more or less what one would expect: http://www.lrb.co.uk/2011/08/19/slavoj-zizek/shoplifters-of-the-world-unite
ReplyDeleteThis comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteyeah, lies, nonsense, fascist racist provocation, à la starkey.
ReplyDeleteSo "rabble" is okay if you preface with "what Hegel called" and "beast" is very welcome to the zizzian left if their "creation" is attributed to "capitalism" via "Marcuse's critique of consumerism..." and "barbarian" can be inserted with these Authorized terms as fitting in with this taxonomy.