SEND LAWYERS, GUNS & MONEY

In the 1986 Smiths song “Panic,” brooding misanthrope extraordinaire Morrissey laments the alienation he feels when confronted with mainstream culture.  To be fair, Morrissey seems to square off against alienation just about every time he gets near a microphone, but in “Panic” his resentment takes particularly poignant form when considered in the context of certain recent events.

With a typically mournful wail, he collapses the multifaceted notion of “mainstream culture” into the singular metaphor of pop music.  And then he incites a riot:

Burn down the disco,
Hang the blessed DJ,
Because the music that they constantly play,
It says nothing to me about my life.

The history of the UK is a history of alienation.  Empires don’t thrive on egalitarianism: they are built on the backs of proles.  And while the Empire itself may be in decline, the trademark alienation continues to flourish.  It’s the necessary by-product of a rigid class system and racism draped unconvincingly in the robes of politics.

Out of this context, commentators are trying to make sense of the English riots.  At first we heard government types denouncing them with righteous indignation as “pure criminality.”  The middle classes were quick to jump on board and decry the actions of wayward youth.  Armies of broom-wielding Britons posed for photo ops, chests puffed out, proud to be captioned as “the real faces of London.”

(This, by the way, is simply a new mechanic of alienation.  Telling the rioters that they aren’t REAL Londoners.  If you thought you didn’t belong before the riots, we’ll be damned if we’ll let you belong after.  It’s not terribly productive.)

But after the initial burst of moral outrage, Russell Brand led the charge with a new riot mythology.  In a thoughtful and well worded critique of the socio-political conditions that coalesced to let the riots take hold, he attempted to explain the riots as a political act even if he stopped short of condoning such an act.

In response, Ben Leo at Street Boners and TV Carnage wrote a flippant, libertarian flavoured rebuke of Brand’s article, accusing him of imbuing the rioters with too much political agency.  His thesis is essentially that the youth didn’t riot because they were dispossessed, disillusioned or disenfranchised… They rioted because Grand Theft Auto is fun and this was a chance to play a video game “for reals.”  He aggressively mocks Brand’s suggestion that the solutions is to prevent the people in power from “tearing apart the values that hold our communities together.”  For Leo, the problem is simply “kids today.”  Or perhaps more accurately, “kids’ parents today.”

While I think much of Leo’s rejoinder functions solely as shock shlock, he raises an interesting point.  As a culture, we’re hesitant to grant the Revolutionary title to anybody that can’t articulate what is is that they are revolting against.  Leo is quite correct in asserting that the vast majority of rioters had no specific political purpose in mind, that the general sentiment could quite succinctly be summed up as “Fuck tha police!”  

But that doesn’t mean that the riots lacked politics.

The reality is that most of the rioters aren’t university educated.  They are the working poor.  The subaltern, the marginalized, the Other, whatever.  Their everyday lives don’t include the discourse required to engage in a political arena controlled by wealthy, university educated, white men.  They can’t reference Frantz Fanon, (apt as it may be), and suggest that violent acts are justified on the part of an oppressed group because the statutes of humanity only apply to those who are considered human.

The lack of access to a political discourse, however, does not preclude somebody from participating in a political act.

I am suggesting that the rioters and the looters took to the streets for a political purpose, whether they could articulate it or not.  I am suggesting the opposite of what Ben Leo mocked: I am not imbuing them with too much political agency, I am imbuing them with the functional equivalent of none.  They became cogs in the machine of insurrection, and the riots self organized.  They didn’t lack politics, they only lacked individually articulated politics. The riots were a collective scream, a chorus sung to the oppressors: 

The music that you constantly play,
It says nothing to me about my life.