London's Burning

[TheMercenary]

How does a country that tries to give it's people everything, free healthcare, generous retirement benefits, strong union representation, all those utopian ideals of the American Left end up in such disarray? Anyone? What? they didn't give enough? Maybe they need to raise more taxes and redistribute more of the wealth, that should fix it. Obviously taxes are not high enough.

[Aliantha]

I think part of the problem is that there are too many people taking handouts and not enough putting back into the system. The state can't afford decent education because of all the money spent on housing and healthcare etc, and many people never learn enough to get themselves out of the cycle.

This issue is going to take a long time to resolve and I think the people of the UK are going to have change the way they think for that to happen.

I don't necessarily agree with the way healthcare etc is run in the US or even Aus, but there's got to be a way to help those in need but exclude those who want to leech off the system.

[gvidas]

DanaC, that it's a "primal yell" rings true to me.

I've never been even as close to London as Heathrow on a layover. But the idea that this comes out of a disenfranchised class and generation without the eloquence or clarity or whatever it takes to be recognized as "legitimately political" makes a lot of sense to me. In a certain way, that so many figures of traditional power dismiss the riots as apolitical and "just crime" is, itself, a sign that there is a deep, probably fairly widespread common cause -- one which is so endemic that they cannot even pretend to relate.

This seems maybe a relevant, if sort of anarcho-philosophical in a dense way, essay about the (previous?) apathy of British students relative to French: Reflexive Impotence

In it, he basically argues that there is a bleak future for young people, where they're simultaneously trained to be manic entertainment/stimulus junkies, but also to take on debt and join the rat race.

Reflexive impotence amounts to an unstated worldview amongst the British young. Many of the teenagers I work with have mental health problems or learning difficulties. Depression is endemic. The number of students who have some variant of dyslexia is astonishing. It is not an exaggeration to say that being a teenager in late capitalist Britain is now close to being reclassified as a sickness. This pathologization already forecloses any possibility of politicization. By privatizing problems - treating them as if they were caused only by the individual's neurology and/ or family background - any question of social systemic causation is ruled out.
[...]
If the figure of discipline was the worker-prisoner, the figure of control is the debtor-addict. Cyberspatial capital operates by addicting its users; Gibson recognized that in Neuromancer when he had Case and the other cyberspace cowboys feeling insects-under-the-skin strung out when they unplugged from the matrix (Case's amphetamine habit is plainly the substitute for an addiction to a far more abstract speed).
[...]
It is worth stressing that none of the students I teach have any legal obligation to be at college. They could leave if they wanted to. But the lack of any meaningful employment opportunities, together with cynical encouragement from government means that college seems to be the easier, safer option. Deleuze says that control societies are based on debt rather than enclosure; but there is a way in which the current education system both indebts and encloses students. Pay for your own exploitation, the logic insists - get into debt so you can get the same McJob you could have walked into if you'd left school at 16 ...

The people who control the narrative freak out about their pensions or 401ks or stock portfolios going into the shitter when the economy collapses. But the youth, who are already predisposed to be somewhat angsty about what the future may hold, are watching the older generation lose their shit over it, too. Is it worse to lose it all, or to watch what could be yours some day get lost?

I have both a day job and an active entreprenurial pipe dream. But if I were there, or the riots here, I wonder what I would do: it doesn't seem that foreign. Every generation "theatricializes one's lack of prospects": mine did it with body decoration and narcotics. But, we had prospects.

[classicman]

<faints>

[Urbane Guerrilla]

http://www.cityam.com/news-and-analy...0sp58Y.twitter

[ZenGum]

It fixes most things.

[DanaC]

@ UG:

So because a relatively small number of people went on a rampage for a few nights we should utterly change the way we as a country function, and have functined for some considerable time?

The reality is that we have been slowly creeping towards more American style solutions to social problems and this is the result: social dischord.

The recent austerity moves have added to an already mounting tension.

This isn't about benefits culture and handouts. At least, I don't think it is. They weren't all unemployed, or from unemployed families. Some of the people arrested have had respectable jobs. One of them was a teaching assistant.

But for those that are unemployed, cutting their already low benefits payments and making it harder to claim is not helpful when youth unemployment is riding at 20.3% in some places.

At the same time the paths to college and university are getting harder to follow with abolition of the EMA (£30 per week educational maintenance allowance, given to low income kids going to college from school, to assist in paying for travel and books) and the tripling of university fees (used to be capped at c. 3k per year, now most o fthe universities have taken up the opportunity to raise fees and are charging 9k per year).

Schools meanwhile have become more segregated than ever along income/class lines, and the movement to an Academy system in many areas has resulted in a massive increase in school exclusions, with difficult to reach pupils far more likely to be excluded than worked with, than used to be the case. Many schools/academies are now specialising, with some offering a more vocational bent and others a more academic, I'll leave it to you to guess which areas have leaned towards academic specialisms and which areas are channeling their youngsters into plumbing and plastering.

Society has never felt more economically divided. Kids are growing up in the most consumerist society Britain has ever known, with social worth more tagged than ever to branded goods and having exactly the right stuff. At the same time they're flooded with a mix of messages around entitlement. That has nothing to do with the welfare state being too generous. We had a welfare state when i was a kid, and we had an unequal society and all sorts of trouble. We had second generation entrenched unemployed and a massive underclass, but this sense of lifestyle entitlement is new.

[Urbane Guerrilla]

Originally Posted by DanaC

@ UG:

So because a relatively small number of people went on a rampage for a few nights we should utterly change the way we as a country function, and have functined for some considerable time?

Exactly. The sooner, the better. It will bring this kind of thing to an end. And do it determinedly, permanently, and thoroughly. Among other things, this means for you personally to quit being a socialist. I know what you've got invested in this false god, but were I you I'd simply jettison the whole construct. The riots are precisely the Clockwork Orange result of socialistic thinking and policymaking, further aggravated with classist thinking, which plagues European society and I am not excluding the British. At least one British editorial has drawn this very point.

This is the end of the welfare state, in flames and broken glass. Good riddance, say I.

The Sun Never Sets . . .

[Trilby]

Originally Posted by Urbane Guerrilla

This is the end of the welfare state, in flames and broken glass. Good riddance, say I.

That's funny. I was thinking the same thing about capitalism.

Nothing lasts forever - not even economic systems.

the second law of thermodynamics proves it.

Good riddance to capitalism!

[Urbane Guerrilla]

Originally Posted by Brianna

That's funny. I was thinking the same thing about capitalism.

Nothing lasts forever - not even economic systems.

the second law of thermodynamics proves it.

Good riddance to capitalism!

No, the Second Law does not. That's because money is not heat, it is a method of keeping score.

Capitalism accords with what human beings naturally do in exchanges and deal-making, absent -- and this is crucial -- governmental interference in transactions. To eliminate capitalism, you must first eliminate human beings.

The Socialists, Communist and Fascist together, took a fair poke at that, and racked up 120M peacetime deaths. Not something remotely necessary from a capitalistic viewpoint -- or any other genuinely good or human viewpoint. Inherently necessary, in Socialism.

I grasp this. Brianna, had you the same understanding, you would not have written that shameful, Godawful post.

[Trilby]

Originally Posted by Urbane Guerrilla

No, the Second Law does not. That's because money is not heat, it is a method of keeping score.

No, the second law is about entropy. Pay attention.

Originally Posted by Urbane Guerrilla

To eliminate capitalism, you must first eliminate human beings.

I'm ok with that.

Originally Posted by Urbane Guerrilla

The Socialists, Communist and Fascist together, took a fair poke at that, and racked up 120M peacetime deaths. Not something remotely necessary from a capitalistic viewpoint --

Capitalists have killed just as many people - only they do it more personally. Like via withholding goods and services to individuals.

a Capitalist will look you in the eye as they tell you you won't be getting that life saving surgery after all.

I stand by what I said. Capitalism will fail - just like every system fails sooner or later.

[SamIam]

Originally Posted by Urbane Guerrilla

No, the Second Law does not. That's because money is not heat, it is a method of keeping score.

Yeah, but what about Maxwell's demon?

Originally Posted by Urbane Guerrilla

I grasp this. Brianna, had you the same understanding, you would not have written that shameful, Godawful post.

Leaving out Maxwell's demon is such an egregious error that it leaves you little credibility to be correcting someone else. I suggest that the next time you feel a need to comment on any possible disturbance in London, you get your information straight from the source - Dana.

[tw]

Originally Posted by Urbane Guerrilla

To eliminate capitalism, you must first eliminate human beings.

He has now insulted the Ferengi. A stereotypical ultra-capitalist society only motivated by profit. They cannot exist without Huuumans?

UG is too terrestrial. He needs to spend more time out of this world.

[TheMercenary]

Originally Posted by DanaC

The reality is that we have been slowly creeping towards more American style solutions to social problems and this is the result: social dischord.

Do you really believe this? It seems to me that the whole EU and the UK included has the lead in this path to forced reduction of a long term history of expensive social support. Look at Greece, France, Spain, when you peel back the onion of what they have been paying for with from their tax coffers it boggles the mind. No wonder so many are going broke. If there has ever been an argument against "more taxes" will give us more money to take care of the down trodden this should be it. Taxes in the UK are much higher than in the US (I think) and yet they still can't make it and support the systems in place which they have promised the people. Riots aside, you are right the problems are much deeper. I don't have the answers.

[DanaC]

A couple of things that i find quite interesting about this.

The timing of this is interesting. We've seen over the last couple of years a massive increase in youth involvement in politics. The debate over tuition fees galvanised a large section of the young people of Britain into action. Marches and protests and letter writing campaigns and planned (politely, with permission from the university authorities) campus occupations.

There was a huge rally in London, and kids from all accross the Uk flocked to it. Kids were ditching school and getting down to London with their mates, there were young people at the end of their university courses, protesting on behalf of younger friends and relatives, there were teachers and other professionals, many of whom were in their professions because they'd had access to university education through a combination of loans and grants without having to take on massive amounts of debt to do so.

There was a real sense of energy around their response, and engagement. There was then a lot of support from young people when it came to protests about public sector pensions.

Last year when the main parties were gearing up to the election, the Liberal Democrats heavily courted first time voters, and made tuition fees and student loans one of the central planks of their campaign. They made all sorts of promises, including a cast iron guarantee that if they were in government that they wouldn't allow any increase to tuition fees.

Young people joined the LibDems in droves. They were a huge part of their campaign. The twitter generation used social media to increase the footprint of the lib-dem campaign massively.

Then the two main parties failed to gain a majority, with many of their votes migrating to the Lib Dems, partly because of this youth response and it was down to the Lib Dems, the third party, to attach themselves in coalition to one of the two parties to form a coalition government. They formed a government with the Conservatives, and one of the first things that coalition did was abandon all the promises the libdems made to the young people.

I don't think it's any accident that this is occurring now. I think there is a general sense amongst a lot of young people that the adult world simply isn't interested in them or their views.