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Introduction 539
aftermathwith 2,905 formally charged or summoned to court so far and 1,103 of these receiving prison sentences. The riots first broke out following a protest march to Tottenham Police Station organized by Mark Duggans friends, family, and other supporters demanding information about the shooting. The Duggan family left around nine in the evening as clashes with the police began. Two police cars and a double-decker bus were set alight, and intense looting engulfed much of the surrounding area. These elementsviolent clashes with police, arson, and widespread lootingcharacterized many, although not all, of the riots that occurred over the next few days. As the events unfoldedand in the days, weeks, months, and now nearly two years that have passedcommentators, activists, politicians, and theorists have all struggled to make sense of what happened and why. What were the riots causes? Who had taken part, and why? Why did the riots erupt and spread so far this time, when other perceived injustices, abuses, or acts of police violence have provoked no such response? And what sort of reactions and reconfigurations did they generate, if any? Most analyses have been heavily informed by a single, albeit multifaceted problem: whether, how, and in which sense to ascribe the status of political to the riots. Many of those on the right and center-right of the ideological spectrum, and not a few on the left, dismissed the riotsand the looting in particularas primarily opportunistic, simply criminal, and thus generally apolitical. By and large, those (more interesting, critical) approaches that resisted such dismissals have examined one or more of the following interconnected dimensions of the 2011 riots, and specifically: of their politics. The first involves recognizing the riots as political simply by virtue of their having emerged from, been formed by, and given further shape to a political context even if not yet necessarily in a clearly quantifiable way. This is a context, of course, that is simultaneously economic, social, and cultural, as well as crosscut by racialized hierarchies. To examine this context has meant exploring a reality plagued by a precariousness and insecurity that cannot but come from sustained crises in each of these fields. The second, related dimension to the politics of the riots concerns the ways they were, became, and have remained an object of politics. Exploring this has meant addressing the technologies of power to which the rioters, and those who surrounded them, were subjected: how they were tracked, documented, disciplined, and punished, and with what effect. What transformations in power, politics, and policy has all this entailed?
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The third and final dimension has been by far the most contested. It has sought to grasp the extent to which the rioters themselves constituted political subjects. This question, of course, invites another, namely, what would be at stake in ascribing or denying this status to the riotersor in identifying such a process of constitution? What degree, for example, of rationality, of consciousness, of shared ethics, or even of morality is required to become a political subject proper? And if these components are to be found in any (emergent) political subjectivityor subjectivitieswhat forms do they take? It is an exploration of these three crucial dimensions to the riots political context, political subjection, and emergent political subjectivities that form some of the primary threads running through the essays that follow.
Note
1 See Lewis et al. (2011: 27).
References
Lewis, Paul, et al. 2011. Reading the Riots: Investigating Englands Summer of Disorder. London: The London School of Economics and Political Science and the Guardian. Metropolitan Police. n.d. Operation Withern. http://content.met.police.uk/Site/operation withern (accessed December 1, 2012).
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understanding of the deadliest riots in modern US history and set a benchmark for rigorous, social scientific journalism. When we first read about the project, in the days after the riots in England, we immediately wondered if this was something the Guardian could in some way emulate. In essence, the concept was to collaborate with a university, pool resources and expertise, and find out what had happened. At that time, the England riots were unexplainedthe country was flummoxed as to how upwards of fifteen thousand people could have come onto the streets, seemingly without any obvious motivation, to loot, start fires, and clash with police. We had witnessed the worst civil unrest in a generation, which had left five people dead and communities across the country devastated, but no one could reliably answer that tricky question: why? I tracked down Professor Phil Meyer, who co-led that study more than forty years ago, and we had some lengthy discussions about what a research collaboration of this kind would involve and some of the challenges. It was obvious from speaking with Phil that two crucial requirements would be a world-class academic partner and sufficient funding. The first step, then, involved convincing Professor Tim Newburn, who runs the Social Policy Department at the London School of Economics and is one of the UKs leading criminologists, to get on board. Tim did not take much persuadingno one at that time was conducting any research into the riots, and the government was resisting calls to open a full public inquiry. So there was a very obvious gap that needed to be filled. Tim was attracted to the notion of a piece of research that was unorthodoxa bridge between journalism and academiaenabling a faster turnaround than is typical for social research, and guaranteed impact, while maintaining academic rigor. Tim and I then jointly approached the Open Society Foundation and the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, both of which agreed to back the research. We launched the project and hired thirty-five researchers across England, less than a month after the riots had finished. The Detroit study was an inspiration, but in the end it was not a template. It was sociology from a different eraa huge accomplishment of its time, but not something that we would want to replicate directly. Phil Meyers team used quantitative techniquesformal, survey-style questions addressed to people in the communities affected by the riots in Detroit, a small portion of whom (less than fifty, I think) had actually taken part in them. Our ambition was to interview larger numbers of rioters and looters during the first phase, and then secondly to interview others who would
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Reading the 2011 Riots 543
have useful insights: victims, lawyers, vigilantes, police, etc. We also felt that a predominantly qualitative approach would be more suited to the study. Our interviews were mostly semistructured, allowing respondents to lead the discussion in an open, informal way, although we also conducted some survey-style questions and collected demographic data. These were detailed, in-depth interviews, mostly carried out anonymously. In total, we interviewed more than five hundred people affected by the riots. Around 270 of them were looters or riotersthe people directly responsible for the disorder. We also interviewed 130 police officers. The interviews were then transcribed, coded, and themed by a team of analysts at the LSE. Separately, we also conducted statistical and sentiment analysis on a database of 2.6 million riot-related tweets. After the 2005 uprisings in the French banlieues, the public were presented with a fairly clear profile of the participants, largely on the basis of those arrested or appearing in court. The vast majority were young, male, and precariously employedif at all. Many were second-generation migrants with French citizenship. Could any clear social group or groups be identified among the rioters in England? Not in the same way, I dont think. The England riots are notable because of the speed with which they spread, across London and then, of course, to towns and cities around the country. It took just four nights for the disorder to spread across England. These separate riot locations often had a very different demographiccertainly ethnically, but in other ways too. Brixton, in south London, which was the scene of rioting on the second night, is known as a largely black area. Salford, in the north of England, which saw some of the most intense rioting on the fourth night, is almost completely white. This was reflected in the composition of the rioters in these different locations. That said, we can speak of some very general similarities across the country. Most rioters were men, although our research suggests that as many as one in five were women. They were predominantly youngabout three-quarters, we estimate, were aged under twenty-four and statistically more likely to have been convicted for criminal activity than the wider population. All of the available data also indicates they were on the whole likely to be poor or from economically deprived areas. Of the rioters interviewed who were of working age and not in education, 59 percent were unemployed. In all of these generalizations, there were of course many exceptions. Many of those taking part in the riots, as well as police on the front line,
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victims, and lawyers, remarked how surprised they were at the diverse mix of people who became involved. It would be unwise, on the basis of our research or anything else I have seen, to suggest those taking part in the riots belonged to any obvious social group, but that in itself I think is really interesting. The category of the gang is notoriously nebulous, and sociologists, criminologists, policy makers, and others have long struggled to produce a convincing definition. How did you define the term for the purposes of your research? Also, you seem to have found two things. Firstly, that many police and politicians overstated the role played by gangs in the riots. And secondly, those who were involved in gangs behaved atypically, suspending feuds and moving through territories they would not normally operate in. Did any of those you interviewed offer insight into how and why the latter occurred? We thought gang was a problematic term, and more importantly so did the rioters who were interviewed. Loosely speaking, I think politicians and senior police use the term to refer to criminal groups of young people. That definition brings with it a whole host of problems, but to some degree, in some areas, there is a sense among young people of groups and associationssome with names, hierarchies, and territory, but the significance should not be overstated. In major citiesLondon, Birmingham, Manchester, Liverpooland where these identities do exist, they tend to coalesce around neighborhoods, sometimes known by postal codes. Police and government officials were quick to blame gangs, although they later retracted some of their claims. The Metropolitan Police initially said as many as 28 percent of those arrested in London were linked to gangs, a figure they revised to 19 percent, and then 13 percent countrywide. Our research would indicate even that may be an overestimate. To the extent that these gang loyalties existand again, it was a contested categoryrespondents told us they indeed operated in a completely counterintuitive way, putting aside their rivalries for the duration of the unrest and even in places working together. It was a de facto truce, a suspension of hostilities, and it occurred pretty much wherever there were riots. Exactly how and why this happened is difficult to fathom. Certainly, a great many people described the riots as a unifying experience, often one that saw them take on a common enemy, and for many, that was the police. Some of the BlackBerry Messenger messages we obtained which were inciting riots and even advertising times and locations to meet made explicit references to this coming together of ordinarily hostile groups. There were
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major exceptions, but this was definitely the trend. For some of the younger people we spoke to, for whom these gang loyalties are an everyday feature of their lives, this coming together was a remarkable sight. Your report shows many participants cited the police shooting of Mark Duggan as a major spark for the events, even outside London. What other grievances did they say fed into the riots? Given that the last time unrest on this scale broke out in England was in the 1980s, just after the Conservative Partythen led by Margaret Thatcherhad been elected, as the state was being rolled back, recession taking hold, and unemployment rising, these would all seem like factors that might have played a role in 2011. The factors you mentionrecession, unemployment, the rolling back of the statemay well have been at play in some capacity, but this is incredibly hard to measure, and it would not be accurate, on the basis of our research, to say that those grievances were often articulated in overt or explicit terms. Sometimes they were, and we had rioters and looters say they had participated in the unrest because of these political grievances, although it is important, too, to consider how rioters might postjustify criminal behavior with political rationalizations which were not at the forefront of their minds at the time. Where grievances were voiced, it tended to be in less specific terms. The very substantial increase in student feesfrom 3,000 to 9,000 per yearwas mentioned by some respondents, as was the abolition of the Educational Maintenance Allowance, a 30 a week grant for seventeen-, eighteen-, and nineteen-year-old students from poor backgrounds. While we have to be cautious not to attribute the rioting to any single or specific policy areas, I think we can accurately describe many of those who took part as feeling in some way marginalized or disempowered. Eighty-five percent of rioters said poverty was an important or very important factor in causing the disorder. And only 51 percent of rioters interviewed said they felt part of British societycompared with 92 percent of the wider population. Finally, you mention Mark Dugganand the perceived injustice of his death. The evidence suggests it was a significant factor, although it was strongest by far in his local neighborhood of Tottenham, where the riots started. What came through the research very strongly, however, was that many of those who took part in the riots saw the disorder as an opportunity to get their own back at police. We discovered a deeply felt mutual distrust and even hostility between police and some sections of the communities, which predated the riots and to a significant degree drove people to come
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out onto the streets and take part. Much of that frustration with police was born from a sense among those who took part in the riots that the people around them are regularly mistreated or discriminated against by police, and stop-and-search powers [the UKs version of stop-and-frisk] was a central grievance. Of those we interviewed, 73 percent said they had been stopped and searched in the previous year, with many complaints about the discriminatory and disrespectful manner in which those searches were perceived to have been conducted. Several senior British politicians expressed concern at the role played by social media like Twitter and Facebook in facilitating the riots. Your own research found that, in particular, the encrypted communication allowed by BlackBerry Messenger was widely used by participants. What precise function did you find these different media fulfilled? I am really interested in social media as a new communication platform and used it a lot when I was out reporting on the riots. So for me this was a fascinating question to unpick. What we found surprised all of us. Much of the talk following the riots, as you rightly say, sought to blame technology, and the viral nature of Facebook and Twitter in particular. This fed into broader narrativeswhich are contestedabout the role of social media in political movements elsewhere in the world, particularly in the Middle East. In testimony to Parliament, senior police said they considered whether they could somehow turn off Twitter, fearing it was being widely used to share information about the disorder and stay one step ahead of the authorities. I do not think the leap to blame technology was new; I gather there was a lot of emphasis, for example, placed on rolling TV news as a possible causative factor in the 1992 LA riots. Contrary to what had been assumed, we found no evidence that either Twitter or Facebook were used in any significant way to incite or organize riots. There were some instances, and some of the harshest jail sentences were given to those very few people who were found to have posted Facebook messages inviting people to a riot location. But it just was not happening on a significant scale. As rioters put it to us: why would they publicly advertise their criminal intentions? Instead, social media, and Twitter specifically, was largely used by regular citizensthat is to say, people who were not riotingto find out what was going on in their areas and, in the days after the riots, to orchestrate a collective cleanup.
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But technology did play an intriguing role. BlackBerry smartphones were the device of choice among young people at the timecheaper than other smartphones, they also had cheap monthly plans. Due to a quirk derived from their original purposeconfidential messages between businessmen they also come equipped with an instant messaging service known as BBM, which is encrypted. This was used widely by rioters, in London particularly, but elsewhere too. People were using BBM to advertise future riot locations and times to meet, share live updates in the midst of disorder, warn people about where police were stationed, and sell looted goods. What rioters were essentially able to do was covertly arrange flashmob meetings, hence the appearance of large crowds in seemingly random parts of the city. Some of these areas were not deprived at all but were considered filled with lootable goods. And rioters were traveling substantial distances, way outside of their own neighborhoods and sometimes even to different cities, after receiving tip-offs about where there would be trouble next. Part of what distinguished the 2011 riotsand much of what I think was responsible for them being cast as apoliticalwas the amount of this looting that took place. Why do you think it was so pervasive, and do you have a sense of why some shops and businesses were looted and not others? I do not know why looting was so pervasive, but in some areas it certainly was. I have heard it said that one of the riots distinguishing features was the degree and intensity of looting, although I think the hypothesis would need backing up by some more empirical work. In cities outside of London, where rioting mainly occurred in the suburbs, there were repeated attempts, some of them successful, to target city center shopping malls and districts filled with stores. Did you get any sense, from the looters themselves, why they looted particular things? Did any of them cite poverty or an inability, particularly in the crisis, to meet basic needs? Or was it more about accessing luxuries they would not usually be able to? Also, your research seemed to find there was a discrepancy between the sorts of things being looted by men and those by women. Could you say something about that? Around twenty-five hundred stores and businesses are estimated to have been looted during the disorder. Most of the evidence suggests looters were targeting stores that they knew and stores that they believed contained high-value goods. The most likely stores to be looted were electrical shops.
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Pawnbrokers, loan companies, jewelry stores, betting outlets, and ATMs were all frequently attacked, as were fashion and clothing stores. However, it is not trueas some have claimedthat only multinationals or big corporations were targeted. On the contrary it was not uncommon for independent convenience stores and liquor shops to be broken into, and many local businesses. Supermarkets were also frequently targeted, and it was not uncommon for people to be looting food. I do not think we can draw firm conclusions about gender differences from our research. But there was some evidence that women targeted different stores to men: clothing shops for womens fashion, for example, or hairdressers. More interesting perhaps is that there does appear to have been a somewhat different moral code, as well as behavior, among the women who participated. They were less likely to be at the front of a crowd and more likely to enter stores once the window had broken and others had gone in. In interviews, they were also more willing to admit to feeling scared during the riots, and they criticized aspects of the disordersuch as the widespread arsonwhich they felt was unjustifiable. The riots followed the polices shooting of a black Briton. In the popular consciousness, however, they have been cast as less explicitly about race than the last time widespread rioting broke out in Tottenham, after an Afro-Caribbean woman died of heart failure while police were searching her home in 1985. What role did the rioters themselves see race as playing? Race was a complex subject. The rioters we spoke to were mostly very resistant to the suggestion the disorder had anything to do with race. They rejected attempts to racialize the unrest and mostly wanted to stress the multiethnic nature of the crowds who were taking part. These were in no way at all race riots, in the sense of interethnic conflict, and looking at the disturbances as a whole, race does not go anywhere near to explaining why the disorder spread across England as it did. That said, among some who took part, the grievances they expressed as possible explanations for their participation in the riots were sometimes couched in terms of race. So those who complained about stop-and-search would be likely to complain that they or their friends were targeted and mistreated by police because of the color of their skin. Research has shown black people are up to twenty-eight times more likely to be stopped and searched than whites, for example. So race, as a grievance, was there in some form, among some of the people who were taking part in the riots, but it was rarely if ever an overt or
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prominent feature of the unrest, and most people strongly rejected the proposition that the riots had anything to do with race in any overarching way. The punishment handed down to a lot of those arrested during the riots has been heavier than would normally be expected. The Guardian reported a higher rate of imprisonment, as well as considerably longer sentences being issued, compared to similar crimes committed the previous year. How was this rationalized by the prosecutors, magistrates, and judges interviewed by the project? And is this something participants in the riots remarked on? On average, sentences handed down for offenses committed during the riots were three times more severe than for the same crimesay, burglary, or theft, or criminal damagecommitted outside of a riot. The judiciary and politicians justified this approach, saying that the riots should be considered an aggravating feature of the offense. On the whole, rioters we spoke to thought the sentences handed down were too heavy and not justified. Some regretted their behavior and thought the riots should be considered a mitigating factor, because they felt they had been caught up in the excitement and thrill of rioting, carried along with friends, and committed crimes they would never imagine doing in an ordinary setting. That said, the severe punishments handed down to rioters were popular with politicians, police, and the wider public, although, interestingly, less so it seems in the communities most affected by the riots. As would be expected, interviews with police on the one hand and rioters on the other revealed often starkly contrasting views on most subjects related to the disorder: from its possible causes right through to this question of the appropriate punishment for those involved. The one area where there was a broad level of agreement was the probability of a repeat of the disorder. On the whole, most peopleboth police and riotersfelt the conditions that led to the disorder in the first place, whatever they believed those might be, had deteriorated in the intervening months. Four out of five rioters told us they expected the riots would happen again, and most anticipated that would be sooner rather than later.
Reference
Lewis, Paul, et al. 2011. Reading the Riots: Investigating Englands Summer of Disorder. London: The London School of Economics and Political Science and the Guardian.
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The relevance of questions of political culture was dismissed out of hand by Labourisms ascendant realist criminology (Lea and Young 1986). Voices closer to the movement of disenchanted youth were either ignored as reductive or condemned as romantic for their approach to rebellion and resistance. Although the challenge of reading the riots as political culture reappeared with each new outburst, discussion was often diverted into debates about the manifold pleasures (or irrelevancy) of consumer capitalism, the contested impact of post-Fordism, the rise of Thatcher(ism), and the complicated genealogies of authoritarian statism and neoliberalism. Those debates sometimes yielded useful observations, but their lofty tone contributed an overly abstract approach which suggested that the world could be reduced to an elegant set of theoretical categories. Additional problems appeared as too many dubious assumptions were made about the importance of the national state to governmental power, about the character and tempo of economic, technological, and cultural change, about the relationship of resistance to resignation, and about the boundaries and articulations of class conflict. In the meantime, the architects of the social market economy and state went quietly about their business (Centre for Policy Studies 1975). Back to the Future The rioting of summer 2011 returned us to a host of questions that had been left pending by the general failure to come to terms either with 1981 or the morbid, postcolonial politics of race, class, and nation that animated it. In seeking answers to even the simplest questions such as how these different phases of the rioting might be connected, we become obliged to reopen Britains disorderly history and the vexed issue of what might be called the earlier riotings productive character. The 1980s disorders fed the militarization of policing and the instrumentalization of law and order, but they had other, less clear-cut if not exactly progressive consequences too. The riots of 1981 were the culmination of more than a decade of bitter conflict between Britains coloured school leavers and the police charged with controlling the problems black youth were said to represent if not embody (Islington 18 Defence Committee 1977). Though they should not now be reduced to a mass rejection of the forms of work that were then available, the struggles of those desperate young people to escape the kind of work their immigrant parents had undertaken as a super-exploited stratum and a reserve army of labour must be seen to encompass that
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important element. Youths battle to be free from shit work was buoyed up by an ill-defined but nonetheless alternative conception of social life, affirmed in the unruly, dissident (sub)culture that they improvised from the residues of insurgent Ethiopianism, Black Power, and democratic, antiracist sentiment.1 The example of Northern Irelands low-intensity war loomed large in the minds of those in charge of the police and the army. They feared the possibility that a similar breakdown of law and order might appear in Britains noisy pockets of minority settlement, which would then become no-go areas. The race war that had been predicted by the racist Conservative politician Enoch Powell in 1968 appeared more plausible once the scale of antipolice rioting had shifted from quotidian resentment to spectacular resistance at the Notting Hill Carnival in 1976. In a sign of what would soon be a routine feature of acting locally and thinking globally, that riotous crowd, mindful of what had been going on in the embattled schools of apartheid South Africa, began to chant Soweto, Soweto at Londons bewildered and defeated police force. The same patterns continued as dusk fell on the west London street celebrations a year later, and the bricks and bottles started to fly overhead once again. The same righteous militancy echoed through the many confrontations with white supremacist skinheads and organized neofascists that led up to the 1979 election that brought Margaret Thatchers government to power (NCCL 1979). The rioting that continued sporadically between April and July of 1981 was rooted in the youngs particular experiences of inequality and injustice. It was also configured by a dawning sense of chronic crisis and the unholy forces unleashed by accelerating deindustrialization of urban zones. Both were mirrored in a pervasive sense of hopelessness. The 1981 arrest data revealed that participation in the nationwide riots was far from confined to the countrys ethnic minorities (Commissioner of Police of the Metropolis 1982). While the Economist trumpeted that the events demonstrated the failure of Britains welfare state settlement, the New York Times offered a more thoughtful and considered interpretation than was publishable in the UK press at the time:
Spreading urban violence erupted in more than a dozen cities and towns across England yesterday and early today as policemen and firemen fought to control thousands of black, white and Asian youths on a spree of rioting, burning and looting. A senior Government official said that the disturbances, which came as the epidemic of violence in the dilapidated inner cities entered
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its second week, were the most widespread to date. In some cities, he said, we are facing anarchy. By 5 A.M., most of the violence had been brought under control, but sirens and burglar alarms could still be heard through the streets of London, and palls of smoke rose from half a dozen districts. From Battersea and Brixton in the south to Stoke Newington in the north, and from Chiswick in the west to Walthamstow in the east, rocks and shattered glass littered at least 10 multiracial neighborhoods. (Apple 1981)
Burning and Looting Thirty years after that shocking, transformative eruption, the same streets in Englands cities were again aflame. This time, there was no rioting in Scotland, Wales, or Ireland, and this time, no progressive reforms of discriminatory policing or uneven, color coded law would follow. No deepening of democracy would be considered as part of any postriot adjustments to the countrys politics of inclusion. Democracys steady evacuation by the governmental agents of corporate and managerial populism was too far advanced. The market state that had been dreamed about was now a rapacious and destructive actor, privatizing and outsourcing government functions while managing to incorporate those who had the most to lose into the destruction of the public institutions on which they relied. Though the 2011 riots had been widely predicted by an extraordinary range of discrepant political opinions, the initial cause of the rioting and looting had been anger at a single act of police violence. A young man, Mark Duggan, was shot dead by police officers in hotly disputed circumstances that resounded with earlier instances of unaccountable and reckless use of deadly force. Less important than either the veracity or legitimacy of the police action in taking the young mans life was the subsequent behavior of the force in dealing with his family and the broader community in which he lived. Tottenham, where the killing took place, is an area uniquely saturated with histories of conflict between the community and the police. Its fragile equilibrium would be swiftly unsettled by yet another violent death perpetrated by the police. The local police commanders refusal to meet with family representatives and to share even the most basic information about Mark Duggans end with them compounded the loss and suffering involved. Understandably, there was grave disenchantment and anger at this perceived injustice. It was augmented by what seemed to be the institutionalization of the old double standards that were still operating informally in line with anachronistic racial hierarchies in spite of refined police management
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of news media, organizational modernization, and loud professions of corporate commitment to diversity. More than that, the policing of the crowd that had gathered and waited outside the police station as darkness fell was in line with the contempt, disregard, and hostility common to decades of interaction between the Metropolitan Police and Londons black communities. This point establishes the continuity of personnel across a twenty-five-year period. In a clear attempt to defuse and avoid the mistakes of the past, the 2011 demonstrators had ensured that their protest was directed and represented by local women, led by Mark Duggans relatives. In 1981 and again in 1986, apocryphal, strongly gendered tales of racist brutality meted out routinely by police officers in habitual patterns less ideological than merely thoughtless or stupid were found at the core of the rioters sense of their own legitimacy. Loudly amplified by the emphatically predigital power of rumor, anger was channeled through the idea that contemptuous police had struck or injured a woman. That fundamental image formed a rampart of righteousness regardless of whether it could be proved. What mattered more than any concrete evidence was the moral and legal climate in which the hateful possibility of reckless police violence became plausible. That ecology was something that had been built up over many years during which police nigger hunts and torture inside police stations became unremarkable features of Londons policing. Thirty years later still, the ability to imagine those scenarios is probably less potent than it was. However, by way of compensation, the precise moment in which a young black woman demonstrating outside Tottenham Police Station was viciously and needlessly struck by an officer apparently less familiar than he should have been with the history of the area and apparently disinterested in the ways in which small actions can generate enormous unanticipated consequences could be captured with all the veracity of phone-shot footage and then uploaded to YouTube (2011) for sixty-nine thousand viewers to see. In 1981, a framing narrative had emerged across government, state, and media to explain but never to excuse the crimes of the rioters. It centered on the idea of the black communities familial pathology and related identity conflicts. The mobs public crimes were the result of cultural difference visible along generational lines: primarily between the Victorian attitudes of immigrant parents and the more modern outlook of their disobedient, locally born children whose vulnerability was compounded by their psychological and cultural disorientation.
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Drawing heavily on US discourse of the Kerner/Moynihan variety, this approach was given the official imprimatur in the report into the riots that was written for the government by Lord Justice Scarman (1981).2 He identified the pattern of female-headed households and the intergenerational tensions but held firmly to an explanation that strove to present the actions of the rioters within a coherent sociological framework. At that time, acceptable political speech was not so narrowly focused on ritual acts of denunciation that serve as points of entry into the possibility of being taken seriously. In other words, a gap was still audible between explanations of the riots and sympathy with the rioters. In that sense, Scarmans approach did not deviate far from the demotic attempt at contextualization presented at the time by Jerry Dammers 2 Tone group, the Specials, whose classic commentary Ghost Town held the number one chart position while the flames scraped skyward. The summer 2011 riots had also been preceded and perhaps anticipated by the previous winters protests over the increasing of university tuition fees and the termination of the educational maintenance allowance, which provided financial assistance for teenage students from poorer families. The depth of the neoliberal revolution that Britain had undergone during the three intervening decades was conveyed above all by the way that the new norms specified by generalized individuation and privatization were able to reframe the disorders as a brisk sequence of criminal events and transgressions that could be intelligible only when seen on the scale of personal conduct. Similarly, repairing the damage accomplished by the rioters was not primarily a social phenomenon but rather a matter of individual responsibility. Society had been abolished long ago. It was no surprise that the black communities, already being riven into the two great neoliberal tribes of winners and losers, were internally divided. One regularly repeated popular sentiment suggested that thirty years earlier there had really been things to complain about, while nowadays, things were not so bad as to justify the rioters mindless violence. The official statistics on unemployment, street stops and searches, and school exclusions told a different story about the institutionalization of racialized inequality, prejudice, and discrimination. Casual talk of black youth had been replaced by superficially anodyne, technical disquisitions on antisocial behavior and the quantifiable perils of ungovernable gang culture. The pampered young rioters and looters of 2011 were selfish, sensation seeking, and probably bored. They seized the things that only their fecklessness prevented them from being able to buy in the normal manner. The
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neoliberal catechism repeated in inner city academies and mentorship programs insisted that the preconditions for personal success are now in place regardless of growing inequality. That message is often, though by no means only, sourced in myths of uplift drawn from the lexicon of black Americas vernacular conservatism. As I write, Cecil Martin, a former National Football League player, is touring Londons schools spreading the message, Its your time; seize it! His cruel urging anticipates the default judgment that these days failure is a matter of ones own personal responsibility. In a postsecular celebrity-obsessed culture that conceives of selfishness as an innate virtue, the rioters greed and gratification, though undesirable, misplaced, and criminal, were also morally insufficient to make them truly deviant. We can see that their pursuit of gratification is in fact a mainstream attitude common to corrupt bankers, expenses-fiddling politicians, and others seeking the addictive thrill of acquiring something for nothing. Betting shops, solicitors offices, and job centers were among the principal targets for destruction, but the lack of any legible pattern in the destruction and a reckless disregard for the lives of those who shared their communities made the perpetrators of these disorders into an infrahuman or alien parasitic scum. Their wretched lives contrasted sharply with the noble, armored Poujadism of more recent incomers: nonpostcolonial settler-migrants determined to protect their shops, businesses, and uplift strategies from the feral mob by any means necessary.3 It was thought to be significant that the 2011 riots had taken place during the holy month of Ramadantiming that helped to explain the limited scale of the eruption and the relatively small contribution of young south Asian men to the events. The political geography of the 2011 riots expressed the fact that so many young Muslims exhausted by the long summer days without food were inclined to prioritize their nightly Iftar over the pleasures of money-free shopping and pseudoinsurrection. This shift toward the salience of faith points to the way that Muslim now serves as a quasiracial category shaped by a long antipathy to strangers, settlers, and aliens and closely conditioned by the discriminatory operation of UK immigration laws. Combined with instruments designed to manage the state of exception in Ireland, that body of legal tools provided the basis for new apparatuses of security that have been built up after September 11, 2001, in the name of antiterrorist activity. The clash of civilizations provides an overarching, metatheoretical construct that explains how British troops fight in Afghanistan in order to keep domestic streets safe and secure. It is very hard to tell how many people fall for this patriotic, postcolonial froth.
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Despite talk of withdrawal, war is now an apparently endless feature of our diminished democracy, and the British armyalways already the best in the worldis uniformly heroic now regardless of its occasional excesses (Ware 2012). Olympic Redemption In the summer of 2012, the Olympic Games came to London as the welcome redemption of a riot-torn nation. Mohammed Farrar, the iconic Somali refugee turned champion runner, reemerged as Mo, and swathed protectively in a Union Jack like so many black British athletes before him, he joined the Sheffield-based mixed race heptathlete Jessica Ennis in a vivid demonstration of what an alternative, less belligerent multicultural Britain might actually look like. They were not the kind of muscular liberalism that Prime Minister David Cameron (2011) had in mind in his Munich denunciation of failed multiculturalism. Whatever else was being transacted in enthusiasm for this odd couple, the popular pleasure that was generated by the epiphany of these particular golden Brits expressed the submerged yearning for a different country, less burdened by the past and less anxious in the face of alterity. Domesticated racial difference bolstered by a palpably convivial multiculture supplied the means to demonstrate a break with the past. But that precious glimpse of organic plurality displacing brittle unanimism was far from secure. It would be easy to lapse back into the melancholic desire for restored imperial greatness signaled slyly in the mayors address to the victory parade and the prime ministers insistence (BBC News 2012) that the 2012 Olympics would be like 1966 in the national psyche. Of course the proliferation of digital bread and virtual circuses heralds the emergence of a different kind of societya market society. We are told that it will be secure, more militarized, more unequal, and perhaps also beyond the reach of satire. The novel nomos required by that variety of control makes us all suspect, all surveilled. Mass incarceration is a basic rule and containment a founding principle of the expedient governance that marks the divorce of capitalism from democracy. The parapolitical power of antiIslam sentiment is likely to increase and be brutally instrumentalized by dogwhistling, ethnoracial populism. The very best we can hope for may be that the old chestnuts of whiteness and blackness will fade away into generic, market-based identities or life styles. That may prove to be a hollow victory amidst the manifold neocolonial, biopolitical, and environmental dangers that await us on the perilous pathway of our countrys mismanaged decline.
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Notes
1 Ethiopianism refers to a spiritual as well as political current, both predating and intersecting with Pan-Africanism, emerging from South and southeastern Africa in response to European colonialism and white settlement. 2 While the 1968 Kerner Report argued the series of ongoing urban uprisings in the United States resulted from the lack of opportunities available to African Americans, the Moynihan Report, published three years earlier, had attributed this experience of poverty to the supposed absence of positive male role models. 3 Poujadism was a conservative movement, established in France in the 1950s by Pierre Poujade, that sought to protect the interests of particularly small businesses.
References
Apple, Raymond W. 1981. New Riots Sweep Englands Cities: Anarchy Feared. New York Times, July 11. www.nytimes.com/1981/07/11/world/new-riots-sweep-england-s-cities -anarchy-feared.html. BBC News. 2012. Cameron: 2012 Brought A Golden Summer for Britain. September 10. www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-19544414. Cameron, David. 2011. PMs Speech at Munich Security Conference. British Prime Ministers Office, February 5. www.number10.gov.uk/news/pms-speech-at-munich-security -conference/. Centre for Policy Studies. 1975. Why Britain Needs a Social Market Economy. London: CPS. Commissioner of Police of the Metropolis. 1982. Report of the Commissioner of Police of the Metropolis for the Year 19811982. Cmnd. 8569. London: HMSO. Coulter, Jim, et al. 1984. State of Siege. London: Canary Press. Islington 18 Defence Committee. 1977. Under Heavy Manners: Report of the Labour Movement Enquiry into Police Brutality and the Position of Black Youth in Islington, Held on Saturday July 23, 1977. London: Islington 18 Defence Committee. Lea, John, and Jock Young. 1986. Whats to Be Done about Law and Order? Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin. National Council for Civil Liberties (NCCL). 1979. National Council for Civil Liberties Report of the Unofficial Enquiry on the Police Riot in Southall, 23 April 1979 . London: NCCL. Scarman, Lord. 1981. The Brixton Disorders 1012 April 1981. Cmnd. 8427. London: Her Majestys Stationery Office. Ware, Vron. 2012. Military Migrants: Fighting for Your Country. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave. YouTube. 2011. 16 Year Old Girl Attacked by Tottenham Riot Police! August 7. www.you tube.com/watch?v=YX9qZVsMQP8&oref=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com %2Fresults%3Fsearch_query%3Dtottenham%2Briot%2Bpolice%2Battack%2Bgirl% 26oq%3Dtottenham%2Briot%2Bpolice%2Battack%2Bgirl%26gs_l%3Dyoutube.3... 1450.9739.0.10226.33.29.0.4.4.0.77.1670.29.29.0...0.0...1ac.1.vnfm1kVNPqE (accessed November 14, 2012).
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rioting and looting across English cities in August 2011this crisis has become far noisier. We contend that these events generated more than white noise. That is, the noise of August 2011s rioting and looting conveys information, and this information reveals a very different kind of moral economy than that proposed by the Miliband brothers. We are inspired in this approach by Thompsons remarkable 1971 essay, The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century (Thompson 1991a). Our proposition is that, just as eighteenth-century bread rioters were acting in defense of customary entitlements and demonstrating historical agency in a period of social transition, so too were the rioters of August 2011. Against the Spasmodic View Applying Thompsons concept of a moral economy to contemporary society means drawing parallels with the political problems of the eighteenth century. There is, however, another historical comparison to draw. Thompson, developing the concept in the 1960s and early 1970s, was responding to various political and academic positions that characterized the crowd (or the mob) in different ways. In the opening paragraphs of the essay Thompson criticizes the spasmodic view of popular history according to which, at least before the French Revolution, the common people can scarcely be taken as historical agents (1991a: 185). He is arguing against a reading of history in which the poor only intrude occasionally and spasmodically upon the historical canvas, in periods of [compulsive, rather than self-conscious or self-activating] social disturbance (185). In this spasmodic view, the crowds actions are nonpolitical because of their spontaneous, almost instinctive nature; bread rioters, for example, are simply responding to the animal (or feral) impulse of hunger. We can also contrast Thompsons analysis with that of some of his comrades in the Communist Party Historians Group. Eric Hobsbawm, for example, famously characterized certain forms of collective action, such as those of the eighteenth century, as pre-political, ...in many respects blind and groping (Hobsbawm 1971: 2). Such forms are cast as either precursors to, or cul-de-sacs from, the organized labor movementwhich is held as the exemplar of a political movement. Thompsons refutation of these characterizations of popular revolt was an intervention into the understanding of struggle in the 1950s and 1960s. But the 2011 riots have also been primarily portrayed as either non-
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political or prepolitical. Examples of the former abound, not least in the riots immediate aftermath when the widespread injunction to understand a little less and condemn a little more produced what amounted to a prohibition on thought (Milburn 2012: 402). Prime Minister David Cameron, for instance, insisted that there was nothing political about the riots; they were criminality, pure and simple (Milne 2011). Although the casting of the 2011 riots as nonpolitical was initially ubiquitous, it is hard to maintain that position under scrutiny. To do so requires the counterintuitive separation of the riots from the context of the early twenty-first centurys great recession. Most commentators who recognized the riots as a response to a specific political and economic context, however, have still characterized them as prepoliticalas an inarticulate outburst, a howl of rage that contains little information. Implicit in this position is the need to channel and interpret the anger through more properly political forms, a view exemplified by Simon Winlow and Steve Hall, who say of the looting: We would suggest that consumerism acted as a perverse default position that achieves its primacy only in the absence of more appealing or progressive alternatives.... There was no attempt to change those social processes and systemic abuses that contribute to the subjective experience of rage. The rioters frustration and dissatisfaction could find no articulate form of expression (Winlow and Hall 2012: 162). In contrast to both the spasmodic and prepolitical readings, Thompson finds eighteenth-century crowd actions quite articulate: It is possible to detect in almost every eighteenth-century crowd action some legitimizing notion... .The crowd ...were defending traditional rights or customs; and, in general ...they were supported by the wide consensus of the community.... The consensus was so strong that it overrode motives of fear or deference (Thompson 1991a: 188). Indeed, understanding this articulacy is essential because the conceptions of rights and customary entitlements that underpin the moral economy of the poor are frequently opaque, disclos[ing] themselves most clearly only when one examines the crowd in action (Thompson 1991a: 212). Societies in Transition Central to Thompsons argument are the following insights. First, although Englands momentous social and political-economic transition over the course of the eighteenth century, from a feudal society to a capitalist one, is obvious to us today, it was much more obscure to those living through it.
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Second, this transition was contingent on struggle, and capitalisms eventual triumph was by no means assured. During this century the value practices associated with a nascent market economy repeatedly clashed with those associated with a preexisting moral economy, sparking food riots and other forms of crowd activity. The crowd acted when it felt its cause was legitimate and that legitimacy was grounded upon a consistent traditional view of social norms and obligations, of the proper economic functions of several parties within the community, which taken together, can be said to constitute the moral economy of the poor. An outrage to these moral assumptions, quite as much as actual deprivation, was the usual occasion for direct action (Thompson 1991a: 188). This moral economy was based on certain customary expectations in which members of the community such as millers andto a greater degreebakers were considered servants of the community, working not for a profit but for an allowance (Thompson 1991a: 194). In these circumstances laissez-fairethe political economy of Adam Smithentailed a de-moralizing of the theory of trade and consumption (201); it also represented a mortal threat to the livelihoods of the poor. Faced with this threat, the poor acted not only to seek sustenanceto satisfy their immediate bodily needsforcing merchants, millers, or wealthier farmers to sell grain (or bread) at what they considered the customary or moral price, but also to punish those they considered profiteers, for acting according to market logic was seen as predatory and placed the perpetrators outside the community. Thus Thompson recounts many examples of men and women near starvation attacking mills and granaries not to steal the food and eat it but to destroy the goods to punish the proprietors (232). Such action required a high level of consensus; indeed, such were the levels of public support that often little physical violence was involved. Thompson explains: In truth, the food riot did not require a high degree of organization. It required a consensus of support in the community, and an inherited pattern of action with its own objectives and constraints (238). There are of course innumerable differences between the eighteenth and the twenty-first centuries. Yet our contemporary crisis-riven society is also in transition, and, we argue, this common transitional status makes Thompsons concept of moral economy worth pursuing.1 Today we seem trapped in a state of limbo, unable to escape the most severe economic crisis in almost a hundred years. We are living through this crisis and so, of course, do not yet know its outcome. We are confident, however, that the economy will not return to the exact neoliberal shape of the last three decades.
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Our confidence in making this assertionand a key plank of our argumenthinges on our notion of a neoliberal deal (Turbulence Collective 2009). We are accustomed to thinking of Keynesianism as containing a deal between capital and labor, based on rising wages and rising productivity. The neoliberal deal, in contrast, was more of a tacit arrangement. It relied not on rising wages (which in the UK and the United States have stagnated since the late 1970s) but on aspiration, plentiful cheap credit, and access to cheap commodities. These three elements, we believe, became customary expectations on which peoples social reproduction relied. Beyond mere physical survival, these expectations included a sense of entitlement to a certain standard of livingaccess to a certain amount of social wealth, in particular to consumer goods such as flat-screen televisions and branded sportswear. To the extent that these items were purchased by means of cheap and plentiful creditand to a great extent they werepeople were getting something for nothing, at least in the short term. Since the credit crunch of 2007 and 2008, peoples ability to access such wealth has been curtailed, but their sense of entitlement remains. The Moral Economy in Evidence in August 2011 We have highlighted three of Thompsons main arguments concerning the moral economy of the eighteenth-century English crowd: that members of this crowd believed that they were defending traditional rights or customs; ...[that] in general, they ...were supported by the wider consensus of the community (Thompson 1991a: 188); and that those considered predatory on the community were punished. To examine to what extent we can make similar arguments about a moral economy of the twenty-first-century English crowdor at least of those crowds that rioted and looted over five August days in 2011we draw on the extensive interview evidence and analysis published in Reading the Riots (Roberts 2011).2 Looting was by far the most common type of unlawful activity during the August 2011 disturbances. In all, approximately 2,500 shops and businesses were looted. According to Reading the Riots, the electrical appliance chain Currys was a common target, as were jewellery shops....The same businesses were named time and again: Foot Locker, PC World, mobile phone outlets. JD Sports lost 700,000 worth of stock during the riots and was a key target, according to interviewees. In the words of one witness: We had Currys for almost an hour. Going in, coming out, pulling out TV boxes. Id say people left with like 80in TVs running straight across the road
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into the estate. I just wanted to get anything thats worth money. We got Canon lenses, we got PlayStations, we got Xboxes, we got small TVs. Other shops that were named include the pharmacy chain Boots; clothing retailers H&M, TK Maxx, and Debenhams; electrical appliance chain Comet; and auto-parts retailer Halfords, along with pawnbrokers shops and off-licences. Although one Reading the Riots interviewee reported seeing a woman with a large box of soap powder, and other women apparently took nappies, baby food and bags of rice, such items were rarely looted. Instead, looters appeared attracted to fashion retailers and stores containing high-value goods. But we think Reading the Riotss use of the term high-value is rather misleading. The luxury brands and commodities stolen include iPhones and BlackBerry smartphones; Gucci and Ralph Lauren clothing; and Nike and Adidas trainers. Some looters attempted (unsuccessfully) to break into a retailer selling Rolex watches, but we found no other evidence of looting of real luxury itemsthat is, of goods that are customarily purchased by rich people. For the most part, the goods looted were habitual luxuries, consumer goods to which, precrisis at least, most people in England felt entitledif they made themselves available for work or were willing to indebt themselves. In this sense, we can say that the riots and looting were acts in defense of certain customary entitlements. The interview evidence also suggests a relatively high degree of community consensus in support of rioters and looters. Although many people were horrified by the riots, in the main, respondents were struck by the breadth of people from all parts of their community who joined together. As one participant reported: I seen an old guy running out of Foot Lockerliterally this guy was like 70. He took a hat and was running for his life. But more interesting than this is the extent to which older, presumably wiser, heads facilitated the participation of younger, less experienced members of the community. Thus,
At times, [fourteen-year-old] Joshua said he felt people were looking up at him. We saw a black lady in the car. She was like: Go on son, dash the brick at them, dash the brick at them.
Or consider the forty-six-year-old man in Salford, who saw some teenagers being stupid and turned his attention to the CCTV. I was sort of like putting cameras out of action, he said. Smashing themI just made sure none of them could focus on anywhere.
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Finally, it seems that the majority of participants had a keen sense of which businesses were predatory on the community. Although some two hundred small, independent retailers were looted, large businesses were targeted far more frequently, and there was little sympathy among looters. JD [Sports] is making like what50 off a shoe? said a 20-year-old from Clapham. Some of Reading the Riots s interviewees also talked about looting or vandalising shops to which they had earlier sent their CVs. Ive given them a hundred CVsnot one job, you know what I mean? said an unemployed man from Lewisham who joined the looting. So I didnt give a fuck. Thats why I left my house. Or, as another participant said: Were angry at banks, were angry at high street shops that are making countless amounts of money out of us. And, on this theme, a third looter insisted he only took from major consumer brands, stuff that was like industries, businesses, like big businesses, like international businesses that are just raping the world anyway, that are just taking advantage of other peoples labour....So why cant we take advantage of them for this one moment? Against the New Normal Lootinggetting something for nothing, defending customary entitlementswas not the only motive for those involved in the August 2011 riots. The riots were sparked by community anger at the policea common motive up and down the country. More generally, according to Reading the Riots,
the one term that kept cropping up was justice. The targets of [participants] anger were varied, from the prime minister to MPs expenses, the cuts, bankers bonuses, university fees and the ending of the educational maintenance allowance (EMA)....For many, the central issue was not having a job or any prospect of a job. In a typical comment, a 22-year-old man from London said: All I can tell you is that me, myself and the group I was in, none of us have got jobs.
Justice, inequality, the rich, lack of prospects: we believe that many of these motivations and grievances can be understood within a moral economy framework. While the aspiration, which was central to the neoliberal deal, relied on the idea of education as a potential route to (individual) prosperity, the economic crisis coupled with austerity policiesin particular attacks on public educationhas fundamentally undermined that hope.
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We have argued that the riots revealed aspects of the previously obscured moral economy of the urban poor. But they arent the only group suffering a crisis of social reproduction; others are also having their customary expectations undermined. When thinking of forms of collective action to mobilize this wider groups moral economy, we can find more direct inspiration in Thompsons essay. He cites many examples of crowds who, outraged at the market price, acted to enforce a moral or popular price. Examples of such actions include the Honiton lace-workers, in 1766, who, having taken grain from the farmers and sold it at the popular price in the market, brought back to the farmers not only the money but also the sacks (Thompson 1991a: 30). As the market economy of the twenty-first century increasingly fails to ensure the populations social reproduction, we have seen social struggles move in a familiar direction. Most famously, in August 2012: Snchez Gordillo, the mayor of a small town in rural Andalusia, led farm labourers into supermarkets to expropriate basic living supplies: they filled trolleys with pasta, sugar, chickpeas and milk, left without paying, and distributed the loot to local food banks (Hancox 2012). Both in England and across the planet, elites are attempting to impose austerity as the new normal. Such a project requires the construction of a new moral economy in place of the customary entitlements of the neoliberal deal. As in eighteenth-century Englandanother period of transition populations are contesting this imposition, defending what they believe they are entitled to. The society that emerges from this period of crisis will, to a large extent, depend on the outcome of these struggles. The concept of a moral economy can help us understand these struggles and why they are occurring now; it can also inform them, allowing the development of collective action that may begin with a defense of customary entitlements but will not end there.
Notes
We are grateful to Ben Trott for suggesting we write the piece and for useful comments that helped improve the finished version. 1 We might take at least a little license from Thompson here when he suggests that riot is functional, and may be expected to show itself at the same transitional moment in many national histories (1991b: 295). 2 The Reading the Riots researchers interviewed a total of 270 people who participated in the disturbances. The book is available only in Kindle format, the text of which is not paginated; thus no page numbers are provided for quotations drawn from this book.
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References
Bagehot. 2011. Ed Miliband, an Old-fashioned German Social Democrat. Economist, September 29. www.economist.com/blogs/bagehot/2011/09/labour-party-leader. Behr, Rafael. 2011. Miliband Must Name This New, Insecure Era. New Statesman, September 22. www.newstatesman.com/blogs/the-staggers/2011/09/british-crisis-miliband. Hancox, Dan. 2012. The Spanish Robin Hood. Guardian, August 15. www.guardian.co.uk /world/2012/aug/15/spanish-robin-hood-sanchez-gordillo. Hobsbawm, Eric. 1971. Primitive Rebels: Studies in Archaic Forms of Social Movement in the 19th and 20th Centuries. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Hutton, Robert. 2010. Labour Contender David Miliband Accuses Coalition of Economic Masochism. Bloomberg, August 26. www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-08-26/labour -contender-david-miliband-accuses-coalition-of-economic-masochism-.html. Milburn, Keir. 2012. The August Riots, Shock and the Prohibition on Thought. Capital and Class 36, no. 3: 4019. doi:10.1177/0309816812453733. Milne, Seumas. 2011. These Riots Reflect a Society Run on Greed and Looting. Guardian, August 10. www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/aug/10/riots-reflect-society -run-greed-looting. Roberts, Dan, ed. 2011. Reading the Riots: Investigating Englands Summer of Disorder. London: Guardian Books. Thompson, E. P. 1991a. The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century. In Customs in Common: Studies in Traditional Popular Culture, 185258. New York: New Press. Thompson, E. P. 1991b. The Moral Economy Reviewed. In Customs in Common: Studies in Traditional Popular Culture, 259351. New York: New Press. Turbulence Collective. 2009. Life in Limbo. Turbulence: Ideas for Movement, no. 5: 37. Winlow, Simon, and Steve Hall. 2012. Gone Shopping. In The English Riots of 2011: A Summer of Discontent, edited by Daniel Briggs, 14968. London: Waterside.
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that serves to reinforce the feedback loop central to neoliberalism: in conceiving of individuals as utility-maximizing atoms, it creates the structural mechanisms that produce exactly that kind of subjectivity. When the system crashes, rather than this indicating a flaw in conception, it is taken as a sign that individuals failed to play their part in what is otherwise unquestionable. There was a certain resonance with this mainstream discourse from more unexpected sources. Zygmunt Bauman (2011) described the urban uprisings as riots of defective and disqualified consumers, for whom looting and burning shops gratified the systemically enforced injunction to buy made impossible by an equally systemically enforced incapacity to do so. For Slavoj iek (2011), the protests expressed impotent rage and despair masked as a display of force, envy masked as triumphant carnival. The problem with the riots was not the violence per se, but the fact that such violence was insufficiently self-assertive. As zero-degree protest[s], . . . violent action[s] demanding nothing (iek 2011), they manifested the abstract negativity of Hegels rabble (Pbel).1 Their lack of political program approximating them to the Spanish indignad@s and the Occupy Wall Street protests that shortly followedwas itself a symptom of our postpolitical age, which celebrates choice but in which the only available alternative to enforced democratic consensus is a blind acting out (iek 2011).2 Immediately after these sorts of events, a strugglewhich is political through and throughtakes place around how they are to be defined in public discourse. One of the first battles to be fought concerns how much subjectivity and rationality one is to ascribe to those who took to the streets. Suggestions that their actions are somehow a relapse into animality (they are feral, vermin, packs) or immature behavior (impotent acting out) are de rigueur. Furthermore, even while government and media prefer to isolate these actions as the work of individual subjects, there is nevertheless a connection between rioters being seen as falling short of a standard of accepted rationality and their being seen as insufficiently subjective. They are reducible to their objective social conditions or to the expression of a culture in which the paternal superego function has gone missing, turning individuals into menacing walking ids. In its radical political version, this amounts to saying that the lack of a distinct subjective affirmation makes rioters difficult to identify as an instance of the emergence of the revolutionary subject (iek 2011), an impure subject ... neither political, nor even pre-political (Badiou 2011: 4243), whose subjectivity, dominated by negation and destruction, does not allow us to clearly distinguish what arises from a partially universalizable intention and what is mere nihilistic rage (41).3
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It is because of this struggle at the level of public discourse that one must draw attention to the problems with this kind of formulation when coming from the Left. First, exposing the situation to an all-or-nothing analytical gridrevolutionary subject or bust! flattens the different dimensions of rational decision and subjectivation that are always present. Second, and as a consequence, it fails to heed the subjective outcome of the experience itself and the potentials that it leaves behind. The true problem is less one of asking whether it passes or fails some stringent criteria of what counts as proper political action than whether any collective learning has taken or can take placeand what is required for it to serve as the material for (further) political subjectivation. Were the Riots Political? Intelligibility in history, writes Michel Foucault (2004: 244), resides not in the assignment of an always more or less metaphorized cause as source, but in something that could be called the constitution or composition of effects. How are global effects composed, how are mass effects composed? It is a fundamental Machiavellian insight that it is because historical causality is complex that there are cracks through which contingencyand ultimately also politics, will, and subjectivitycan seep in. A simple model of such complexity can be found in Francis Bacons (1851: 7677) analysis of uprisings, which presents them as multilayered systems of material and occasional causes, the former being the inflammable material that the latters contingent intervention can act upon: If there be fuel prepared, it is hard to tell, whence the spark shall come, that shall set it on fire. ... The cord breaketh at the last by the weakest pull when something, anything, in offending people joineth and knitteth them in a common cause. It is not difficult to apply this to the riots, in which the police shooting of a black man in Tottenham acted as the catalyst in a field of causes, where some going back many years have more recently been added to and intensified: habitual police abuse and humiliation; institutional racism; lack of opportunities; growing economic insecurity; the impacts of cuts in welfare infrastructure; and the widespread feeling of living in a system in which the dice are hopelessly loaded. Obviously, however, it is only after the fire is lit that something will be seen as having ignited itand that the whole thing can be seen as having been a long time coming. There is no telling in advance what will do it, which is exactly why Bacon insists that it is on the material causes that the sovereign must act, if seditions are to be pre-
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vented. What matters most, however, is what takes place between the occasional cause that will retrospectively appear as having been so and the different layers of material causes. It is here that a series of individual and collective choices are made according to information available (such as whether to fight or loot, based on the police-to-rioter ratio on-site). 4 As has been observed so many times, the surprising thing should be not that people revolt, but that they do not do so more often, and this sort of calculation no doubt goes some way toward resolving the conundrum. More important, it is here that subjectivation takes place, in the moment whenthrough the interplay of more or less intense affect and more or less distinct calculationone crosses the threshold between not acting and acting, making oneself into the subject of that decision. Of course, there are important differences between making oneself into the subject of a riot and making oneself into a political subject, but one must allow for shades between the two. It would be a mistake to discount all the declarations made by rioters in which they enlisted political motivations for their acts; one must judge a subjective assertion for what it is, rather than what it supposedly fails to be. Even if we grant iek (2011) the hypothesis of the cynical protester who, caught looting and burning a store and pressed for his reasons, would answer in the language used by social workers and sociologistsa perverse machine for systematically disregarding what agents have to say for themselves, if there ever was onethe very fact that individuals have such a repertoire of explanations for their motives is relevant. If what is at stake is the political potential in the subjectivation that takes place, is it not better that people can situate themselves within a bigger social pictureeven if that does not necessarily lead them to more sustained and efficient political actionthan that they do not? For the same reason, should we not find something positive in the fact that the riots have made them experience the power they can have engaging in collective action, as well as all the other things that become crystalline the moment one crosses the threshold to actingas in the rioters reply to the journalist who asked whether rioting was the right way to make a point: You wouldnt be talking to me now if we didnt riot?5 In short, a bivalent logic according to which one can decide if a behavior is political or not political limits the one who uses it to the position of the spectator judging from the sideline. If the problem is posed in terms of a continuum, along which different elements implicated in the riots are differently placed, the question becomes how a subjectivation that has already happened in that moment the threshold to action was crossedcan serve
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as the basis from which to build other modes of subjectivation and collective action. The political question, once incidents like the 2011 riots subside, is not whether they corresponded to our expectations or criteria, but what traces they leave in subjectivities, affects, and perceptions, and what is to be done with them and how. These, then, become the material on which to work material for processes of collective learning, politicization, organization. What Have We Learned? We can thus say that the riots, by dint of their (themselves eminently political) material and occasional causes, were political regardless of whether each and every participant was consciously doing politics through them. They were political because they contained if not a subjective message, at least an objective one: societies that accept growing inequality will be increasingly prone to this sort of outburst, or worse. They were political because at least some of the subjectivations they produced among participants and enthusiastic spectators are, if not immediately or globally political, at least a starting point for further politicization. And they were political because the responses to them inscribed them in competing political narratives. There is no doubt that the victor in this competition was the story of societal breakdown and the need, by symbolic hook or coercive crook, to reaffirm moral values and a sense of community. That was evident in the calls to give police greater powers, a rash of disproportionately severe sentences, and most interestingly, social mediaorganized local clean-ups to sweep away debris and pick up broken glass in riot-affected areas. The clean-ups were symptomatic both in that they took place in areas (like Hackney, Clapham, and Brixton, in London) where the frictions produced by gentrification are the strongest and that their social composition tended distinctly toward the young, white professional and creative types usually at the vanguard of gentrification. Perversely, what these more or less spontaneous reactions did was to fashion those places sense of community out of the exclusion of precisely those people who a few days earlier had vented their frustration at being presented but not represented (to put it in Alain Badious terms) in their neighborhoods. Here a we are all in this together ethicto invoke Conservative Prime Minister David Camerons favorite phrase, which he has used in appeals to acquiesce to austerity as a way out of the crisiswas explicitly built on the segregation of a them.6 Remarkably, if one looks at these front lines of gentrification, one finds that the foot soldiers of urban regeneration tend to be exactly the kind of
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people who took part in the student movement of winter 20102011.7 These, the indebted undergraduates in council estates rather than the up-and-coming professionals in the townhouses, are at the point where two separate worlds existing in the same area touch and often chafe. For them, the riots will probably have been an extreme public display of a resentment that they will at times have sensed in the courtyards and the stairwells. Yet while this border zone is where the tensions are at their highest and so where something like the riots can generate reactions that reaffirm existing divisions (as seen in the clean-ups), it is also where there is the most potential for building a political project to which a downward-mobile middle class and an ever more superfluous underclass could both belong. It is regrettable, though certainly also telling, that the physical contiguity among individuals who took part in the two most important mass phenomena of recent times in the UKthe riots and the student protestshas produced so little communication between them. It is telling because it illustrates a point made by many about Occupy, the indignad@s, and other movements that erupted in 2011: so atomized and threadbare is the social fabric of contemporary capitalism that simply creating a space for producing the relations that politics requires in order to exist is a major achievement. It is obvious that the narratives about societal breakdown mobilized by government and media are not false in and of themselves. What is problematic is their arbitrary apportioning of what can and cannot be causally explained; the individualizing, moralizing bent; and evidently, the remedies thence derived. This deliberate self-blinkering is all the more striking when one compares dominant attitudes in Europe or the United States to what happens at home and what happens abroad: while vague platitudes about social inequality and wealth disparity will be muttered when the subject is the global South, mainstream public discourse in the global North seems incapable of calling rising poverty and exclusion by their name. That people can lead entirely parallel existences in the same space has been evident in the global South for a long time. And it is a lesson borne by the riots even more powerfully than by the more immediately political protests of Occupy and the indignad@s that the global North had better heed while there is time. Allowing patterns of inequality to become entrenched leads to the division of society into universes that barely communicate, even where and when they share space directly. Places like Hackney, Clapham, and Brixton, which erupted in the summer of 2011 remind us that when all semblance of community unifying these universes is stripped,
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what is still left is the bare fact of physical contiguity: everyone is in it together, at the most basic level, simply because everyone inhabits the same space. For that reason alone it should be clear that doing nothing about inequity is bound to boomerang sooner or later. To Build on Destruction It has long been incumbent on the Left to develop forms of organization adequate to a reality of flexibility, precarity, and the creation, by capital, of an increasingly expendable underclass. With the decreased centrality of those circumstances after which it had fashioned itselfthe mass worker, the workplacethe Left seems to have found itself in a self-reinforcing feedback loop: the stronger societys centrifugal, atomizing, individualizing tendencies become, the farther the conditions of possibility of the political recede; the more they do, the harder it is to mount any political challenge against those tendencies. This process has decimated the Lefts organizing capacity, particularly in the global North and especially in regard to the urban underclass, and it has led to a practical and affective dependency on peaksthe moments, like those in 2011, when discontent suddenly flares upthat create openings for political change and accumulate energy for some time, but then dissipate into the order that they had initially interrupted. This, in turn, can perhaps explain the theoretical preeminence acquired by the exceptional, singular point over the ordinary curve, as seen in such formulations as the event (Badiou), the act (iek), and even the opposition between an anti-politics of events and a politics of organisation (Holloway 2005: 228). As I argue above, the risk of that move is to feed into the same problem: since any existing, ontic politics will always pale in comparison to the truly ontological political gesture that theory tells us to expect, it may be the case that nothing that actually happens will live up to the standards we have set, and we will fail to take it for what it isas potential material for a political, organizing process. 8 It could be that, in present conditions, there is no alternative for the Left but what Lenin might have called a tailism of the event, in which political organization always responds to the event rather than attempting to produce it; the challenges are too great and organizing capacities too limited. But there is still an option between active and passive tailism, and here we could draw another lesson from the global Southabout the importance of physical contiguity and territorial organization as seen in places like Venezuela, Bolivia, and Argentina. What if the UK riots had served to open commu-
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nication between the student protesters and their rioter neighborsfor example, through the setting up of common jail and legal support for rioters and students (who were also facing trials at the time)? Would that have succeeded in creating a space for mutual education and politicization through the building of concrete ties of solidarity and reciprocity? The question of organization today may well be about what to do between peaks: how to build on them in order to create the conditions for new ones so as to produce the fabric of relations that will be necessary for a politics capable of not only interrupting but also radically transforming the present state of things. In that regard, efforts like Occupy Sandy (the Occupy Wall Street affiliated mutual aid effort in the aftermath of the 2012 East Coast storm) or the antiforeclosure campaigns that have sprung up in Spain, the United States, and other countries could point a way forward. They, too, come in the wake of exceptional events, in this case wholly negative ones. But in moving organizing beyond an ever-shrinking workplace and into the territory and the field of social reproduction, they are not only acting here and now to solve or mitigate problems that the system itself cannot deal with (or has directly caused) but also creating the conditions for the relations of trust and reciprocity and the collective learning that more directly political projects require. This can be done out of a belief in the possibility of putting a human face on capital, or because of a liberal investment in our common humanity, in which case its transformative potential is limited; it can also be explicitly inscribed in the long tradition of service provision as political organizing, for which organizing and mutual aid go hand in hand (Jaffe 2012). This traditionhistorically the only one that has ever succeeded in producing mass political movementsarises from the acknowledgment of a simple fact: you have to start from where people are, without romanticizing or patronizing them. It could be apathy, it could be bereavement, it could be unfocused anger; you have no choice. Sometimes they will be people who have already been on the streets, who have already made themselves into subjects of collective action. Even when the action might not have been the kind we would wish to promote, that could be a great place to start.
Notes
1 2 For an excellent analysis of the Hegelian conceptincluding the way in which capitalism to some extent generalizes itsee Ruda (2011). Indignad@s (the indignant ones) refers to the (ongoing) movement against austerity and the hijacking of representative democracy by financial interests that burst into Spanish streets on May 15, 2011hence the name by which it is referred to in Spain, 15M.
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3 4 5
6 7
Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own. For an interesting attempt to apply computer modeling to the UK riots that addresses these calculations, see Osborne and Wilkins (2012). See Fletcher (2011). The Guardians (2012) comprehensive analysis of the riots collects, in a section called Profiles of Rioters, a number of fascinating statements that testify to the political potential (as well as the contradictory nature, evidently) of the experience. For an analysis on the clean-ups that makes some similar points to those raised here, see Himmelblau (2011). In response to proposed cuts to education and raising the cap on tuition fees, a strong protest movement irrupted among UK students between November 2010 and the early months of 2011. To be fair to Badiou (2008: 657), he made a similar point in relation to the riots in the French banlieues recognizing that a big part of the problem was that we have no relations with the young people in revolt in the banlieues.
References
Bacon, Francis. (1625) 1851. Of Seditions and Troubles. In The Essays, or Counsels Civil and Moral, 7481. London: Whitaker and Co. Badiou, Alain. 2008. We Need a Popular Discipline: Contemporary Politics and the Crisis of the Negative. Critical Inquiry 34, no. 4: 64559. Badiou, Alain. 2011. Circonstances 6: Le rveil de lhistoire. Paris: Lignes. Bauman, Zygmunt. 2011. The London RiotsOn Consumerism Coming Home to Roost. Social Europe , August 9. www.social-europe.eu/2011/08/the-london-riots-on -consumerism-coming-home-to-roost/. Fletcher, Martin. 2011. The Sad Truth behind the London Riot. NBC News World Blog, August 7. http://worldblog.nbcnews.com/_news/2011/08/07/7292281the-sad-truth -behind-london-riot?f b_ref=.TkANzuKuFIa.like&f b_source=home_multiline. Foucault, Michel. 2004. Scurit, territoire, population: Cours au Collge de France, 19771978. Paris: Gallimard/Seuil. Guardian. 2012. Reading the Riots. Investigating Englands Summer of Disorder. www .guardian.co.uk/uk/series/reading-the-riots. Himmelblau, Sophia. 2011. #Riotcleanup or #Riotwhitewash. University for Strategic Optimism blog, August 10. http://universityforstrategicoptimism.wordpress.com/2011 /08/10/riotcleanup-or-riotwhitewash/. Holloway, John. 2005. Change the World without Taking Power. London: Pluto. Jaffe, Sarah. 2012. Power to the People. Jacobin, November 3. http://jacobinmag.com/2012 /11/power-to-the-people/. Osborne, Andrew, and Inigo Wilkins. 2012. Catalysing Dissent. Mute, November 1. www .metamute.org/editorial/articles/catalysing-dissent#. Ruda, Frank. 2011. Hegels Rabble: An Investigation into Hegels Philosophy of Right. London: Continuum. iek, Slavoj. 2011. Shoplifters of the World Unite. London Review of Books, August 19. www.lrb.co.uk/2011/08/19/slavoj-zizek/shoplifters-of-the-world-unite.
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ponytail, and she is ready to get to work. Yet her task is not simply a menial one; it is also pedagogic. Emblazoned across her chest, in carefully ordered, hand-painted letters is a clear moral message: Looters Are Scum. Behind her is a sea of white facesrespectable middle-class do-gooderswho have come to clean up the streets, to sweep away the dirt and debris, and to cleanse the events that shook fear into middle England. I start with these contrasting images because they each evoke particular truth narratives that have come to explain the events of August 2011. Both photos were widely disseminated in corporate news media and recirculated on popular blogs and websites in the weeks following the riots. Their representational power arguably lingers because they tell familiar stories about criminality and danger, law and order, individual accountability and big society responsibility. These photographic narratives work not only to naturalize the punitive state responses that followed the civil unrest of August 2011including lengthy prison sentences, violent police raids, increased surveillance, and social benefit sanctionsbut also to absolve the state of its own culpability. Just as the volunteer broom brigade merrily swept away the remnants of danger left on Londons streets, the state has largely swept away its responsibility for what happened and instead generated a narrative of blame to justify its own disciplinary violence. The Punitive Aftermath of August 2011 The events of August 2011which began with a peaceful demonstration outside a police station in Tottenham to protest the fatal police shooting of twenty-nine-year-old Mark Duggan and subsequently erupted into five days of rioting, looting, and burning in cities across Englandpresented the state with a political opportunity. Clearly these events were a sign of widespread rage, disaffection, and discontent, and they stemmed from deeper problems that had been brewing for years. But rather than seize the moment to confront these issues, the government chose instead to simply extend its law, order, and moral responsibilization agenda. On August 9, returning early from his family vacation in Tuscany, Prime Minister David Cameron (2011a) issued a public warning: I have this very clear message to those people who are responsible for this wrongdoing and criminality: you will feel the full force of the law and if you are old enough to commit these crimes you are old enough to face the punishment. Reiterating these comments the following day, Cameron (2011b) announced: Anyone charged with violent disorder and
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other serious offences should expect to be remanded in custody ...and anyone convicted should expect to go to jail. This was no mere political rhetoric. Camerons edict translated directly into practice, with more than 3,100 individuals charged for riot-related offenses in the twelve months that followed. The main charges were burglary (50 percent), violent disorder (22 percent), and theft (15 percent). Of those who were sentenced, 66 percent were taken into immediate custody, with an average prison sentence of 17.1 months. The pattern of sentencing was more than quadruple what would normally be expectedsentences for similar offences during the preceding year averaged at 3.7 months (UK Ministry of Justice 2012). This surge of arrests had ripple effects across the criminal justice system, with courts working around the clock to process defendants, police officers working extended hours to make arrests, and magistrates cases being routinely referred up to the Crown Court to enable stiffer penalties. The already overcrowded prison estate in England and Wales was stretched to the max, reaching its highest ever population peak at 88,179 in December 2011 (Howard League for Penal Reform 2012).2 Snitching, Shaming, and Dawn Raids Attempting to recover from its dramatic loss of control on the streets, the state responded with a spectacular show of criminal justice might. The police undertook a series of aggressive dawn raids, violently breaking down doors of suspected looters homes to search for stolen property and arrest young people. These raids, which primarily targeted low-income housing estates, recovered relatively low-value looted goods such as shirts, sneakers, and belts (Gayle 2011; BBC News 2011a). Police and corporate media launched widespread snitching campaigns to encourage the public to identify and report suspected looters and rioters. Suspects photos were splashed across the front pages of local newspapers, the Manchester Police launched a Shop a Looter billboard campaign, and the Metropolitan Police posted suspect profiles on its Flickr page, with copycat websites created by members of the public (BBC News 2011c; Daily Mail 2011). These tactics were designed not only to track down and arrest suspects but also to name and shame them publicly. In the week following the riots, the Crown Prosecution Service advised the Magistrates Court to abandon identity protections for young people (who are usually granted anonymity) and instead publish the names and addresses of convicted youths where it
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was in the public interest to do so (Bowcott and Bates 2011). Some speculated that this unusual decision was a direct response to Camerons remark that the government would not let phony concerns about human rights get in the way of the publication of [suspects] pictures (Cameron 2011b). Overzealous Sentencing Questions were raised about the proportionality of sentencing as well as political interference with the judiciarys supposed independence, particularly when it was revealed that magistrates had been advised to disregard normal sentencing guidelines for riot-related offenses (Bowcott 2011; Bowcott and Bates 2011). There were many striking cases: a twenty-three-year-old with no prior convictions sentenced to six months imprisonment for stealing 3.50 worth of bottled water; a twenty-two-year-old sentenced to sixteen months for stealing ice cream; a forty-eight-year-old sentenced to sixteen months for stealing doughnuts; a woman who slept through the riots but was imprisoned for accepting a pair of shorts that had been looted by her lodger; and two young men sentenced to four years each for attempting to incite a riot via Facebook, even though their posts did not result in any such action (Lewis, Ball, and Taylor 2011; Addley, Vasagar, and Coleman 2011; Carter and Bowcott 2011). Despite appeals, most sentences were upheld on the grounds that the context of the riots constituted an aggravating factor that warranted additional punishment (R v. Blackshaw and Others [2011] EWCA Crim. 2312). The consequentialist rationality standard that was so stringently applied to those who participated in the riots did not apply to those doling out punishment. Stiff sentences were publicly justified on the need for deterrence, despite the lack of evidence that longer sentences have any such effecta fact that even the director of public prosecutions admitted (Bawdon, Lewis, and Newburn 2012). Expanding and Collectivizing Punishment Other punitive measures also followed. Barely a week after the riots ended, several local councils issued eviction notices to tenants in social housing who had been charged with riot-related offences, including a single mother whose son had been charged but not yet convicted (BBC News 2011b). The evictions applied to entire households even if only one member had been involved in the offense. While the courts subsequently rejected these evictions, the prime minister made it clear he would back councils efforts to rid their properties of convicted rioters. For too long, he said, we have
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taken too soft an attitude to people who loot and pillage their own community. If you do that you should lose your right to housing at a subsidized rate (Topping and Wintour 2011). True to Camerons word, in May 2012 the government released plans to enact a new mandatory power of possession that would enable landlords to evict tenants for antisocial behavior and criminal convictions (UK Department for Communities and Local Government 2012). This new power would limit discretion and force courts to issue evictions that met particular conditions. The proposed triggers for eviction would apply not only to the behavior of a formal tenant but also to any regular visitors to the property. Most significant, the proposed legislation would effectively allow councils to abandon their duties to provide accommodation in such cases: Where tenants have been evicted for anti-social behaviour [it] is very likely that they will be deemed to have made themselves intentionally homeless and therefore the local authority will not owe them a duty to provide new settled accommodation (UK Department for Communities and Local Government 2012: 23). This notion of intentional homelessness adds a frightening weapon to the states arsenal of antipoor laws. The message is clear: low-income people who break the law (and get caught) or are deemed to engage in antisocial behavior will not only forfeit their basic entitlements but will also face legally sanctioned social abandonment. As the head of Manchester Council aptly summed up: We have the power to evict people involved in anti-social behaviour and we are ready, willing and able to use that power. Anyone involved in these disturbancesor anyone who has allowed their children to be involvedneeds to understand that we dont want you in our community (Leese 2011; emphasis added). Like parental responsibility orders, which hold people accountable for their childrens behavior, this new power of possession essentially renders whole households responsible for the actions of any one of its members or guests. No doubt this will have a particularly gendered effect, with lone parents (who are disproportionately female) bearing the costs, as has been the case with housing evictions related to antisocial behavior (Hunter and Nixon 2009). Such measures also reflect an inability to understand poverty as anything other than a choice. As one commentator pointed out: The idea seems to be that those in social housing could just find somewhere else, they could just walk into private housing. Like the similar proposals for taking away housing benefit from miscreants, it is based on an inability to imagine what poverty is like, to think for a second what might happen to a family when it loses its income or its home (Hatherley 2011).
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In addition to these new powers of eviction, the government announced a host of other punitive sanctions designed to tackle gang and youth violence (UK Government 2011). While some of these measures were already in the works prior to August 2011, the riots gave greater impetus for implementing them. Civilized Outrage and Rationalized Retribution These punitive responses were made possible in part because the riots were defined from the outset as decisively not political. Although most commentators acknowledged that the initial demonstration outside Tottenham Police Station fell within the proper realm of political dissent, the subsequent actions were widely characterized as little more than criminal opportunism. As Sadiq Khan, the member of Parliament for Tooting in South London, wrote in the London Evening Standard:
Lets be clear: what weve witnessed across our London boroughs is not a genuine outlet of political angst, nor a reaction to police conduct. It is simply criminality on a devastating scale. There is no excuse. The people looting sports ware [sic] stores, electrical shops and department stores werent thinking about what happened to Mark Duggan. They werent thinking about the stagnating economy or public service cuts. Their motivation was to wreak havoc and perhaps grab a pair of trainers or a TV along the way. (Khan 2011)
More liberal commentators who insisted on drawing attention to the immediate political context of the unrestthat is, decades of racist policing, entrenched poverty and unemployment, educational disenfranchisement, and the imposition of austerity measuresnonetheless argued that the actions of the rioters were not political, at least not in a proper sense. It was as though the definition of the political had become so narrowly proscriptive that it became impossible to hear the political message of anger, desperation, and disaffection expressed on the streets. When framed as nonpolitical, the events were easily reduced to a consequence of poor choices and failed morals, which thus warranted punishment. As Home Secretary Teresa May remarked: We must never forget that the only cause of a crime is a criminal. Everybody, no matter what their background or circumstances, has the freedom to choose between right and wrong. Those who make the wrong decision, who engage in criminality, must be identified, arrested and punishedand we will make sure that happens (May 2011). These punitive responses were also permitted in part
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because they disproportionately targeted disenfranchised populations young people, poor neighborhoods, black communities, and single parents that were already so widely demonized that the public was willing to accept their mistreatment. As Joe Sim pointed out, normally such blatantly disproportionate sentencing would threaten the legitimacy of the system. However, in the immediate aftermath of the disturbances, the state could, and did, respond coercively in order to restore order with little consideration for the legitimacy of the judiciarys actions. This was due to the simple fact that popular and political hostility towards the poor had become so deeply embedded in the wider society (Sim 2012: 27). But perhaps more important, these punitive measures were consistently framed as rational and appropriate responses to the mindless criminality that had emerged on the streets. In doing so, the government was able to cloak its own class anxieties about the disturbances and mask its own anger and vindictiveness. From the courts that imposed severe sentences, to the politicians who launched new legislative penalties, to the councils that sought to evict riotersthese were the hallmarks of a civilized outrage, an acrimonious yet refined resentment that couched itself in measured tones, rational language, and decisive action. This was the riotous behavior of the elite classes, who mete out legally sanctioned modes of violence while naming it otherwise. Returning to the two images with which we began, we can see how the narratives of dangerous criminality contrasted with the upstanding moralism of those who sought to restore order. Yet this restorationlike the actions of the broom brigade that sought to tidy up the streets in the aftermathwas not a challenge to the systemic injustices that had prompted the unrest in the first place, but a return to the status quo. In many ways, the states punitive response to the riotswhich has not only scapegoated, stigmatized, and criminalized those who participated in the unrest, but also punished, abandoned, and chastised their communitiescould not have been more counter productive. As many police, rioters, policy makers, and researchers alike have warned, there is ample reason to believe that further riots will ensue. The question is not if, but when.
Notes
1 2 The first image is available at Telegraph n.d.a. The second image is available at Telegraph n.d.b. The urban unrest did not spread to Wales. However, those convicted of offenses in England can be sentenced to prison in either country, resulting in the riots impacting on the prison populations of both.
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References
Addley, Esther, Jeevan Vasagar, and Jasmine Coleman. 2011. UK Riots: In Courtrooms across Country, There Was Little Room for Leniency. Guardian, August 11. www .guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/aug/11/uk-riots-courtrooms-country. Bawdon, Fiona, Paul Lewis, and Tim Newburn. 2012. Rapid Riot Prosecutions More Important Than Long Sentences, Say Keir Starmer. Guardian, July 3. www.guardian .co.uk/uk/2012/jul/03/riot-prosecutions-sentences-keir-starmer. BBC News. 2011a. Dawn Raids in Hackney Two Months after London Riots. October 7. www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-15212124. BBC News. 2011b. London Riots: Tenants Sent Eviction Warning Letters. August 24. www .bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-14643349. BBC News. 2011c. Police Inundated with Calls to Shop a Looter Scheme. August 13. www .bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-manchester-14515631. Bowcott, Owen. 2011. Magistrates Were Told to Send Rioters to Crown Court, Emails Show. Guardian , September 14. www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/sep/13/riots-sentencing -justice-system-emails. Bowcott, Owen, and Stephen Bates. 2011. Riots: Magistrates Advised to Disregard Normal Sentencing. Guardian, August 15. www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/aug/15/riots -magistrates-sentencing. Cameron, David. 2011a. PM Statement on Restoring Order to Cities. August 9. www .number10.gov.uk/news/pm-statement-on-restoring-order/. Cameron, David. 2011b. PM Statement on Violence in England. August 10. www .number10.gov.uk/news/pm-statement-on-violence-in-england/. Carter, Helen, and Owen Bowcott. 2011. Riots: Mother Jailed for Handling Looted Shorts Freed on Appeal. Guardian, August 19. www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/aug/19/riots -mother-looted-shorts-freed. Daily Mail. 2011. Do You Know These Looting Suspects? Police Release a Handful of Pictures (but Weve Found 49 More to Be Going on with). September 2. www.dailymail.co.uk /news/article-2024120/London-riots-2011-suspects-Photos-released-know-looters.html. Gayle, Damien. 2011. Its Payback Time for the Looters: Police Snatch Squads Swoop on Homes of Riot Suspects in a String of Dawn Raid Across. Daily Mail, August 11. www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2024620/LONDON-RIOTS-2011-Payback-time -looters-police-swoop-homes-suspects.html. Hatherley, Owen. 2011. Evicting Rioters Families from Their Homes? Theres a Horrible Logic to It. Guardian, August 16. www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/aug/16 /evict-rioters-families. Howard League for Penal Reform. 2012. Week by Week Prison Population Breakdown. Weekly Prison Watch, September 11. http://d19ylpo4aovc7m.cloudfront.net/fileadmin /howard_league/user/pdf/Prison_watch/Prison_Watch_09.11.12.pdf. Hunter, Caroline, and Judy Nixon. 2009. Disciplining Women: Gender, Silence and AntiSocial Behaviour. Criminal Justice Matters 75, no. 1: 79. Khan, Sadiq. 2011. Riots Are Not a Genuine Outlet of Political Angst. Evening Standard, August 9. www.standard.co.uk/news/riots-are-not-a-genuine-outlet-of-political-angst -6431047.html.
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Leese, Richard. 2011. The Only Place to Be. Leaders Blog (Manchester City Council), August 11. www.manchester.gov.uk/blog/leadersblog/post/477. Lewis, Paul, James Ball, and Matthew Taylor. 2011. Riot Jail Sentences in Crown Courts Longer Than Normal. Guardian , September 5. www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011 /sep/05/riot-jail-sentences-crown-courts. May, Theresa. 2011. Speech on Riots Given to the House of Commons. August 11. London: Home Office. www.homeoffice.gov.uk/media-centre/speeches/riots-speech. Sim, Joe. 2012. Shock and Awe: Judicial Responses to the Riots. Criminal Justice Matters 89, no. 1: 2627. Telegraph. n.d.a. London and UK Riots: 50 Powerful Images. www.telegraph.co.uk/news /picturegalleries/uknews/8693000/London-and-UK-riots-50-powerful-images .html?image=19 (accessed November 18, 2012). Telegraph. n.d.b. London and UK Riots: 50 Powerful Images. www.telegraph.co.uk/news /picturegalleries/uknews/8693000/London-and-UK-riots-50-powerful-images .html?image=49. Topping, Alexandra, and Patrick Wintour. 2011. London Riots: Wansworth Council Moves to Evict Mother of Charged Boy. Guardian, August 12. www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011 /aug/12/london-riots-wandsworth-council-eviction. UK Department for Communities and Local Government. 2012. Strengthening Powers of Possession for Anti-Social Behaviour: Summary of Responses to Consultation and Next Steps. May. www.communities.gov.uk/documents/housing/pdf/2148929.pdf. UK Government. 2011. Ending Gang and Youth Violence: A Cross-Government Report Including Further Evidence and Good Practice Case Studies. Cm. 8211. Norwich, UK: Stationery Office Limited. www.homeoffice.gov.uk/publications/crime/ending-gang -violence/. UK Ministry of Justice. 2012. Statistical Bulletin on the Public Disorder of 6th to 9th August 2011September 2012 Update. London: Ministry of Justice. www.justice.gov.uk /downloads/statistics/criminal-justice-stats/public-disorder-stats/august-public -disorder-stats-bulletin-130912.pdf.

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Against the Day

Harvie and Milburn

Moral Economy of the English Crowd 567

Building on Destruction 569

570 The South Atlantic Quarterly

Against the Day

Building on Destruction 571

572 The South Atlantic Quarterly

Against the Day

Building on Destruction 573

574 The South Atlantic Quarterly

Against the Day

Building on Destruction 575

576 The South Atlantic Quarterly

Against the Day

578 The South Atlantic Quarterly

Against the Day

The Quiet Dangers of Civilized Rage 579

580 The South Atlantic Quarterly

Against the Day

The Quiet Dangers of Civilized Rage 581

582 The South Atlantic Quarterly

Against the Day