[Op-Ed] A society on the verge of a meltdown

[Thanas]

Augstein Op-Ed

A Society on the Verge of a Meltdown
The riots in London are a social Fukushima for the Western world. Should we really be suprised that an increase in wealth for just a few, accompanied by simultaneous impoverishment of the masses, could not continue unabated?

"We know nothing about the form of future tragedy," German playwright Botho Strauss once wrote. But that isn't true any longer. Now we can picture the form of our tragedy -- all we have to do is watch it on YouTube. The images of the London riots are a preview of our future. Malaysian student Asyraf Haziq sits bleeding on the ground as a man approaches to help him up, only to then help three others plunder the contents of the defenseless man's rucksack, leaving him alone on the street.

This is rock bottom for humanity.

British Prime Minister David Cameron needed a few days to find the right words. "Social problems that have been festering for decades have exploded in our face," he said just this week, referring to a "broken society." For a Tory this was a step forward. "Society" is not a word that easily passes through the lips of a conservative.

"There is no such thing as society," former conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher famously said. "There are individual men and women, and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look to themselves first."

But when society is broken, people break too. Thatcher and all the other neoliberal ideologues after her didn't want to believe this. But the market has no moral qualities, and without morals we all become animals.

Moral Meltdown
Suddenly this has occurred to everyone. Just weeks before the riots conservative commentator Charles Moore wrote in the Daily Telegraph: "It has taken me more than 30 years as a journalist to ask myself this question, but this week I find that I must: is the Left right after all? You see, one of the great arguments of the Left is that what the Right calls 'the free market' is actually a set-up."

In the conservative German daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, commentator Frank Schirrmacher turns similar sentiments toward Chancellor Angela Merkel and her Christian Democrats, complaining about the "ghostly coolness" with which she approaches the moral vacuum of conservative politics.

The riots in London have done to the West's social self-image what Fukushima did to the concept of nuclear energy. It was a super maximum credible accident -- the imagined, but never expected catastrophe. A moral meltdown.

But with all due respect, the only thing astonishing here is the actual astonishment. Who really thought it could simply go on indefinitely like this? Who believed there would be no consequences to the increase of obscene wealth for a few while impoverishment simultaneously plagued the masses. Wealth disparity is no accident of the capitalist system -- it is the system. Just as the Berlin Wall and the Russian Gulag were no accidents of socialism, this disparity is reality. Capitalism means that one person owns a yacht with a swimming pool and a hangar for their helicopter, while millions of others haven't had a salary increase in years. Socialism means equal fortune for all, except for those who don't play along and end up in prison.

The Rubble of Neoliberal Ideology
The neoliberals can now take their places alongside the Left on the rubble of their ideology. But it's no reason to rejoice. The German socialists have always been broken because they couldn't reconcile the ideas of fairness and freedom. The socialist Left Party has commandeered the word "left" and held on tight, just as the business-friendly Free Democrats have done their part to usurp the word "freedom." This is unbecoming to those words, which have degenerated through political wear.

Politicians like Gesine Lötzsch and Klaus Ernst, who head the Left Party, which includes politicians from the successor party to the former East German Communist Party, engage in undignified bickering about the sad history of communist East Germany, while the party's deputy chairwoman Sahra Wagenknecht and her passel of displaced East Germans tout nothing more than political folklore. If that's the left, then who wants to be a part of it?

The Junge Welt newspaper recently published a cynical article thanking the Berlin Wall for prisons run by the feared East German secret police, the Stasi, and suppression in schools under the East German regime. That's not leftist. That's indecent.

A Neglected Polity Will Founder
In the political sense, "left" would mean defending the parliamentary system against its enemies and fighting for more equality within our society. The position in the political system has been open since the Social Democrats quit government in 2005, unpopular and struggling to find their message. But if the Left Party wants to occupy it, then it must finally abandon the notion that the true consummation of society lies outside the parliamentary system. In that domain, it is only the Stasi that is waiting -- and nothing more.

The parliamentary system is under pressure and needs strong allies. Authoritarians smell their chance: Right-wing populism is on the rise everywhere . In England, the far-right has formed citizen militias, while Cameron is considering controls on Facebook and Twitter like those in place in the Arab states. Meanwhile in Germany, the interior minister supports the end of anonymity online .

The future of a democracy without democrats is grim. We famously learn little from history. But if we take one thing from the Weimar era it should be this: The res publica amissa, or the neglected polity, will fail in the end. When it comes down to what matters more to us -- democracy or capitalism -- what will we decide?

And will we be allowed to choose?

[Mr Bean]

I hate broken comparisons sometime

The riots in London are a social Fukushima for the Western world

You mean it's a slow motion disaster which will disrupt lots of people lives in the local area but is ultimately harmless to anything outside a forty mile radius except to it's over-reaction among the general population and will serve as a valuable teaching moment for the rest of the world?

This one is even better

But with all due respect, the only thing astonishing here is the actual astonishment. Who really thought it could simply go on indefinitely like this? Who believed there would be no consequences to the increase of obscene wealth for a few while impoverishment simultaneously plagued the masses. Wealth disparity is no accident of the capitalist system -- it is the system. Just as the Berlin Wall and the Russian Gulag were no accidents of socialism, this disparity is reality. Capitalism means that one person owns a yacht with a swimming pool and a hangar for their helicopter, while millions of others haven't had a salary increase in years. Socialism means equal fortune for all, except for those who don't play along and end up in prison.

I love that comparison especially, yes capitalism leads to wealth inequality by default because the free market always results in winners and losers and by it's nature there has to be lots of losers to make winners sometimes it's by a tiny amount sometimes by a massive amount. But socialism leads to gulags and iron curtains? I'm sorry I thought that was a side effect of dictatorships by centeral committees who are dedicated to holding onto power not the idea of the common good socialism espouses.

[Lord Zentei]

I've seen all kinds of "lessons" being learned from the riots in London, from "welfare society makes people into dependents" (since the UK has generous welfare compared with much of the world) to "moral breakdown in society" from conservatives (and they have been ranting about that for a long time - in stating otherwise, the article is simply wrong). This looks like another soap box rant to me, preaching to the choir.

[kaeneth]

I've seen all kinds of "lessons" being learned from the riots in London, from "welfare society makes people into dependents" (since the UK has generous welfare compared with much of the world) to "moral breakdown in society" from conservatives (and they have been ranting about that for a long time - in stating otherwise, the article is simply wrong). This looks like another soap box rant to me, preaching to the choir.

This.

But with all due respect, the only thing astonishing here is the actual astonishment. Who really thought it could simply go on indefinitely like this? Who believed there would be no consequences to the increase of obscene wealth for a few while impoverishment simultaneously plagued the masses. Wealth disparity is no accident of the capitalist system -- it is the system. Just as the Berlin Wall and the Russian Gulag were no accidents of socialism, this disparity is reality. Capitalism means that one person owns a yacht with a swimming pool and a hangar for their helicopter, while millions of others haven't had a salary increase in years. Socialism means equal fortune for all, except for those who don't play along and end up in prison.

Where are the riots in the US demanding a socialist model and/or taxing the US more? Where is the massive public outcry? I mean, if you are going to argue it is both inevitable and an inarguable outcome of wealth disparity, shouldn't it start where it is nearly purely capitalist? Or at least come so closely on the heels of the events in London for the connection to be obvious? (e.g. Arab Spring)

At least the author didn't invent the rant out of whole cloth, I suppose.

[Starglider]

It's appropriate that Thanas is posting this, because it's the kind of ridiculous hyperbole, with no sense of scale or perspective, that comprises much of his recent rants. The London riots were frankly minor in both scale and damage. They don't compare to even recent events in other bits of Europe, never mind the many hundreds of large scale riots seen throughout the 20th century. When over 50 people died in Los Angles in 1992, was the US on the verge of meltdown? Obviously not.

When the body count is in triple digits, hospitals are flooded with minor injuries, when the police have to abandon areas for weeks at a time and losses climb into the tens of billions, you may then complain about 'imminnent meltdown'. 'This is rock bottom for humanity.' will still be insulting even then to everyone who has lived through oppression, genocide and the destruction of nations.

[Alyrium Denryle]

Where are the riots in the US demanding a socialist model and/or taxing the US more? Where is the massive public outcry? I mean, if you are going to argue it is both inevitable and an inarguable outcome of wealth disparity, shouldn't it start where it is nearly purely capitalist? Or at least come so closely on the heels of the events in London for the connection to be obvious? (e.g. Arab Spring)

To play Devils Advocate:

There are some important historical and cultural differences to consider. Namely, violent riots over politics are not especially common in the US. It takes things like systematic oppression of minority groups for a hundred years, military conscription for unjust wars, or emergent properties of crowds after sporting events or somesuch to get a riot going. My knowledge is a bit limited, but even unions in the gilded age didnt generally do anything like rioting until AFTER their boss called in the army to kill them all. I could be wrong here, I am going from memory rather than a list of US riots. American culture is such that economic inequality is thought of to a large extent as good and proper, so long as GDP stays high and people can delude themselves into thinking they have a happy future.

Conversely, in France, riots happen when the government tries to change labor laws...

The point being (IE. what you should take home, even if I am wrong on the details), cultural and historical factors may push a hypothetical riot-threshold forward or back along certain Unpleasant Conditions axes.

[Simon_Jester]

I love that comparison especially, yes capitalism leads to wealth inequality by default because the free market always results in winners and losers and by it's nature there has to be lots of losers to make winners sometimes it's by a tiny amount sometimes by a massive amount.

Wealth inequality is not, in itself, the problem. The problem arises when the overall pie is static or growing in size, and yet the average citizen's slice of it is shrinking. Ultimately, capitalism is a tool for distributing and organizing the resources of a civilization; if the tool doesn't produce the desired outcome than something is wrong.

I believe that the problems with capitalism as we now know it are fixable, but that doesn't mean they aren't there.

But socialism leads to gulags and iron curtains? I'm sorry I thought that was a side effect of dictatorships by centeral committees who are dedicated to holding onto power not the idea of the common good socialism espouses.

I don't think there are many people who will deny that actual socialism, as opposed to the 'social democracy' of some European countries, tends toward tyranny. It's a fundamental flaw in the system, and while there might be ways to engineer around it while still keeping the government "socialist," no one has done much of a job of coming up with such ways.

The problem is that once you start forcibly confiscating resources from the top concentrations of capital, you need enough state power to carry out arbitrary decisions. You have to be able to say "yes, we are reorganizing the land into collective farms" or "we are taking over your factory and giving it to the workers' committee" and have that decision enforced, even if there is armed resistance. You need to be able to root out people disaffected with the system, because there will always be those who envy the wealthy of other countries... or so the logic goes.

And it is difficult for me to imagine a situation where the logic of socialist revolution does not lead to tyranny. The tyrant(s) may be relatively cruel or relatively benevolent, but tyranny remains, because how else do you run a system that has the power to ruin individuals' livelihoods at will, or to direct drastic reorganizations of labor willy-nilly?

[Stark]

It's appropriate that Thanas is posting this, because it's the kind of ridiculous hyperbole, with no sense of scale or perspective, that comprises much of his recent rants. The London riots were frankly minor in both scale and damage. They don't compare to even recent events in other bits of Europe, never mind the many hundreds of large scale riots seen throughout the 20th century. When over 50 people died in Los Angles in 1992, was the US on the verge of meltdown? Obviously not.

When the body count is in triple digits, hospitals are flooded with minor injuries, when the police have to abandon areas for weeks at a time and losses climb into the tens of billions, you may then complain about 'imminnent meltdown'. 'This is rock bottom for humanity.' will still be insulting even then to everyone who has lived through oppression, genocide and the destruction of nations.

It's a good thing you have so much content to add to a discussion of social problems, instead of just chasing your disagreement with Thanas. The article being bombastic silliness doesn't change the way people view the event and what that means for their comfortable, middle-class lives.

[Thanas]

It's appropriate that Thanas is posting this, because it's the kind of ridiculous hyperbole, with no sense of scale or perspective, that comprises much of his recent rants.

You are somebody who thinks this board can be categorized according to some "level" which determines how much of your fat nerd drivel transhumanist gospel we can handle. Trust me, you do not want this to be about which one of us has a sense of scale or perspective, robot boy.

[kaeneth]

...

There are some important historical and cultural differences to consider.

...

At which point the premise of the OP is invalid in the sense it becomes Op-Ed's 'reasons'+X+Y' not simply the Op-Ed's 'reasons'. At which point the problem becomes 'Here is a list of 10 things that need to be reduced, pick some combination of them.'

Namely, violent riots over politics are not especially common in the US.

Yes.

It takes things like systematic oppression of minority groups for a hundred years, military conscription for unjust wars, or emergent properties of crowds after sporting events or somesuch to get a riot going.

Oppression and unjust wars are perfectly legitimate reasons for a riot. They are also as political as it is the government instruments (e.g. Police, Army) of projecting physical force are being employed. I'm not sure how you can argue 'Protesting the actions of the government in regards to X' as 'not political'. So is massive economic inequality.

[madd0ct0r]

thinking about Alyrium Denryle's Unpleasant Axis, with the point marked 'have a riot' moving back and forth...

What other riots or not entirely peaceful protests has the UK had recently?

this ain't a comprehensive list, just ones I was present at or nearby

Lessee:
2011 - Shopping with violence
2010 - Newport - WDL (EDL in hiding) trying to stir up trouble
2009 - Liverpool, football tv screen broke
2009 - Birmingham - EDL white nationalists vs local population
2008? - race riots up in Bradford area

memory starts getting wobbly here.

[Alyrium Denryle]

Oppression and unjust wars are perfectly legitimate reasons for a riot.

I am not saying they aren't. Just that the threshold for such things is very high, and it takes a while for the discontent to ferment in the US compared to other countries.

Remember: Threaten collective bargaining in the US, and you get peaceful protests and recall elections. Increase the work-week in france, and you get rioting in the streets.

They are also as political as it is the government instruments (e.g. Police, Army) of projecting physical force are being employed. I'm not sure how you can argue 'Protesting the actions of the government in regards to X' as 'not political'. So is massive economic inequality.

I am not saying that it is not political. I am saying that the threshold in the US for a riot is very high when it comes to state oppression, economics and war. In some other countries, this is not the case, and the threshold for a riot is fairly low. Certain historical and cultural factors explain this.

For example, France has a history of removing the heads of leaders and aristocrats who work against the common people. That whole reign of terror thing. In the US, the people tend to fixate on the constitution and the "freedom" it represents, but ignore that state's crimes until it starts killing people, and even then, it is dicey, probably because the population is so fractional that only the people being killed lash out, and there is little history of such actions ending well. Hell, here, peaceful protests regarding social justice are demonized at the time they are done as often as not (basically, whenever the protesters are minorities or poor), and the state has a disturbing history of murdering even violence-free protest actions. Why would you expect the threshold to be at the same place as it may be in France or the UK?

Keep in mind, I am going from memory here. Someone better with post-enlightenment history here may be equipped to correct any misunderstandings I may have

[Darth Raptor]

Our poor minorities are safely contained in ghettos, and our white underclass is pretty firmly pro-establishment, because they're dumb.

There's geography to consider as well. I wonder if one of the pressure valves at work in the US is its size: the internal economic disparity from place to place, and the relative ease with which people from really shitty parts of the country can move to less shitty states without papers or the need to learn a new language. If the US was much smaller, it might also have a lower boiling point.

[kaeneth]

Oppression and unjust wars are perfectly legitimate reasons for a riot.

I am not saying they aren't. Just that the threshold for such things is very high, and it takes a while for the discontent to ferment in the US compared to other countries.

Remember: Threaten collective bargaining in the US, and you get peaceful protests and recall elections. Increase the work-week in france, and you get rioting in the streets.

So your basic argument is the OP is justified because the US has an abnormally high threshold for violent riots?

I guess, I'm trying to get what your objective in arguing with me is beyond saying that.

[Alyrium Denryle]

Oppression and unjust wars are perfectly legitimate reasons for a riot.

I am not saying they aren't. Just that the threshold for such things is very high, and it takes a while for the discontent to ferment in the US compared to other countries.

Remember: Threaten collective bargaining in the US, and you get peaceful protests and recall elections. Increase the work-week in france, and you get rioting in the streets.

So your basic argument is the OP is justified because the US has an abnormally high threshold for violent riots?

I guess, I'm trying to get what your objective in arguing with me is beyond saying that.

I am saying it is worth considering, but that is pretty much it. It is not silly prima facia.

[kaeneth]

...

I am saying it is worth considering, but that is pretty much it. It is not silly prima facia.

Alright. I didn't mean to imply that it was silly, merely that it is more rant with bits of evidence tossed in than a comprehensive article that answers the question posed at the start.

[Prannon]

Our poor minorities are safely contained in ghettos, and our white underclass is pretty firmly pro-establishment, because they're dumb.

There's geography to consider as well. I wonder if one of the pressure valves at work in the US is its size: the internal economic disparity from place to place, and the relative ease with which people from really shitty parts of the country can move to less shitty states without papers or the need to learn a new language. If the US was much smaller, it might also have a lower boiling point.

I think you may have a point in this one. It's not like the US has a single city that you could freeze up and bring the entire country to a halt, like Paris in France, Cairo in Egypt, or London in the UK. And yes, people can easily move from bad place to good place in the US and live where the politics and the culture suit themselves. The day that people are no longer able to move about easily, as well as not find work or feed their families, you will find immense unrest in the states.

[Darth Wong]

Oppression and unjust wars are perfectly legitimate reasons for a riot.

I am not saying they aren't. Just that the threshold for such things is very high, and it takes a while for the discontent to ferment in the US compared to other countries.

Remember: Threaten collective bargaining in the US, and you get peaceful protests and recall elections. Increase the work-week in france, and you get rioting in the streets.

That may well be, but if we're looking specifically at the recent London riots (which I assume we are, since that is what the OP talks about), the catalyst was a police shooting of a suspect. In the case of the Los Angeles Rodney King riots, the catalyst was a non-lethal police beating of a suspect.

[Phantasee]

There were a couple catalysts in 1992. The Rodney King trial's conclusion, and the shooting death of a young black girl by a Korean shop owner. The latter explains why Koreatown and Korean shops were specifically targeted, and Asians in general.

[Darth Wong]

There were a couple catalysts in 1992. The Rodney King trial's conclusion, and the shooting death of a young black girl by a Korean shop owner. The latter explains why Koreatown and Korean shops were specifically targeted, and Asians in general.

Still, it seems to me that the American threshold for rioting isn't really as high as some are making it out to be.

[Mr Bean]

Still, it seems to me that the American threshold for rioting isn't really as high as some are making it out to be.

It was the trials conclusion not the act itself in London a police-officer shot a supect and cue riots. Here in America we had a similar hell we have an even worse case a few weeks back which was on film no less, we had a six page thread on it back in June which you can find here.

Since you might have missed it in that case we had an identical situation where a man was shot by the police but not only that but the first gunshot was from a policeman so the other (eleven) police officers open fired because one of them panicked they heard the gun-shot and subsequently riddle the poor bastards car with bullet holes and managed to hit not only four bystanders but each other as three of the police officers were reported as being hit by ricochets from the polices own gun fire which caused even more gun-fire.

That caused zero riots here in America. Or can you remember the Bart shooting? With it's thread here which also failed to touch of any rioting. Face it DW here in America we have a much higher threshold for rioting than in London. The Rodney King resulted in rioting mainly because there were thousands of people lined up to hear the verdict and tens of thousands more listening in and it was so blatantly a racial case captured so well by the famous video when people were polled at the time you got results in the 90% range that the officers had done wrong, and getting 90% of Americans to agree to anything is ni-impossible. So when the jurors came back and said the cops were innocent it caused a shit storm.

[Alyrium Denryle]

There were a couple catalysts in 1992. The Rodney King trial's conclusion, and the shooting death of a young black girl by a Korean shop owner. The latter explains why Koreatown and Korean shops were specifically targeted, and Asians in general.

Still, it seems to me that the American threshold for rioting isn't really as high as some are making it out to be.

Well, as I recall, the Rodney King race riots were the culmination of a great deal of institutionalized racism and police brutality. It was not just that one incident. It took decades to reach that tipping point. It is not as if I am proposing the idea of riot thresholds with only single events. Rather, events and abuses accumulate along an axis (say, poverty, civil rights abuses etc) and at some point, a discrete incident pisses people off enough that, along with the weight of similar abuses, causes a riot.

I am most familiar of course with the Stonewall riots. It was not that the police raided the Stonewall bar during Judy Garland's wake by itself. It was that the police had been raiding gay bars and arresting guys so much as holding hands for decades (then publishing their names and addresses in the paper). But all of that, on top of basically interrupting the gay version of a memorial service, that finally caused angry gay people to riot.

[Darth Wong]

Still, it seems to me that the American threshold for rioting isn't really as high as some are making it out to be.

It was the trials conclusion not the act itself in London a police-officer shot a supect and cue riots. Here in America we had a similar hell we have an even worse case a few weeks back which was on film no less, we had a six page thread on it back in June which you can find here.

Since you might have missed it in that case we had an identical situation where a man was shot by the police but not only that but the first gunshot was from a policeman so the other (eleven) police officers open fired because one of them panicked they heard the gun-shot and subsequently riddle the poor bastards car with bullet holes and managed to hit not only four bystanders but each other as three of the police officers were reported as being hit by ricochets from the polices own gun fire which caused even more gun-fire.

That caused zero riots here in America. Or can you remember the Bart shooting? With it's thread here which also failed to touch of any rioting. Face it DW here in America we have a much higher threshold for rioting than in London. The Rodney King resulted in rioting mainly because there were thousands of people lined up to hear the verdict and tens of thousands more listening in and it was so blatantly a racial case captured so well by the famous video when people were polled at the time you got results in the 90% range that the officers had done wrong, and getting 90% of Americans to agree to anything is ni-impossible. So when the jurors came back and said the cops were innocent it caused a shit storm.

Does that mean America has a very high threshold for rioting, or that America just doesn't give a shit about certain things that other people actually care about?

[Zaune]

I have a theory as to why the US has a higher riot-threshold than Britain, actually. Remember this thread? The thing that struck me about the quoted article at the time was how bad things were even before the recession. I mean, I don't have any equivalent numbers for the UK, and in fact I'm pretty sure a British hospital emergency room wouldn't even be collecting statistics on such an occurrence, they'd be asking very searching questions and preparing a report to Social Services and/or the police.

To put it bluntly, standards of living for your poorest citizens don't have as far to fall as ours do.

[Mr Bean]

Does that mean America has a very high threshold for rioting, or that America just doesn't give a shit about certain things that other people actually care about?

Why does it have to be one or the other? In this case I think it's easily both, American's are hard to motivate to begin with and then motivating them enough to riot over something is doubly hard. It is pure and simple outside of Washington DC very hard to motivate Americans to do anything for any cause period. And when we are motivated the simple size of our country means it's not like Britain where the incident in question is less than a day's travel for everyone in our country. It's one thing to get motivated about a police shooting some place "far off" but it something non-American's don't take into account and most American's don't realize consciously that is just as violence in New Orleans will never result in riots in Toronto, violence in Miami would never result in riots in New Orleans. Hell violence in New Orleans might not result in riots in New Orleans unless the scale is large enough for someone to know someone directly affected.

*Edit
I point out that the Rodney King situation again which seems to contradict me because there were daughter riots spawned elsewhere from the main incident but keep in mind what the situation was. A Black man is beaten without provocation by white cops and it's carried wall to wall coverage by all media at the time, the verdict is read live on national television and shortly there after the reports of mass demonstrations quickly turn ugly and people who've been watching this elsewhere start gathering together in other places getting angry and "doing" something about it, IE rioting.