I was not intending to write about the recent events in London and other major English cities during August 2011 on this blog, since I was on the other side of the world at the time, and not a first hand witness. However, an anecdote caught my attention in terms of the targets of the looting during these recent riots. It seemed that the high street shops which suffered the least, or were completely overlooked by the looters, were all book-shops. Immediately two thoughts came to mind, firstly the looters saw absolutely no value in books and therefore did not waste their time trying to break into these kinds of shops, or secondly the looters wanted to protect their English cultural heritage from wanton destruction and deliberately limited their attacks to electronic stores, sports shops, and corner super-markets. I suspect the truth lies within the first thought. Unfortunately, books and novels were no longer seen by the actors of this revolt as items of value to be desired or even instruments which defined a revolution. Compared to the big European revolts of May 1968, or the Maoist revolt in China, which were in effect cultural revolutions defined by the written word, the uprising of 2011 seemed to be a product of consumerism and advertising. It was observed that the most stolen items (Sneakers, iPods and iPads, video games, TVs, junk food) were those which were the subject of intense advertising campaigns. This was, in effect, not a revolt of the poor for basic items which help sustain life, or to better their lot in life, but an up-rising of a new generation of Londoners considering themselves entitled to these items. For them their identity was now defined by these very same consumer products. In just forty years it seemed, since the revolts of ’68, books, reading, and in a sense imagination, were no longer essential building blocks for the way a generation aimed to create a world-view.
Of course this kind of behaviour is nothing new. If we are to compare past riots, even only within the London context, we can see little difference over the last Seven Hundred years. In 1381, London was already burning and pillaged by a set of malcontents, that time it was the peasantry revolting against a hated feudal poll-tax, and instead of shop-keepers being bashed and looted, it was Flemish merchants getting knifed by the angry peasant mob because they were simply jealous of their growing wealth. Six Hundred years later in 1981, the Brixton riots triggered by racial tensions, were again hijacked by looters. Time and again European cities have seen up-rising through-out the centuries which have acted as warning posts to further monumental social change. You can read a detailed analysis of the events of 1381 from the following book from a young historian, Dan Jones (http://www.summerofblood.com) written a couple of years ago. In fact these kinds of comparative analysis are also nothing new, as Engels, produced a tract comparing the European revolts of 1848 with the peasant rebellions of 1525 in Germany, Switzerland and Austria, which you can read here (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1850/peasant-war-germany/index.htm). You might need to work through the usual nonsensical Marxist rhetoric in order to get an understanding of Engel’s points, but some of these can still be applied to the recent events we witnessed in August 2011 in England.
Firstly, the riots of August 2011 were the first symptom of a loss or down-grading of economic activity in large English cities. Although marginal, most of the rioters were the first to feel the effects of the economic down-turn, namely they no longer had the means to purchase legally their items of desire, items for which culturally (due to advertising) they felt absolutely entitled to. These modern day urban peasants are behaving in exactly the same way as the peasants of central Europe four hundred years ago in 1525. Back then Germany had lost out to the emerging markets created by an increasingly powerful merchant navy of Britain and Holland. Similarly, the UK and most of Europe in 2011 is now losing out competitively to the rising economic dominance of China, and therefore losing further access to economic wealth.
Secondly, the immediate reaction from Government, whether in early-modern Germany, or 1848 France, or the Thatcher years of 1980’s UK, will always be to increase the power of the state. However, this reaction is now pointless, as we are all living in a completely globalised world. The problem today is that the State, which abhors the anarchic nature of these up-rising, will no longer be able to control the context within the bounds of the national borders. Even as late as the beginning of the 21st Century, Governments still had the ability to control the cultural context; they had the means to limit the access to certain cultural products, namely specific novels, pamphlets and films; whilst promoting others. In the globalised networked age, most of the citizens of the Western World now have access to unlimited sources of culture, with little or no control from the state. For the inner-city youth involved in the recent riots, their major defining culture seemed to focus around the gangsta aesthetic, mostly through the medium of music and video games. Although, this cultural style has remained popular across all of the young strata of British society, it leaves little to the imagination. It was therefore not surprising that the looters targeted electronic shops and sports stores, in a sense they were gaining access to the objects, fashion, and totems which defined their culture, and their very identity.
In this new media age there will be little to be gained from seeking to control access to these types of cultures. The flood-gates were opened as soon as You-Tube started playing gangsta-rap and as soon as smart-phones began to use instant messaging. The medium which provided the message was not in itself the problem, it was rather the content, and the lack of imagination which the message contained. Where-as in the past, even the banned novels across the ages (such as Madame Bovary, Grapes of Wrath, Dr Zhivago, Animal Farm) or the political pamphlets (Mill’s “On Liberty”, Rousseau’s “Du Contrat Social”, or even the Little Red Book), contained universal truths which enabled the human mind to soar with imagination above the miseries of daily life. In fact none of the current new media are actually able to engage the human mind of the rioters into the individual self-actualisation of their own separate human identity. It could very well be that if the young looters had been introduced to a few good novels, a few good books, and had valued the written word, they may very well have targeted a bookshop down the high street, instead of the local video game shop, but then again their own sense of self-worth, endorsed by the act of reading, might have made them think twice about blindly following the mob in the rampage.
Honestly, I do hope that those caught up in the criminal justice system are shown the prison library during their long sojourn at Her Majesty’s pleasure. They just might emerge as a better reformed human being if they were able to read a novel or two. However, do not believe those who have already proclaimed that the events are a “one-off”, they have occurred time and again in the history of London, and in much of Europe. The more the economic squeeze takes effect the higher the chance of a repeat performance – maybe someone will write a good novel about this one day.
