House of Paine

riotz as klass revolt passing thru chaos

a whole  klass or klass race-fragment

either way

    riot is
        the  bursting energy 
                 of social rebellion
             
      void of  higher form ......

    but to be  worshiped 

             as  the eternal flame    


=======================================     



 here's a  typical progluditic 
               tepid prance around the fire 


by Gary Younge

Published on Monday, November 14, 2005 by the
Guardian/UK 

http://www.commondreams.org/views05/1114-31.htm

'If there is no struggle, there is no progress," said
the African American abolitionist Frederick Douglass.
"Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate
agitation are men who want crops without ploughing up
the ground; they want rain without thunder and
lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar
of its many waters ... Power concedes nothing without a
demand. It never did and it never will."

By the end of last week it looked as though the
fortnight of struggle between minority French youth and
the police might actually have yielded some progress.
Condemning the rioters is easy. They shot at the
police, killed an innocent man, trashed businesses,
rammed a car into a retirement home, and torched
countless cars (given that 400 cars are burned on an
average New Year's Eve in France, this was not quite as
remarkable as some made out).

But shield your ears from the awful roaring waters for
a moment and take a look at the ocean. Those who
wondered what French youth had to gain by taking to the
streets should ask what they had to lose. Unemployed,
socially excluded, harassed by the police and condemned
to poor housing, they live on estates that are
essentially open prisons. Statistically invisible (it
is against the law and republican principle to collect
data based on race or ethnicity) and politically
unrepresented (mainland France does not have a single
non-white MP), their aim has been simply to get their
plight acknowledged. And they succeeded.

Even as the French politicians talked tough, the state
was suing for peace with the offer of greater social
justice. The government unrolled a package of measures
that would give career guidance and work placements to
all unemployed people under 25 in some of the poorest
suburbs; there would be tax breaks for companies who
set up on sink estates; a O1,000 (#675) lump sum for
jobless people who returned to work as well as O150 a
month for a year; 5,000 extra teachers and educational
assistants; 10,000 scholarships to encourage academic
achievers to stay at school; and 10 boarding schools
for those who want to leave their estates to study.

"We need to respond strongly and quickly to the
undeniable problems facing many inhabitants of the
deprived neighborhoods," said President Chirac. From
the man who once said that immigrants had breached the
"threshold of tolerance" and were sending French
workers "mad" with their "noise and smell" this was
progress indeed.

"The impossible becomes probable through struggle,"
said the African American academic Manning Marable.
"And the probable becomes reality."

And the reality is that none of this would have
happened without riots. There was no petition these
young people could have signed, no peaceful march they
could have held, no letter they could have written to
their MPs that would have produced these results.

Amid the charred chassis and broken glass there is a
vital point of principle to salvage: in certain
conditions rioting is not just justified but may also
be necessary, and effective. From the poll tax
demonstrations to Soweto, history is littered with such
cases; what were the French and American revolutions
but riots endowed by Enlightenment principles and then
blessed by history?

When all non-violent, democratic means of achieving a
just end are unavailable, redundant or exhausted,
rioting is justifiable. When state agencies charged
with protecting communities fail to do so or actually
attack them, it may be necessary in self-defense.

After the 1967 riots in American cities, President
Johnson set up the Kerner commission. It concluded:
"What white Americans have never fully understood - but
what the Negro can never forget - is that white society
is deeply implicated in the ghetto. White institutions
created it, white institutions maintain it, and white
society condones it." How else was such a damning
indictment of racial discrimination in the US ever
going to land on the president's desk?

Following the inner-city riots across Britain in 1981,
Lord Scarman argued that "urgent action" was needed to
prevent racial disadvantage becoming an "endemic,
ineradicable disease threatening the very survival of
our society". His conclusions weren't perfect. But the
kernel of a message black Britons had been trying to
hammer home for decades suddenly took center stage. A
few years later Michael Heseltine wrote a report into
the disturbances in Toxteth entitled It Takes a Riot.

Rioting should be neither celebrated nor fetishized,
because ultimately it is a sign not of strength but
weakness. Like a strike, it is often the last and most
desperate weapon available to those with the least
power. Rioting is a class act. Wealthy people don't do
it because either they have the levers of democracy at
their disposal, or they can rely on the state or
private security firms to do their violent work for
them, if need be.

The issue of when and how rioting is effective is more
problematic. Riots raise awareness of a situation, but
they cannot solve it. For that you need democratic
engagement and meaningful negotiation. Most powerful
when they stem from a movement, all too often riots are
instead the spontaneous, leaderless expression of
pent-up frustration void of an agenda or clear demands.
Many of these French youths may have had a ball last
week, but what they really need is a party - a
political organization that will articulate their
aspirations.

If Kerner and Scarman are anything to go by, the
rioters will not be invited to help write the documents
that could shape racial discourse for a generation. Nor
are they likely to be the primary beneficiaries.

"During the 80s, everyone was desperate to have a black
face in their organization to show the race relations
industry that they were allowing black people to get
on," says the editor of Race & Class, Ambalavaner
Sivanandan. "So the people who made this mobility
possible were those who took to the streets. But they
did not benefit." The same is true of the black
American working class that produced Kerner.

Given these uncertain outcomes, riots carry great risk.
The border between political violence and criminality
becomes blurred, and legitimate protest risks degrading
into impotent displays of hypermasculinity. Violence at
that point becomes not the means to even a vague
aspiration but the end in itself, and half the story
gets missed. We heard little from young minority French
women last week, even though they have been the primary
target of the state's secular dogma over the hijab.

Finally, violence polarizes. The big winner of the last
two weeks may yet prove to be Sarkozy. The
presidential-hopeful courted the far-right with his
calculated criticisms of the rioters; if he wins he
could reverse any gains that may arise. Le Pen also
lurks in the wings.

The riots in France run all these risks and yet have
still managed to yield a precarious kind of progress.
They demand our qualified and critical support.

Power has made its concessions. But how many, for how
long and to whom depends on whether those who made the
demands take their struggle from the margins to the
mainstream: from the street to the corridors of power.

(c) Guardian Newspapers Limited 2005