The Chaos of Order
16/08/2011
- Opinión
In spite of their specificity, the violent riots in London and other British
cities should not be seen as an isolated phenomenon. They are a
disturbing sign of our time. In contemporary societies a high inflammable
fuel is flowing underneath our collective lives unsuspected of families,
communities, social organizations, and politicians. When it rises to the
surface, propelled by a spark‐like incident, it may provoke a social fire of
unimaginable proportions. Such fuel is made up of four components:
endorsement of both social inequality and individualism,
mercantilization of individual and collective life, racism renamed as
tolerance, democracy highjacked by the privileged elites followed by
politics turned into management of the loot “legally” taken from the
citizens and the unease it provokes. Each one of these components bears
an internal contradiction. When they overlap, any incident may bring
about an explosion.
Inequality and individualism. With neoliberalism, the brutal increase of
inequality stopped being a problem to become the solution. The
ostentation of the super‐rich became proof of the success of a social model
that condemns to pauperism the large majority of people, allegedly
because they do not strive enough to succeed. This was only possible
because individualism has become an absolute value which,
paradoxically, must be lived as a utopia of equality, i.e., each one equally
rescinding social solidarity, whether as its agents or beneficiaries. Such an
individual only considers inequality to be a problem when it is adverse to
him or her. When that is the case, it is considered unfair.
Mercantilization of life. Consumer society implies replacing relations
between people by relations between people and things. Rather than
fulfilling needs, consumer objects create them endlessly, personal
investment in objects being as strong when they are possessed as when
they are not. Shopping malls provide the ghostly vision of a network of
social relations beginning and ending in objects. Capital, ever yearning
for profitability, is now submitting to the law of the market goods that we
have always considered too common (water, air) or too personal (privacy,
political convictions) to be traded in the marketplace. Between believing
that money is the universal mediator and believing that anything can be
done to obtain it there is a smaller step than one thinks. The powerful
make this step everyday and nothing happens to them. Seeing this, the
destitute believe they can do the same – and end up in jail.
Tolerance’s Racism. The unrest in England had a racial dimension at the
beginning. The same was true in 1981, as it was regarding the turmoil
that shook Paris and other French cities in the fall of 2005. This is no
coincidence; it rather reflects the colonial sociability which continues to
prevail in our society long after the end of political colonialism. Racism is
merely one among the components, since youngsters of different
ethnicities have been involved in the riots. But it is an important
component, because it adds corrosion of self‐esteem to social exclusion. In
other words, being less is worsened by having less. A young black
person in our cities experiences daily a suspicion that persists regardless
of what he or she is or does. Such suspicion is all the more poisonous by
existing in a society distracted by official policies fighting discrimination
and by the fake appearance of multiculturalism and the benevolence of
tolerance. When everybody dismisses racism, victims of racism are
termed racist for fighting against it.
Highjacking of democracy. What is there in common between the unrest in
England and the destruction of the citizen’s welfare brought about by the
austerity measures imposed by the rating agencies and the financial
markets? They both submit the democratic order to a stress test of
uncertain outcome. The rioting youngsters are criminals, but we are
certainly not facing here “pure and simple criminality,” as Prime Minister
David Cameron said. We are facing a violent, political denunciation of a
social and political model that finds resources to bail out banks but not to
bail out the youth faced with no future worthy of the name, young people
stuck in the nightmare of an increasingly expensive education which may
turn out to be irrelevant, given the rise of unemployment. These are
youngsters abandoned in communities, which anti‐social public policies
have turned into training camps for wrath, anomie, and revolt.
Between the neoliberal credo and the urban rioters there is a fearful
symmetry. Social indifference, arrogance, unfair sharing of sacrifices are
sowing chaos, violence, and fear. Tomorrow, the sowers, taking offence,
will argue that what they sowed had nothing to do with the chaos,
violence, and fear haunting our cities today. The true disorderly are in
power and soon will be emulated by those who have no power to bring
order back to political power.
August 11, 2011
https://www.alainet.org/en/articulo/151925
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