[Urbanstudy] [HasiruUsiru] As London Explodes in Riots, There Is a Context That Can't Be Ignored: Brutal Cuts and Enforced Austerity Measures

[Deepa Mandrekar Rao]

http://www.arcadejournal.com/public/IssueArticle.aspx?Volume=27&Issue=4&Article=324

*ON THE ETHICS OF CATASTROPHE**Nicolas Veroli *
------------------------------


Crisis is in the air. As the global economy crumbles and as the planetary
ecology evaporates, the question of what kind of historical moment we are
living through becomes contemporary again. Are we living through a
catastrophic age? And if so, what should we do? What is our responsibility?
Or, on the contrary, is the appearance of universal catastrophe a design, an
optical illusion painted on the wall of the future?

Everything seems to suggest that a universal catastrophe is upon us. At this
moment in time, the Dow Jones industrial average, the index of US industrial
activity, has lost half of its value in less than a year. The economic
mechanism that has held up American consumerism through loans over the past
30 years, the finance and banking industry, is at a standstill, and at least
according to some experts, in large part out of business. Unemployment is
reaching doubledigit levels in many parts of the country, and along with it,
of course, there come increases in home evictions, poverty and hunger. And
all this, as it turns out, is a rather mild version of what’s happening
throughout the rest of the world: Entire countries are going bankrupt or are
on the brink of bankruptcy, their economies merrily restructured by the
International Monetary Fund (IMF) – which does not seem to have heard the
death knell of neoliberalism – tens of millions more people thereby sinking
into all-too-predictable destitution.

Meanwhile, symptoms of Global Warming are suggesting that even if the
economic logic of consumer capitalism and its foundational institutions
could somehow be salvaged, a persistent use of the fossil fuel-based
technologies that constitute its actual substance (from anything made of
plastic to cars to most power plants) will result in massive ecological
imbalances, and, quite possibly, the extinction of human life.

One might even argue here that Obama’s “Green New Deal,” while it will go
some way toward reducing Carbon emissions – how much and how fast, however,
is not quite clear – will do little to the economic structure of capitalism
since it is largely premised on re-establishing the status quo ante. But it
is precisely this system – premised as it was on ever-increasing consumption
of commodities produced in the Third World by an ever-more impoverished
middle class in the First (which is precisely where lending came in) – that
is no longer an option.

Catastrophe thus does seem the order of the day. Environmental prophets are
screaming it to whoever will listen; religious prophets (all denominations
included) are depicting it in the terms of their favorite image, that of The
Apocalypse. Even the Marxist prophets are here for the reunion, resurrected
it seems, especially for the occasion, to rub their hands in terminal glee.

But if we take a step back for a moment, if we ask ourselves precisely what
is a “catastrophe,” this interpretation – let us call it the catastrophist
interpretation – seems substantially less compelling.

When you think about it, the concept of “catastrophe” is rather paradoxical.
On the one hand, catastrophe is a category of history. It denotes a
historically identifiable event—the extinction of the dinosaurs, for
instance, or the collapse of the Roman Empire. On the other hand, it is a
category of history which designates the end of what it belongs to: Namely,
the end of the historical process. After that famous meteor shower that had
catastrophe written all over it, for instance, the history of the dinosaurs
came to an end. The catastrophe is thus both inside and outside history. It
exists in history, however, only as the after-image of the end, a
phantasmagorical image of something that happened – or more precisely, that
stopped happening – in the past, projected ever-forward in the future. The
perceived or divined catastrophe is both a symptom of humans’ remarkable
consciousness of their mortality and the projection of their greatest fears
into a future that is ultimately indecipherable.

But the real catastrophe, the Real of the catastrophe to speak the language
of the philosophers, is only retrospective, it is only what can be recorded
retrospectively about someone or something else. No one lives through a
catastrophe: That is the definition of catastrophe.

So this is one problem with the catastrophist thesis: The catastrophe cannot
be lived in the present. It can only be remembered as an abstract historical
memory. Or, it can be experienced as a fantasy of the future, in the mode of
science fiction, so to speak.

The other problem with the view that we are living through a catastrophe
today is that it is a lie, what in more “sophisticated” language one might
call a mystification. Think about it this way: Bankers, Wall Street wizards,
various industry lobbyists and their flunkies (who compose most of the
political establishment), as well as a full supply of academic geniuses
inhabiting social science and philosophy departments have been crowing in
the same choir for 30 years or so. Let’s call all these people the elite.
Their song? A paean to the free market, consumerism, ceaseless economic
growth (and the endless construction of ugly malls, ugly houses, ugly
buildings that accompanies it), deregulation, privatization—a song whose
chorus was “There Is No Alternative,” or TINA.

Now, in common parlance, a catastrophe is no one’s fault; it is unforeseen
and thus unavoidable. But that is precisely what the current situation never
was. Global Warming and environmental collapse have been known quantities
since the early 1970s. By 1981 there were federal government scientists who
were filing official reports predicting that if significant reductions in
greenhouse gases were not made in the medium term, really bad things would
start to happen.

The global economic meltdown critics like Susan George were starting to get
the picture of what would happen by the mid-80s, as they studied the result
of neoliberal policies imposed by the IMF/World Bank complex on Southern
countries like Nigeria and Mexico that were defaulting on their
international debt. It was then that many people started realizing that the
financialization of the world economy, the emphasis on American consumption
(fueled by personal credit) as the solution to ever-increasing productivity
(premised on a stagnant or shrinking global wage) was a recipe for disaster.
By the late 90s and the crisis of the so-called “Asian Tigers” (South Korea,
Malaysia, Singapore, etc.) the writing was on the wall. No one needed to be
a genius, then, to see that sooner or later this situation would no longer
be tenable. The housing market was a stop-gap that lasted just long enough
to get George W. Bush re-elected, but here again it wasn’t difficult for
whoever wanted to see what was happening to get the picture.

Thus, neither global warming nor the world-economic depression we are now
entering can seriously be called catastrophes. They were avoidable and they
could have been avoided… had it not been, that is, for the nature of elite
rule.

So the first thing we must do is refuse the catastrophist premise in all of
its practical and existential implications. Yes, climate change is going to
happen, and yes, we are going to have to change the way we consume, move and
live. We must have limits on how we spend and on what and how we buy. Cars
must become our dinosaurs. And cities must become more efficient with water
and power. But these changes are not bad; they are by no means catastrophes.

 ------------------------------
*Nicolas Veroli is a political philosopher. He lives in upstate New York and
teaches at several state penitentiaries. He is currently writing a book on
the dreamlife of sovereignty. He has published criticism in magazines such
as *The Stranger* and *The Portland Mercury* and theoretical and historical
articles in academic journals such as *International Studies In Philosophy,
The CLR James Journal* and *Ijele: A Journal of African Aesthetics.










On Wed, Aug 10, 2011 at 2:32 PM, Vinay Baindur <yanivbin at gmail.com> wrote:

> **
>
>
>
> As London Explodes in Riots, There Is a Context That Can't Be Ignored:
> Brutal Cuts and Enforced Austerity Measures
>
> By Nina Power, Comment Is Free
> Posted on August 9, 2011, Printed on August 10, 2011
>
> http://www.alternet.org/newsandviews/647514/as_london_explodes_in_riots%2C_there_is_a_context_that_can%5C%27t_be_ignored%3A_brutal_cuts_and_enforced_austerity_measures
>
> Since the coalition came to power just over a year ago, the country has
> seen multiple student protests, occupations of dozens of universities,
> several strikes, a half-a-million-strong trade union march and now unrest on
> the streets of the capital (preceded by clashes with Bristol police in
> Stokes Croft earlier in the year). Each of these events was sparked by a
> different cause, yet all take place against a backdrop of brutal cuts and
> enforced austerity measures. The government knows very well that it is
> taking a gamble, and that its policies run the risk of sparking mass unrest
> on a scale we haven't seen since the early 1980s. With people taking to the
> streets of Tottenham, Edmonton, Brixton and elsewhere over the past few
> nights, we could be about to see the government enter a sustained and
> serious losing streak.
>
> The policies of the past year may have clarified the division between the
> entitled and the dispossessed in extreme terms, but the context for social
> unrest cuts much deeper. The fatal shooting of Mark Duggan last Thursday,
> where it appears, contrary to initial accounts, that only police bullets
> were fired, is another tragic event in a longer history of the Metropolitan
> police's treatment of ordinary Londoners, especially those from black and
> minority ethnic backgrounds, and the singling out of specific areas and
> individuals for monitoring, stop and search and daily harassment.
>
> One journalist wrote that he was surprised how many people in
> Tottenham knew of and were critical of the IPCC, but there should be nothing
> surprising about this. When you look at the figures for deaths in police
> custody (at least 333 since 1998 and not a single conviction of any police
> officer for any of them), then the IPCC and the courts are seen by many,
> quite reasonably, to be protecting the police rather than the people.
>
> Combine understandable suspicion of and resentment towards the police based
> on experience and memory with high poverty and large unemployment and the
> reasons why people are taking to the streets become clear. (Haringey, the
> borough that includes Tottenham, has thefourth highest level of child
> poverty in London and an unemployment rate of 8.8%, double the national
> average, with one vacancy for every 54 seeking work in the borough.)
>
> Those condemning the events of the past couple of nights in north London
> and elsewhere would do well to take a step back and consider the bigger
> picture: a country in which the richest 10% are now 100 times better off
> than the poorest, where consumerism predicated on personal debt has been
> pushed for years as the solution to a faltering economy, and where,
> according to the OECD, social mobility is worse than any other developed
> country.
>
> As Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett point out in The Spirit Level: Why
> Equality is Better for Everyone, phenomena usually described as "social
> problems" (crime, ill-health, imprisonment rates, mental illness) are far
> more common in unequal societies than ones with better economic distribution
> and less gap between the richest and the poorest. Decades of individualism,
> competition and state-encouraged selfishness – combined with a systematic
> crushing of unions and the ever-increasing criminalisation of dissent – have
> made Britain one of the most unequal countries in the developed world.
>
> Images of burning buildings, cars aflame and stripped-out shops may provide
> spectacular fodder for a restless media, ever hungry for new stories and
> fresh groups to demonise, but we will understand nothing of these events if
> we ignore the history and the context in which they occur.
>  __._,_.___
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-- 
Deepa Mandrekar

monsoon design
12/2, banaswadi main road,
cooke town,
bangalore 560033

tel: +91 80 41621740/ +91 80 25806139
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