[lbo-talk] Re the city that care forgot

[Wojtek Sokolowski]

> At 12:00 PM 8/31/2005, ThatRogersWoman wrote:
> >Reports I'm hearing are now classifying the types of looting, with
> >most folks not concerned about looting for survival items.  And those
> >taking TVs, barrels of "non-essential" goods and such...where are
> >they going to put it?  No, the biggest concern are individuals or
> >gangs armed and shooting at shooting at people, or, in one reported
> >instance, trying to loot Children's Hospital that, at the time, was
> >still occupied losing resources rapidly before evacuations.   There
> >is already one reported sexual assault in the SuperDome.


And Kelley weighs in:
> Yeah. This happened after Andrew. People looted. Fights broke out and
> people stole from each other, completely stressed from waiting hours in
the
> heat for bottled water and ice. They'd already had to traipse from
> whereever, towing stuff i strollers, Radio Flyer kiddie wagons, and the
> like. Then they had to wait in line in the heat. They looted private
homes.
> There's some public service video that you can order when you first move
> here, and it's shown on the telly all during hurricane season, to educate
> people about the seriousness of a hurricane.


Obviously, there are many ways to look at this, especially from the comfort
of one's air-conditioned office.  One of these ways is to treat this
disaster as a rare social "breeching experiment," which in sociology refers
to a situation when the norms of everyday behavior are intentionally
breeched to test the behavior without them.  

This breeching "experiment" basically belies the claims of anarchists and
their likes that people will self organize from below as soon as the
oppressive norms and institutions of the state and capitalist society are
abolished.  Well, these norms and institutions were abolished in NO and what
ensued is total chaos and gangsterism - just as the institutionalists (such
as myself) would predict.  

The usual excuses (false consciousness, survival etc.) do not save anarchism
from empirical refutation because they simply imply that for self-management
form below to emerge, certain norms and rules of behavior must remain in
place.  So where are those norms and rules are supposed to come from if not
from the actually existing institutions?  It seems that anarchism needs the
order created by the status quo to be a viable form of social organization -
which is quite ironic for the ideology that claims abolition of the
institutional status quo.

Of course, there are other lessons coming from this disaster - such as the
criminal lack of disaster preparedness by the authorities, especially
federal government - which are being picked even by the mainstream media.  I
can only hope that people at last start seeing that the emperor Bush and his
gang (may they be hanged by the balls from lampposts) have no clothes and
their raid on the treasury to reward their obscenely rich cronies is now
starting to bite everyone else in this country.  But I think it would be
instructive for the folk on this list to bracket out, so to speak, this
finger pointing at the usual suspects, and reflect for a while what this
situation means for our own sacred beliefs and received wisdom.

Wojtek