[lbo-talk] riots of the '60s

[c b]

The materials for any research on the riots themselves is either not
available or available only in police files. It would have to start
out with oral history from hundreds of participants. And that would
have had to be collected almost immediately after each riot. The
other, utterly undependable source, would be newspaper accounts.
Comparing riots to revolutons is something like comparign skin
srapings from a partridge with an elephant in a zoo. As I said in the
post fwd from pen-l: Riots are pre-political responses to outrages in
the absence of any formal means of redress. No riots in neighborhoods
in which either the Panthers or SNCC had been active.

Carrol

^^^^^
CB; Yes, though as I said to James Heartfield on facebook , it is
important not to characterize the London riots a "shear criminality".
Riots are caused by capitalism's general law tendency to immiserate a
mass of the population. Socio-economic factors , not personal
irresponsibility , are  the root cause.