[lbo-talk] enemy's turf

[Carrol Cox]

I'm not sure why it is so hard to see the pointlessness of "critic ism" 
or "disagreement" with isolated one-time events. Every riot is 
different, and points made about one riot will never be known by those 
who make the next riot. I thought the beer riots of ISU students back in 
the'70s were pretty damn silly -- and we ignored them. We certainly 
would not, howver, have wasted our time and oxygen in "criticizing" 
them. There is a great movie, no copies of which perhaps remain, Streets 
of Sorrow (made in Europe, featuring Greta Garbo. In its final scenes it 
shifts back and forth between a high-society ball and a gathering bread 
riot, the cadences of the two mirroring each other. Several of us had 
driven from Ann Arbor over to this theater in Clawson that showed old 
films to see a Chaplin film. It was a double bill, and for the first 20+ 
minutes of Streets of Sorrow I thought it was a lousy film, but damn it 
grew on us all. The riot/ball scenes had some of the beauty of the Steps 
of Odessa sequence.

Riots, Watts, London, all of them don't _start_ in order to loot. But if 
people want to take advantage of them to do a little looting, why should 
that be a focus of comment. It throws no light on anything, while other 
aspects of a riot, including what triggered it, may be of interst. 
Kvetching at the looting is merely self-expression to no end by the 
kvetcher.

Carrol

On 10/27/2011 10:08 AM, shag carpet bomb wrote:

<>  On Thu, Oct 27, 2011 at 9:31 AM, Doug Henwood<dhenwood at panix.com> <> 

  wrote: <> <>>>  In 1789, sure. But what about today? <>> <>>  Oh, 
right. The consumer society, such a trap, just like being in <>> 
prison. <> ERIC: That's not the analogy at all. It's not even an 
analogy, at all. Jeez.

It was a weapons depot, small one, but one nonetheless. perhaps depot is 
the wrong word. Anyway, they'd already taken weapons and supplies from 
elsewhere, but because this was symbolic, it mattered. They'd already 
'stormed' food supplies, pissed off that the price of food and wine had 
gone up. What is the name of that famous book or article that argues 
that uprisings (at least in the west) have usually started with outrage 
at the price of basic foodstuffs. riots are started in order to plunder 
food supplies which leads to airing of more grievances which has 
sometimes led to insurrection.

Tilly? Yes. Tilly.

Meanwhile, question. I didn't pay attention at the time, but were the 
London riots about taking shit for their own use, or were they just 
destroying stuff.

If the latter, that would be pretty fucking fascinating.

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