Regarding the riots in London and other parts of Britain
WFDY condemns the reckless violence and widespread criminality of recent nights, however we understand it as a direct product of the capitalist system and of the resulting dangerous lack of stability and rights for the youth of today, accompanied by disenfranchisement and exacerbated by unprecedented levels of alienation.
It is clear that the anger of the youth is derived from a number of factors including police brutality, the massive reduction in public spending on youth and other services, and a general frustration at a future with little prospects. Furthermore, WFDY notes that the cuts in public spending have had a disproportionate impact on both the youth and ethnic minority groups.
The first and main responsible for the wave of violence that now is taking place is the system under which the British people live, responsible for massive unemployment, huge rates of precarity, extremely expensive access to the higher levels of education and almost impossible access to proper housing, mainly for the young generations. It is also important to remind that it is this system that engages the British youth in wars just to satisfy the greed for profit of the big national and international monopolies.
We admit these concerns along with our member organizations in Britain, especially with comrades of YCL Britain, demanding to address the root causes of unrest and violence and by supporting the genuine concerns of young people in the street and their frustration while outright rejecting their way of vandalizing, looting and creating chaos without certain goal of socio-economic transformation.
In this extremely sensitive moment, WFDY calls upon all the young people in Britain to organize themselves and find the best ways to revolutionary transform their country, which will surely be through the overthrown of this dominant order and not through the destruction of public or private goods, for a Britain and a world of peace, solidarity and social transformation.
The CC/HQ of WFDY
Budapest – August 9, 2011
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It’s not enough to blithely condemn violence and looting as spontaneous thuggery or ‘ontic’ violence with no social context, everything has context; we understand nothing of the riots if we ignore the history out of which they emerge. If, like the political classes and mainstream media you refuse to countenance poverty, unemployment and austerity measures as causal factors then let us for a moment agree that the rioters are aggressive, prone-to-violence, narcissistic, apathetic hoodies with an exclusive concern for their own immediate gratification. The next question then is how did society manage to create such a generation? Are we are witnessing the first generation of apolitical yet sophisticated consumer-driven looters who are rioting not out of a collective anger but out of a rampant individualism and greed?
ReplyDeleteAlongside the ugly and rapacious face of modern capitalism that characterizes popular television, next to the largely passive acceptance of the theft our commonwealth through mass privatization, the rioters are perhaps the true children of Thatcher, they are our Lumpenproletariat ...the peasants are indeed revolting...
spot on Stiofan
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