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Marxism Today October 1981

George Rude

The Riotsin History

To reactionaries and conservatives, riots areall basically the same. Criminal elements andsocial riffraff come out of their holes and startplaying mayhem with public property andthe properties of the rich; and without anydeeper motivation than to loot or destroy. Inthe French Revolution, both old-style

conservatives and new-style conservativerevolutionaries thought something of thekind; and even a democrat like Robespierre— hardly a reactionary but a bourgeoisconscious of private property rights —believed that the Parisian bands that forcedgrocers to lower their prices must be agents of the aristocracy or counter-revolution. Ahundred years later, Gustave Lebon, oncecalled the father of crowd psychology,described rioters and revolutionaries in themost lurid and pejorative terms; and, follow-ing him, such epithets as 'mobs', 'socialriffraff or 'dregs from the gutter' have served

generations of conservative historians andsocial scientists and served to foster theillusion that, regardless of time and place, 'amob is a mob is a mob'. And our own MrsThatcher, when recently explaining why herGovernment would not have any dealingswith Irish H-Block prisoners, deliveredherself of the sonorous phrase that 'a crime isa crime is a crime'; which showed not somuch that the Prime Minister has taken acourse in Gertrude Stein as that she sharedthe anti-popular sentiments expressed byGustave Lebon a couple of generationsbefore.

There is no question, of course, but thatriots, whether today's or those of pre-industrial times, have much in common. Ariot is not, and has never been, somethingthat happens out of the blue. Riots havecauses, even though these vary widelybetween different nations and places andgenerations. The two main features to belooked for — common to all popular disturb-ances — are the social, economic and politicalconditions under which it takes place and thesort of people that take part. Where suchconditions are bad or appear to the mass of 

the people to be so, riots, or a muted form of protest, are liable to follow; for, to borrow anexpression from Charles Tilly, the Americansociologist: riots [in such cases], as inClausewitz's theory of warfare, are 'anextension of politics by other means'. In otherwords, unless the economic hardship or

political crisis had been there, there wouldhave been no riot. The corollary does notnecessarily follow, that riots take place intimes of rising prices and falling wages: theGordon Riots of 1780, for example, the mostcostly and destructive in Britain's modernhistory, took place at a time when breadprices were remarkably stable. Moreover, asis well known, bad economic conditions,while driving some people to active protest,drive others to despair: as witness the recentcase of the two Merseyside youths who took their lives rather than face a future of unemployment.

The second factor, important to anunderstanding of all riots, is the nature andcomposition of those taking part. To thosewho, like Gustave Lebon or MargaretThatcher, assume that all such people areriffraff prompted by the basest of motives,there is of course no problem; and if politicsenter into it, these are politics injectedfrom outside by professional agitators orpersons dishing out handfuls of 'Moscowgold'. But serious students of such situations,or for that matter thoughtful people blessedwith a modicum of goodwill, know better. It

is now fairly common knowledge amonghistorians and others that the Parisians —both men and women — who stormed theBastille in 1789 were typically drawn notfrom criminal elements or social riffraff butfrom a multiplicity of trades and crafts. Muchthe same is true — though here the studentsalso played a part — of the rioters whoinaugurated the revolutions of 1848 in thestreets of Berlin, Paris and Vienna; and whenyoung blacks rioted in Washington DC onhearing the news of the assassination of Martin Luther King a dozen years ago, thosearrested, the Washington Post reported, were

in the majority former High School studof good grades and reputations, nonewhom had been in jail before.

The differencesBut, of course, there are impordifferences between today's riots and thosa hundred or two hundred years ago. Ontoday's background of a capitalism thatWestern Europe, is not only universal,overgrown and in an advanced stage ofgeneration: witness the greater numberunemployed proletarians (both white black) among those arrested or injuredthese disturbances; the prevailing woremployer conflict, almost non-existent inriots of the eighteenth century; and the deof city centres, as noted by all observAnother factor is the widespread hatredthe police, a major issue in all toddisturbances and one that only began

emerge — and only tentatively at first —the creation of Sir Robert Peel's 'New' Poin British cities after 1830: witness the fcommon 'police-bashing' in England's noern cities in the 1850s and 1860s.

Another comparatively recent devement has been the emergence of poliparties with roots within the common peoThere were no political parties, propspeaking, at the time of the FreRevolution and, in Western Europe, were only beginning to seek and to bpopular support a hundred years later. factor has obviously since had some influin the preparation and shaping of rtending as it has to remove the relaspontaneity of earlier popular outbreBut, of course, such an intrusion could win one of two ways. It might win the pewho rioted for more positive and democsolutions, as happened in Paris, ViennaBerlin in 1848, in Petrograd in 1917 anCairo, Delhi and Havana on either side oSecond World War. But the opposite mhappen and popular disturbance becomeprelude to fascist systems, as in Fascist and Nazi Germany. It all depends on

ability of the democratic and labour mments to educate and organise the massethey fail, either through disunity (aGermany in 1932) or through indifferenor contempt for the rioting youth (apresent-day England), the democratic tion — which today means the eoverthrow of the Thatcher governmenwill fail by default. Let us be warned. Ilabour and democratic forces fail, National Front and other similar racistreactionary bodies will be ready to stepthe breach, as was attempted at Southcouple of months ago.