Naomi Klein: Daylight Robbery, Meet Nighttime Robbery

I keep hearing comparisons between the London riots and riots in other European cities—window smashing in Athens or car bonfires in Paris. And there are parallels, to be sure: a spark set by police violence, a generation that feels forgotten. But those events were marked by mass destruction; the looting was minor. There have, however, [...]

Wednesday, August 17th, 2011

Posted in FEATURED, THINK TANK BLOG

Guy Debord: The Decline and Fall of the Spectacle-Commodity Economy

“Looting is a natural response to the unnatural and inhuman society of commodity abundance. It instantly undermines the commodity as such, and it also exposes what the commodity ultimately implies: the army, the police and the other specialized detachments of the state’s monopoly of armed violence” – August 13-16, 1965, the blacks of Los Angeles [...]

Monday, August 15th, 2011

Posted in THINK TANK BLOG

Maria Margaronis: Anarchy in the UK

Perhaps the whole point of a riot is to defy explanation: it’s an eruption of the irrational, a shattering of glass and boundaries, a testosterone-fueled roar that briefly flips anger and emptiness into something like ecstasy. What’s in the minds of the young men (and women, too) in London, Birmingham, Bristol and Liverpool who’ve sent [...]

Monday, August 15th, 2011

Posted in THINK TANK BLOG