The chickens have come home to roost. How I love that saying. It first lodged itself in my brain when Malcolm X controversially used it immediately after the assassination of JFK. He was pilloried by both middle-America and his own Nation of Islam for daring to state the obvious. Violent, aggressive, imperialist America was now turning on itself. It was the self same expression that first came to mind after the multiple 9/11 attacks. Yes they were truly horrific but not more so than America’s bloody foreign policies that had left countless millions dead and crippled in their wake. And more recently, I again turned to those succinct few words to sum up the News International hacking scandal and the web of high level criminality that surrounded it.

After decades of courting this corporate media monster, the chickens had truly come home to roost. And that story is not over yet, not by a long shot.

And so we come to this week’s urban rioting and again I can find few better words to sum up the situation. For three decades, since the last major urban riots, successive governments have ignored a growing under-class that has been allowed to fester on decaying housing estates across the country. They don’t vote so why worry. Well this week they did vote but they voted with bricks and bottles and a total disregard for polite parliamentary norms.
Britain of course is not alone in this phenomenon. Most industrial cities have an impoverished and neglected underbelly. The lumpen-proletariat as Marx might describe this strata, a strata most graphically portrayed in the recent American HBO TV series, The Wire, a drama many of us joyously watched, safe in our bourgeois comfort zone, oblivious that a similar sub-culture of alienation and disaffection was developing right here in Britain. And when this devil-may-care urban underclass demanded to be noticed, the typical parliamentary response, echoed by middle England, was to further criminalise and marginalise. As if a three month custodial sentence will make the slightest difference. Quite the opposite probably. A short jail term would be seen as a badge of honour much like the much ridiculed ASBO is, and our delinquent, defiant youth will be schooled in more professional criminality once behind bars.

And what are our delinquent youth actually doing? No more than mirroring and mimicking everything they see around them. They crave the status of tacky consumer trinkets because our entire economy is predicated on the endless sale of this junk. They loot and mug these things at will because that is how the bankers and captains of industry behave. They grab something for nothing in the exact same way that our politicians did with their over the top parliamentary expenses, of which only a tiny handful were ever dragged before the courts. They ape the shallowness of the celebrity culture because that is the culture that they have been force fed by the media corporations since the day they were born. If these youngsters are portraying a sickness Mr Cameron it is because you and your corporate buddies have made them sick in pursuit of a quick buck. The chickens have once again come home to roost.

In the swirling sea of bourgeois moralising that has spewed forth from the corporate media and the privileged old Etonians currently running UK Plc, just a tiny handful of commentators have shown themselves to be right on the pulse. One of my favourites is a short letter in The Guardian 10/8/11 from left Labour MP, John McDonnell, who succinctly writes;

We are reaping what has been sown over the past three decades of creating a grotesquely unequal society with an ethos of grab as much as you can by MP’s and their expenses, bankers and their bonuses, tax-evading corporations, hacking journalists, bribe-taking police officers, and now a group of alienated kids are seizing their chance. This is not to condone but to understand. Addressing inequality is the only way we can avoid a rerun of these riots.

Another extremely poignant passage comes from Camila Batmanghelidjh writing in The Independent 9/8/11: ‘It is not one occasional attack on dignity, it’s a repeated humiliation, being continuously dispossessed in a society rich with possession. Young, intelligent citizens of the ghetto seek an explanation for why they are at the receiving end of bleak Britain, condemned to a darkness where their humanity is not even valued enough to be helped. Savagery is a possibility within us all. Some of us have been lucky enough not to have to call upon it for survival; others, exhausted from failure, can justify resorting to it.’

How does the dialectic play itself out here? On the one hand, those of us that are still idealistic enough to believe that the human impulse to cooperate can, under the right conditions, predominate over our aggressive, individualistic urges, will be dispirited at the dehumanising aspects of the riots. On the other hand there is a shining light emerging from the gloom of urban poverty. The marginalisation of the usually silent underclass has resulted in a sudden and dramatic demand to be heard. It’s politically un-articulate and undefined but it’s political nevertheless. Alienation, whatever its forms, is always, in the final instance, political. Don’t let Cameron and his fellow old Etonians tell you otherwise.

A re-run of this week’s riot is a near certainty and the forthcoming London Olympics will be the obvious stage. For two years we have been playing this charade that London is one big happy family all pulling together for the greater good. Now the charade has been shattered. Lord Coe, who has been ominously silent over the past few days, can finally stop crowing about the non-existent sporting legacy. There will be no sporting legacy and, in fact, many existing grassroots schemes have been axed in order to pay for the IOC’s two week jamboree.

London, in reality, is a deeply divided city where extremes of wealth sit antagonistically close to large swathes of urban poverty and destitution. Britain is a country where tertiary education is rapidly becoming the preserve of the wealthy middle classes. Preparations for the London Olympics have done nothing to address these obscene inequalities.

If the government wants to have an outside chance of preventing a repeat performance of this week’s riots during next year’s Olympic, they will need to match, pound for pound, the nine billion pounds spent on the forthcoming corporate carnival and immediately resurrect all the youth clubs, school-sports partnerships and local community initiatives that they have been so eager to destroy. Of course they wont.

Even nine billion pounds spent urgently on the nation’s decrepit housing estates may be too little too late but at least it would be a step in the right direction. After all, ¬£9 billion is just a tiny proportion of the unpaid, offshore corporation tax.

Community cohesion cannot be built overnight, it must be painstakingly nurtured over decades and generations. That this social task has been neglected by successive governments will become ever more evident as the global capitalist financial system teeters on the brink of a new world recession. Global capitalism has raped, looted and pillaged the planet for decades and now all the world’s citizens are paying heavy price. Sections of the middle classes will quietly sink into the ranks of the working class while whole sections of the once semi-secure working class will slide into total impoverishment in the ever expanding under-class. Marx was spot on in this respect.

This week’s rioting is just a foretaste of things to come. If the children are barred from the village, eventually they will burn the village down.