Riots’ social-media coordination and retail destruction hinted at nascent class consciousness

Evidence

This echoes a point made by John Berger in a 1968 essay about the alchemy of large protests, strikes, rallies, and sit-ins. These demonstrations, Berger wrote, don’t just demonstrate something to those in power (that people are angry, say, and have the power to disrupt the smooth flow of business). They also demonstrate something to the people gathered on the streets. Those people come to realize that they are not merely individuals, with the limited power of their individual selves, but that “they belong to a class. Belonging to that class ceases to imply a common fate, and implies a common opportunity.” Those opportunities manifest in different ways: when individual renters or debtors or workers can’t pay the bills, it’s a crisis for them and their families. When groups of renters or debtors or workers refuse to pay the bills, or decide to jointly withhold their labor, it’s a crisis for their creditors, their landlords, and their bosses. — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, 1087 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Even as Apple’s ascension appeared to ratify the claims of second-modernity individuals, the streets of London told the grim legacy of a three-decade experiment in economic growth through exclusion. One week after the rioting, an article by sociologist Saskia Sassen in the Daily Beast observed that “if there’s one underlying condition, it has to do with the unemployment and bitter poverty among people who desire to be part of the middle class and who are keenly aware of the sharp inequality between themselves and their country’s wealthy elite. These are in many ways social revolutions with a small ‘r,’ protests against social conditions that have become unbearable.” — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 131 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

The fall of protecting class walls transformed the slumbering majorities behind all parties into one great unorganized, structureless mass of furious individuals who had nothing in common except their vague apprehension that the hopes of party members were doomed, that, consequently, the most respected, articulate and representative members of the community were fools and that all the powers that be were not so much evil as they were equally stupid and fraudulent. It was of no great consequence for the birth of this new terrifying negative solidarity that the unemployed worker hated the status quo and the powers that be in the form of the Social Democratic Party, the expropriated small property owner in the form of a centrist or rightist party, and former members of the middle and upper classes in the form of the traditional extreme right. The number of this mass of generally dissatisfied and desperate men increased rapidly in Germany and Austria after the first World War, when inflation and unemployment added to the disrupting consequences of military defeat; they existed in great proportion in all the succession states, and they have supported the extreme movements in France and Italy since the second World War. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 755 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Mass protests transform individual participants into class-conscious actors — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror…, 1087; Loss of class walls fuses disparate grudge-holders into one negative solidarity mass — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 755; Unbearable inequality fueled the 2011 London riots as social revolutions — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 131 (+2 more)

Related

• Mass protests transform individual participants into class-conscious actors (similarity 0.87)
• Unbearable inequality fueled the 2011 London riots as social revolutions (similarity 0.86)
• Britain’s 2011 riots and Occupy shared a common origin in economic inequality (similarity 0.79)
• Loss of class walls fuses disparate grudge-holders into one negative solidarity mass (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• Mass protests transform individual participants into class-conscious actors #corroborates (0.85) — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, 1087
• Unbearable inequality fueled the 2011 London riots as social revolutions #corroborates (0.85) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 131
• Loss of class walls fuses disparate grudge-holders into one negative solidarity mass #corroborates (0.75) — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 755