French Riots

Prof Juan Cole comments on The Problem with Frenchness in discussing the on-going French riots:

The French have determinedly avoided multiculturalism or affirmative action. They have insisted that everyone is French together and on a "color-blind" set of policies. "Color-blind" policies based on "merit" always seem to benefit some groups more than others, despite a rhetoric of equality and achievement. In order to resolve the problems they face, the French will have to come to terms with the multi-cultural character of contemporary society. And they will have to find ways of actively sharing jobs with minority populations, who often suffer from an unemployment rate as high as 40 percent (i.e. Iraq).

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A lot of the persons living in the urban outer cities (a better translation of cite than "suburb") are from subsaharan Africa. And there are lots of Eastern European immigrants. The riots were sparked by the deaths of African youths, not Muslims. Singling out the persons of Muslim heritage is just a form of bigotry. Moreover, French youth of European heritage rioted quite extensively in 1968. As they had in 1789. Rioting in the streets is not a foreign custom. It has a French genealogy and context.

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Roger Stevenson comments on Prof. Cole's analysis:

I agree for the most part with your analysis of the historical factors and the neglect that French society in general has shown for the problems of minority ethnic groups. The housing problems and discrimination they face in everyday life are truly tragic. France was forced in the 50's and 60's to embark on large scale housing projects to house the increasing numbers of immigrant labor families that the economy needed, with the result that these large high rise apartment buildings are now ghetto-like neighborhoods that are often poorly maintained and very overcrowded.

The remnants of France's colonial empire are now stacked, often 12 stories high, in what the French call "rabbit cages." It is easy to understand how the youth of these underprivileged projects feel totally disenfranchised from the mainstream of French society. Many have dropped out of a very rigid education system, and the prospects for any kind of meaningful future in terms of a job, career, decent housing, a feeling of self-worth, etc., are very bleak.

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Al Jazeera posts Paris riots: Those are not Muslims:

The raging violence which has spread to 300 French cities and towns, and which the police hasn’t been able to extinguish yet, is reflecting the social, not religious, grievance, reports James Button in Paris.

Numerous media outlets and politicians made the assumption that unrest raised worrying concerns of a rise of “Islamic extremism” in France.

Those gangs are not Muslims, their heroes are American rappers like 50 Cent, and they harbour special hatred towards police- When they go to fight them they say they're "dancing with wolves", according to an editorial published on The Age.

Linking the unrest that has reached the heart of the French capital to “radical Islam” is misleading and irrelevant. France’s civil unrest should be compared to the riots that burnt down African-American ghettos across the United States in the 1960s.

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What is happening in France is similar to what happened in Macquarie Fields in 2005 and in Redfern in 2004:

• Youth riots in Sydney: the real story
• Car thieves, not police, to blame for chase deaths

Murray Smith writes, FRANCE: State of emergency called in face of widespread revolt

The term “riot” is in fact misleading. The revolt is the work of gangs of youth who know each other and who consciously turn their anger into acts of destruction of property — burning cars, schools, shops, buses — and attacks on the hated police. As one young man put it to the Madrid daily El Pais: “We don’t have words to explain what we feel. We only know how to speak with fire.” Beyond their immediate targets, their anger is directed against interior minister Nicolas Sarkozy, the hard-right hopeful for the 2007 presidential election, who has described them as “rabble” and “gangrene” and threatened to “hose down” their neighbourhoods. The only political demand that the rioters have put forward is for Sarkozy’s resignation.

Of course, there is a negative side to this revolt. It is easy enough to see that wreaking havoc in their own neighbourhoods causes damage to their neighbours and families. This can and is being exploited by the government to divide their communities between generations and between immigrants and non-immigrants. But when the despair of those to whom society offers no future explodes in revolt, it rarely does so in a neat, tidy and “politically correct” way. What is happening in France today recalls the explosions in the ghettoes of North America in the 1960s and the 1981 riots in England.

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In summary, people are pissed off at being treated as shit. And when the rulers do not listen to reason, unreason is the result. This revolt will be put down because the people do not have the political consciousness to understand why they are in this situation. This is just an angry and violent reaction to oppression. And that condemns this revolt to failure.

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Peter Drucker Dies

Patricia Sullivan writes that Management Visionary Peter Drucker Dies:

"There is only one valid definition of business purpose: to create a customer," [Peter Drucker] said 45 years ago. Central to his philosophy was the belief that highly skilled people are an organization's most valuable resource and that a manager's job is to prepare and free people to perform. Good management can bring economic progress and social harmony, he said, adding that "although I believe in the free market, I have serious reservations about capitalism."

It was a typical remark for a man who believed in the empowerment of workers and the futility of big government, which he called "obese, muscle-bound and senile."

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This is an interesting quote. A fuller version was posted by Martin Bento

"although I believe in the free market, I have serious reservations about capitalism. Any system that makes one value absolute is wrong." Interview in Inc., 1985 In The Frontiers of Management

Michael Lewis, in his review of The Man Who Invented Management, concluded:

One way of viewing Peter Drucker's career is as a spiritual exercise performed for the spiritually impoverished. ''Faith is not what today is so often called a 'mystical experience,' '' Drucker wrote in his 1949 essay on Kierkegaard, ''something that can apparently be induced by the proper breathing exercises or by prolonged exposure to Bach (not to mention drugs). It can be attained only through despair, through suffering, through painful and ceaseless struggle.'' In Drucker's attempt to bring a kind of faith to business there is a lingering mystery. How did a man with deep skepticism of capitalism, which he gave voice to over the decades, become the sage of the capitalist class? Could it be that somewhere deep in their hearts the men he advised shared his doubts?

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Again we have sloppy definitions. How can one consider free markets outside of Capitalism? This is the heart of Capitalism. Take away free markets and you destroy Capitalism. Introduce free markets and you introduce Capitalism. The two are inseparable.

Without a reference to The Frontiers of Management, I cannot find what Peter Drucker meant by free markets as distinct from Capitalism.

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Rize

Rochelle Siemienowicz reviews the movie Rize:

Down in the slums of Los Angeles, there is a new dance movement transforming the lives of underprivileged kids. It's called 'krumping' and it's so fast and athletic that the makers of this film have to tell us that the footage hasn't been sped up. The dancers move as if possessed, both by the spirits of their African ancestors and a furious rage at their powerlessness - Rodney King is often invoked. Instead of joining gangs, they paint their faces like clowns and engage in non-violent competitive dance-offs with rival troupes.

Made by music video director and Vanity Fair photographer David LaChappelle, Rize is sometimes unfocussed and sloppy, seemingly unsure of whether it wants to glorify or objectively observe what it finds. Nevertheless, it's full of pummelling energy and arresting visuals as it traces the roots of krumping back to an ex-jailbird called Tommy the Clown, who first combined hip hop music and dance with children's birthday parties. Today, more than 100 groups practise this 'ghetto-ballet'. Their pride and courage is inspiring (and, honestly, a little scary), and you only hope that they'll find a way to move their politics beyond their beautiful, gyrating bodies.

Siemienowicz, Rochelle (2005), 'Rize', The Big Issue, No. 241, 07-22 Nov 2005, p.36

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What Dr. Siemienowicz did not mention was the racism behind the origin of the dance: this was promoted as something that black people could do that white people couldn't. This gave the dancers a sense of false pride. They have fully absorbed the racist propaganda of a Capitalist society. Malcolm X has been forgotten. The only mention of Dr. King was on the closing credits from his I have a dream speech:

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: "We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal."

Towards the end of the film, a white youth and an Asian youth are shown participating in the dance, and being accepted by the black dancers.

Thoughout the film, the dancers comment that they are oppressed or discriminated against, but they do not move beyond that. When they do not try to understand the oppression or discrimination, they are accepting it as part of their life. It is just another part of their lives as is drugs and the gangs. Forty years have erased the memories of the marches and the speeches of the Civil Rights era. The dancers are angry without having any way of understanding the source of that anger. They use dance to drain that anger out.

One problem with black liberation (whatever its manifestation - marches, dance, music) is that it attracts poor whites, Asians, and Hispanics. But with this aggregation of non-blacks, the blacks feel overwhelmed. The problems of the blacks are big enough without all these other poor people tagging along. Blacks want to solve the problems of blacks not everyone else's. The blacks then try to exclude the others by saying that they should solve their own problems.

With this exclusion, the politics of blacks do not develop beyond racism. This attitude entrenches racism further by dividing people into races. Instead, the blacks should welcome the others in their struggle and expand their struggle to include all poor people as Malcolm X and Dr. King were starting to do before they were assassinated. The struggle is a class struggle of the poor against the rich. It is not black against white.

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