George Ciccariello-Maher: Planet of Slums, Age of Riots

George Ciccariello-Maher: Planet of Slums, Age of Riots


Planet of Slums, Age of Riots

By GEORGE CICCARIELLO-MAHER

Tottenham, Chile, Tunis…

There are too many to count

Oakland, Brixton, Taybat al-Imam…

We almost can’t keep the names straight.

Clichy-sous-Bois, Caracas, Los Angeles…

The phrase “riot in London” echoed strangely in my ear, prompting only muted interest. I have been present for a few riots in London and in nearby Cambridge, marches against the war and the perennial Mayday battle between anarchists and the Metropolitan Police. From these to the more recent anti-cuts marches which ended in sporadic clashes with police, my interest has gradually waned, and when I most recently heard this phrase “riot in London,” I expected it would be followed by yet another description of a ritualized protest, with some marchers “kettled” and some anarchists fighting police. This is not simply a criticism: I was not not excited, but I was certainly not excited either.

Instead, the details began to emerge: the immediate spark was the police murder of a Black man, Mark Duggan, who was shot to death by police, and the beating of a 16-year old woman demanding answers from police about Duggan’s death. The fuel for the fire had been long accumulating, however: institutionalized racism in the form of poverty, police stop-and-search methods, and more recent Conservative Party cutbacks in the name of “austerity,” this year’s chosen catchword if “revolution” doesn’t eclipse it entirely.

The similarities with other serious waves of social rebellion then began to emerge with increasing clarity. This was both about Mark Duggan and it was not (here we can agree with the British Prime Minister David Cameron, albeit toward the opposite end), just as the recent rebellions in Oakland in 2009 were both about more than Oscar Grant, just as 2008 Athens was about more than Alexandros Grigoropoulos, 1992 L.A. was about more than Rodney King, the 1965 Watts Rebellion about more than Marquette Frye, and so on. And like these previous moments, the London rebellions are spreading with a degree of spontaneity and a flexibility of organizational forms that has left police utterly confounded. There have already been more than 1,000 arrests, and as hysterical media outlets up the rhetorical ante with talk of “guerrilla warfare,” the police are gearing up for far more.

Mob Hysteria

When economic violence reaches a certain point, social counter-violence soon follows, and yet it is rarely the bankers or the politicians, the purveyors of global austerity measures, who bear the brunt. It begins with name-calling, and no name has more political and historical resonance than “the mob,” the most traditional of slurs. From Philadelphia to London, we are told, the specter of the mob looms, and to the image of the “baying mob,” that keystone of journalistic integrity The Sun has also added the image of the “trouble-making rabble.”

Irrational, uncontrollable, impermeable to logic and unpredictable in its movements, these undesirables have once again ruined the party for everyone, as they have done from Paris 1789 to Caracas 1989. In Fanon’s inimitable words: “the masses, without waiting for the chairs to be placed around the negotiating table, take matters into their own hands and start burning…”

To use the word “mob” is a fundamentally political gesture. It is an effort by governing elites and conservative forces to delegitimize and denigrate popular resistance, to empty it of all political content by drawing a line of rationality in the sand. To make demands is reasonable, but since “the mob” is the embodiment of unreason, it cannot possibly make demands. Never mind the very clearly political motivations that sparked the rebellions around London, as well as the growing and equally political concerns about economic inequality and racist policing: these have been well documented, no matter how little many Britons want to hear it.

But I want to address directly the idea that the riots are fundamentally irrational, as the smear of “the mob” would symbolically insist. Let’s listen closely, let’s block out the torrent of media denunciation and hear what the rebels are saying themselves:

Argument 1: Nothing Else Has Worked, This Might.

When ITV asked one young rebel what, if anything, rioting would achieve, his response was as matter-of-fact as it was profound:

“You wouldn’t be talking to me now if we didn’t riot, would you?... Two months ago we marched to Scotland Yard, more than 2,000 of us, all blacks, and it was peaceful and calm and you know what? Not a word in the press. Last night a bit of rioting and looting and look around you.”

As another put it: “you can’t do nothing that’s normal for it to happen right.” In other words, legitimate discontent has not been heard through official channels, and so those suffering turn to unofficial ones. If someone has an effective counter-argument to this, I’m all ears. This is not to suggest that the rebellions have a singular logic shared by every participant, but that there is logic to be found nonetheless.

This isn’t the only time riots have worked, either: in 2009 Oakland, it was riots and only riots that led to the arrest, prosecution, and conviction of BART police officer Johannes Mehserle for the death of Oscar Grant. And this effectiveness extends to the tactical, while the left marches and is surrounded by police, these street rebels have proven far less susceptible to tactics like “kettling”: as The Guardian put it,

roaming groups of youths cannot be effectively kettled. And unlike activists they will often return to the site of trouble, seeking direct confrontation with police.The looters appear to have been more savvy. Large groups targeting shops have been melting into a nearby estate in seconds at the first sound of sirens arriving.

Argument 2: The Rich Can Do It, Why Can’t We?

Poor people aren’t stupid enough not to have noticed what’s been going on in the world around them. As capitalist crisis has set in a massive redistribution of wealth has taken place, with banks and investors bailed out at the expense of the population, effectively rewarding them for predatory behavior and leveraging national debt into economic growth. The rich line their profits as essential services and benefits are slashed, and faced with such obvious “looting,” we are somehow expected not to notice.

One onlooker to the London riots puts it precisely:

This is about youth not having a future… a lot of these people are unemployed, a lot of these people have their youth center closed down for years, and they’re basically seeing the normal things: the bankers getting away with what they’re getting away with… this is the youth actually saying to themselves, guess what? These people can get away with that, then how come we can’t tell people what we feel?

As one young female looter told The Sun, “We’re getting our taxes back,” and as another told The Guardian, “The politicians say that we loot and rob, they are the original gangsters.”

Argument 3: Locating the Riots.

Essential to the imagery of the irrational mob is the insistence that the bulk of the destruction is centered on working-class communities, and here the logic is fundamentally colonial. The poor and the Blacks can’t be trusted: look what they do to their own. Incapable of governing themselves, they must be taught civilization, by blows if necessary. Here again Oakland resonates, as after the riots there a solitary African braid shop, one of many whose windows were smashed, became the media symbol of the ‘irrationality’ of rioters hell-bent on destruction and nothing more. It is worth noting that the poor rarely “own” anything at all, even in their “own” communities.

To break this narrative, we must read the actions of the rebels as well as listening to their words. While working-class communities have indeed suffered damage (we should note that working-class communities always bear the brunt of upheaval), there has been less talk of more overtly political targeting: police stations burned to the ground, criminal courts windows smashed by those who had passed through them, and the tacitly political nature of youth streaming into neighboring areas to target luxury and chain stores. On just the first night, rioters in Tottenham Hale targeted “Boots, JD Sports, O2, Currys, Argos, Orange, PC World and Comet,” whereas some in nearby Wood Green ransacking the hulking HMV and H&M before bartering leisurely with their newly acquired possessions.

This tendency was seemingly lost on analysts at The Guardian, who were left scratching their heads when the riot locations did not correspond directly to the areas with the highest poverty. And it’s not just the lefty news outlets that let such details slip: Danny Kruger, ex-adviser to David Cameron observed that: “The districts that took the brunt of the rioting on Monday night were not sink estates. Enfield, Ealing, Croydon, Clapham... these places have Tory MPs, for goodness’ sake. A mob attacked the Ledbury, the best restaurant in Notting Hill.”

While refusing to denounce the rebellions, socialist thinker Alex Callinicos nevertheless suggests that such looting is “a form of do-it-yourself consumerism… reflecting the intensive commodification of desires in the neoliberal era.” This view misses the far more complex role of the commodity during a riot, which was as evident in Oakland as in Venezuela: not only is the looting of luxury consumer items far more complex than Callinicos suggests, but the argument of looting as consumerism would have a hard time explaining both the destruction of luxuries and appropriation of necessities that often ensues

Despite the ideological deployment of the specter of mob hysteria, in the words of one observer, there is “nothing mindless” about the London rebellions.

“An Insurrection of the Masses”

British media has by now largely closed ranks against the rebellion, providing a seamless tapestry of denunciation that oscillates between the violently reactionary and the comically hysterical. But this was not without first making a serious mistake, an error in judgment that pried open but the tiniest crack into which stepped a man who has since become a focal point for resistance to the media hype. Darcus Howe, nephew of the Trinidadian Marxist C.L.R. James, seems to have inherited his uncle’s acute capacity for seeing through the racist hype about “mobs” and discerning the political kernel of seemingly apolitical daily acts of resistance, of recognizing the new even amid the crumbling shell of the old.

When asked in a live BBC interview to characterize the recent outbursts, How spoke the following words:

I don’t call it rioting, I call it an insurrection of the masses of the people. It is happening in Syria, it is happening in Clapham, it’s happening in Liverpool, it’s happening in Port of Spain, Trinidad, and that is the nature of the historical moment…

When Howe refused to follow the self-generating script, one so well-known that no orders for its reading usually need be given, the flailing BBC correspondent turned first to bad logic and then to ad hominem attack. If Howe was attempting to explain the context of the rebellions he must also be condoning their effects, and wasn’t he, by the way, himself a rioter as a youth? He wasn’t, as a matter of fact, but he was certainly accused of being one: Howe was tried for affray and riot at the Old Bailey in 1971 only to be acquitted. After Howe’s later release on charges of assaulting a police officer, Linton Kwesi Johnson penned a tribute, “Man Free,” which featured the following words

Him stand up in the court like a mighty lion, him stand up in the court like a man of iron, Darcus out of jail, Shabba!

(A video of the interview recorded from a living room has spread like wildfire, with more than 2.3 million hits as I write, and the Beeb has since been forced to apologize, blaming unspecified “technical issues”).

“The Nature of the Historical Moment”

Darcus Howe is right: there is something peculiar about “the nature of the historical moment.” Maybe it began in 1989 in the South, when Venezuelans rose up against neoliberalism in the Caracazo rebellions only to be crushed in blood and fire with up to 3,000 dead. Who was the subject of that near-insurrection, that world-historical detonator which forever transformed Venezuela and unleashed all that has come since? The poor dwellers of the barrios surrounding Caracas and other Venezuelan cities, the product of decades of systematic underdevelopment and the nascent neoliberalism that had accelerated its effects. These were the residents of the slums of which our planet was soon composed, in Mike Davis’s haunting words, and without access to political power or a workplace to strike in, they had discovered the location of their political action in practice: the streets.

But as jobs have moved South, crisis has come North. Or rather, it has been here all along, in the South of the North and the North of the South, but austerity measures have begun to shift the effects of the contemporary crisis to reach a far broader demographic. In this context, critiquing the effects of riots in our historical moment is about as effective as bemoaning the existence of gravity. Those taking to the streets of London and elsewhere are the social product of capitalist restructuring in the long term and austerity measures in the short term. But a historical subject does not gain its status merely from being a product: first it must act.

Darcus Howe’s uncle, the late C.L.R. James, was straightforward in insisting that it is in such action that the new world emerges from the shell of the old, and here I only hope to note some hopeful indications of this. First and foremost is the unprecedented spirit of unity that has emerged in the streets of London and elsewhere. As The Guardian reports:

…the rioting has been unifying a cross-section of deprived young men who identify with each other… Kast gave the example of how territorial markers which would usually delineate young people's residential areas – known as ‘endz,’ ‘bits’ and ‘gates’ – appear to have melted away. “On a normal day it wouldn’t be allowed – going in to someone else’s area… Now they can go wherever they want. They’re recognising themselves from the people they see on the TV [rioting]. This is bringing them together.”

This sense of unity is not merely among different sets from different areas, but also extends to the unprecedented multi-ethnic demographic that has participated: poor whites, Black British, African and Afro-Caribbean immigrants, South Asians, Muslims, and Jews have all played a role. While some in the Jewish community have complained of being singled out for the participation of Hasidic Jews in the first night’s rioting in Tottenham, this should instead be read against assumptions that the crowd was only Black or only Muslim. All ages have participated as well, with entire families spotted either looting or warning looters of approaching police. The youth, and especially young men, have nevertheless constituted the functional spearhead of the rebellions, with one observer insisting that “this is a movement of the youth, of the young people saying, guess what mister, I’ve got no voice, no future, no leadership.”

But if C.L.R. James saw the potential for unity amid such rebellions, cracks in the shell of the old often produce dangerous shards, and so he was also keenly aware of the equal potential for the opposite: racist backlash among even poor whites. Thus while the more the more liberal wing of white supremacy has appeared in the form of “broom armies” cleaning up the aftermath of the rebellions (wearing t-shirts emblazoned with such heartwarming slogans as “rioters are scum”), “mobs” of white racists like the “Enfield Army” have also emerged, offering their services to the police against the rioters (this alongside the more organized white supremacy of the English Defence League).

“The Left Must Respond”

In a short web comment, Daniel Harvey expressed the sentiment of many on the radical left seeking to walk the fine line between uncritically embracing the English rebellions and falling into the right-wing media strategy of denunciation:

We have to remain loyal to this crisis. We have to support the eruption of the unheard and the unspoken in our obscene society… the problem is not the excesses of this or that action, it is that the rioters are simply not radical enough. We have to radicalise them further… We have to support the anger, but make the anger political, and thereby turn it into something genuinely powerful and dangerous – a revolutionary moment rather than a riot.

This is certainly true in one sense, but it runs the risk of neglecting the fact that “the left” is far behind the rebels in the streets. In some key ways, these riots are far more radical and more effective than the left has proven itself to be, and the rebels have certainly surpassed the left in tactical savvy as in sheer bravado. Who is really more radical?

Certainly, “the left must respond” as one op-ed puts it, if only to fight the messaging of the right, but only if we recognize that there is much we can learn from those rushing through the London streets. As one observer puts it, these youth “got nothing to lose,” to which we might be tempted to add, ‘but their chains…’

George Ciccariello-Maher is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Drexel University. He is completing a people’s history of the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela and beginning a history of rabbles, mobs, and gangs. He can be reached at gjcm(at)drexel.edu.

What happened at Fukushima? 福島原子力発電所で何が起こったのか :: JapanFocus

What happened at Fukushima?　　福島原子力発電所で何が起こったのか :: JapanFocus

What happened at Fukushima?

David McNeill & Jake Adelstein

It is one of the mysteries of Japan’s ongoing nuclear crisis: How much damage did the March 11 earthquake do to the Fukushima Daiichi reactors before the tsunami hit? The stakes are high: If the quake structurally compromised the plant and the safety of its nuclear fuel, then every other similar reactor in Japan will have to be reviewed and possibly shut down. With virtually all of Japan’s 54 reactors either offline (35) or scheduled for shutdown by next April, the issue of structural safety looms over the decision to restart every one in the months and years after.

The key question for operator Tokyo Electric Power Co (TEPCO) and its regulators to answer is this: How much damage was inflicted on the Daiichi plant before the first tsunami reached the plant roughly 40 minutes after the earthquake? TEPCO and the Japanese government are hardly reliable adjudicators in this controversy. “There has been no meltdown,” top government spokesman Edano Yukio famously repeated in the days after March 11. “It was an unforeseeable disaster,” Tepco’s then President Shimizu Masataka improbably said later. As we now know, meltdown was already occurring even as Edano spoke. And far from being unforeseeable, the disaster had been repeatedly forewarned.

The earthquake and tsunami did extensive damage to large areas of Tohoku. Photo by Ikuru Kuwajima Galleries | Ikuru Kuwajima

Throughout the months of lies and misinformation, one story has stuck: “The earthquake knocked out the plant’s electric power, halting cooling to its six reactors. The tsunami – a unique, one-off event - then washed out the plant’s back-up generators, shutting down all cooling and starting the chain of events that would cause the world’s first triple meltdown. That line has now become gospel at TEPCO. “We had no idea that a tsunami was coming,” said Murata Yasuki, head of public relations for the now ruined facility. “It came completely out of the blue” (nemimi ni mizu datta). Safety checks have since focused heavily on future damage from tsunamis.

But what if recirculation pipes and cooling pipes burst, snapped, leaked, and broke completely after the earthquake -- before the tidal wave reached the facilities and before the electricity went out? This would surprise few people familiar with the nearly 40-year-old reactor one, the grandfather of the nuclear reactors still operating in Japan.

Problems with the fractured, deteriorating, poorly repaired pipes and the cooling system had been pointed out for years. In 2002, whistleblower allegations that TEPCO had deliberately falsified safety records came to light and the company was forced to shut down all of its reactors and inspect them, including the Fukushima Daiichi Power Plant. Sugaoka Kei, a General Electric on-site inspector first notified Japan’s nuclear watchdog, Nuclear Industrial Safety Agency (NISA) in June of 2000. The government of Japan took two years to address the problem, then colluded in covering it up -- and gave the name of the whistleblower to TEPCO.

In September 2002, TEPCO admitted covering up data about cracks in critical circulation pipes in addition to previously revealed falsifications. In their analysis of the cover-up, The Citizen’s Nuclear Information Center writes:

“The records that were covered up had to do with cracks in parts of the reactor known as recirculation pipes. These pipes are there to siphon off heat from the reactor. If these pipes were to fracture, it would result in a serious accident in which coolant leaks out. From the perspective of safety, these are highly important pieces of equipment. Cracks were found in the Fukushima Daiichi Power Plant, reactor one, reactor two, reactor three, reactor four, reactor five.”

The cracks in the pipes were not due to earthquake damage; they came from the simple wear and tear of long-term usage. On March 2nd, 2011 nine days before the meltdown, the Nuclear Industrial Safety Agency (NISA) warned TEPCO of its failure to inspect critical pieces of plant equipment, including the recirculation pumps. TEPCO was ordered to make the inspections, perform repairs if needed and report to NISA on June 2nd. It does not appear that the report has been filed as of this time.

The problems were not only with the piping. Gas tanks at the site also exploded after the earthquake. The outside of the reactor building suffered structural damage. There was no one really qualified to assess the radioactive leakage because, as NISA admits, after the accident all the on-site inspectors fled. And the quake and tsunami broke most of the monitoring equipment so there was little information available on radiation afterwards.

The authors have spoken to several workers at the plant. Each recites the same story: Serious damage to piping and at least one of the reactors before the tsunami hit. All have requested anonymity because they are still working at or connected with the stricken plant. Worker A, a 27-year-old maintenance engineer who was at the Fukushima complex on March 11, recalls hissing, leaking pipes.

“I personally saw pipes that had come apart and I assume that there were many more that had been broken throughout the plant. There’s no doubt that the earthquake did a lot of damage inside the plant. There were definitely leaking pipes, but we don’t know which pipes – that has to be investigated. I also saw that part of the wall of the turbine building for reactor one had come away. That crack might have affected the reactor.”

The walls of the reactor are quite fragile, he notes.

“If the walls are too rigid, they can crack under the slightest pressure from inside so they have to be breakable because if the pressure is kept inside and there is a buildup of pressure, it can damage the equipment inside the walls. So it needs to be allowed to escape. It’s designed to give during a crisis, if not it could be worse – that might be shocking to others, but to us it’s common sense.”

WORKER B, a technician in his late thirties who was also on site at the time of the earthquake recalls what happened.

“It felt like the earthquake hit in two waves, the first impact was so intense you could see the building shaping, the pipes buckling, and within minutes, I saw pipes bursting. Some fell off the wall. Others snapped. I’m pretty sure that some of the oxygen tanks stored on site had exploded but I didn’t see for myself. Someone yelled that we all needed to evacuate. I was severely alarmed because as I was leaving I was told, and I could see, that several pipes had cracked open, including what I believe were cold water supply pipes. That would mean that coolant couldn’t get to the reactor core. If you can’t get sufficient coolant to the core, it melts down. You don’t have to be a nuclear scientist to figure that out.”

As he was heading to his car, he could see that the walls of the reactor one building itself had already started to collapse. “There were holes in them. In the first few minutes, no one was thinking about a tsunami. We were thinking about survival.”

Worker C was coming into work late when the earthquake hit. “I was in a building nearby when the earthquake shook. After the second shockwave hit, I heard a loud explosion. I looked out the window and I could see white smoke coming from reactor one. I thought to myself, ‘this is the end.’”

When the worker got to the office five to fifteen minutes later the supervisor immediately ordered everyone to evacuate, explaining, “there’s been an explosion of some gas tanks in reactor one, probably the oxygen tanks. In addition to this there has been some structural damage, pipes have burst, meltdown is possible. Please take shelter immediately.” (It should be noted that several explosions occurred at Daiichi even after the March 11th earthquake, one of which TEPCO stated, “was probably due to a gas tank left behind in the debris”.)

As the employees prepared to leave, the tsunami warning came. Many of them fled to the top floor of a building near the site and waited to be rescued.

The suspicion that the quake caused severe damage to the reactors is strengthened by reports that radiation leaked from the plant minutes later. Bloomberg has reported that a radiation alarm went off at the plant before the tsunami hit on March 11. The news agency says that one of the few monitoring posts left working, on the perimeter of the plant “about 1.5 kilometers (1 mile) from the No. 1 reactor went off at 3:29 p.m., minutes before the station was overwhelmed by the tsunami.”

Workers at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant check water levels at the No 1 reactor. Photograph: Tepco/EPA

The reason for official reluctance to admit that the earthquake did direct structural damage to reactor one is obvious. Onda Katsunobu, author of TEPCO: The Dark Empire (東京電力・帝国野暗黒), who sounded the alarm about the firm in his book (2007) explains it this way:

“If TEPCO and the government of Japan admit an earthquake can do direct damage to the reactor, this raises suspicions about the safety of every reactor they run. They are using a number of antiquated reactors that have the same systemic problems, the same wear and tear on the piping.”

Kikuchi Yoichi, a former GE engineer who helped build the Fukushima nuclear power plant says unequivocally that, "the earthquake caused the meltdown not the tsunami.” In his recent book : 原発をつくった私が、原発に反対する理由: (Why I’m Against the Nuclear Plants I Helped Build), he explains that poorly maintained water pipes and circulation system failure were the cause of the triple meltdown. Kikuchi in his book writes (p. 51), “At Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, at first the plan was to use the water coffin（水棺）approach. In other words, to fill the containment vessels with water and cool down the pressure vessel and ensure a safe and stable state. However, once (TEPCO) understood that the containment vessels (格納容器) had been damaged, they gave up this plan. Because water was probably leaking all over the place from the pipes, from the start this was an unreasonable scenario.”

Tanaka Mitsuhiko, a former nuclear power plant designer and science writer asserts that at least the Number One reactor melted down as a result of the earthquake damage. He describes it as a loss of coolant accident (LOCA). "The data that TEPCO has made public shows a huge loss of coolant within the first few hours of the earthquake. It can't be accounted for by the loss of electrical power. There was already so much damage to the cooling system that a meltdown was inevitable long before the tsunami arrived."

He says the released data shows that at 14:52 on March 11th, before the tsunami had arrived, the emergency circulation equipment of both the A and B systems automatically started up. "This only happens when there is a loss of coolant." Between 15:04 and 15:11 the water sprayer inside the containment vessel was turned on. Tanaka says that it is an emergency measure only done when other cooling systems have failed.

By the time the tsunami arrived and knocked out all the electrical systems, circa 15:37, the plant was already on its way to melting down.

Tanaka believes that a fault in the Mark I reactor, the same type as the number one reactor, was another contributing factor to the meltdown. On November 5, 1987, NISA began an evaluation of the Mark 1 reactors to consider how much stress they could take before a LOCA would occur. The results of that evaluation have not been made public.

There are currently ten remaining Mark type reactors in Japan, according to Tanaka's research. He believes that each one is the equivalent of a ticking time bomb.

Sugaoka Kei, who conducted on-sight inspections at the Fukushima plant, was the man who first blew the whistle on TEPCO’s data tampering with critical machinery. He says that he wasn’t surprised that a meltdown took place after the earthquake. He sent the Japanese government a letter dated June 28th, 2000 warning them of the problems there. It took the Japanese government almost two years to act on that warning.

Sugaoka asserts in his letter that TEPCO left in place and continued to operate a severely damaged steam dryer in the plant even ten years after he pointed out the problem. The steam dryer had never been properly installed and was 180 degrees out of place. Sugaoka states, “It wasn’t a surprise that a nuclear accident happened there. I always thought it was just a matter of time. This is one of those times in my life when I’m not happy I was right.”

Worker A says there were “probably pieces of equipment on site that had never been checked.”

“Let’s say you have a refrigerator – the manufacturer recommends it be checked every ten years. But it’s surrounded by many other kinds of equipment in the plant, all with different requirements for checking. So if the refrigerator check is missed, it will be another 10 years before it is done. Sometimes checks might not happen for decades. In a strong earthquake, that equipment could fail. That’s TEPCO’s responsibility. They’re supposed to make the schedule.”

Onda Katsunobu notes, “I’ve spent decades researching TEPCO and its nuclear power plants and what I’ve found, and what government reports confirm, is that the nuclear reactors are only as strong as their weakest links, and those links are the pipes.”

During his research, Onda spoke with several engineers who worked at the TEPCO plants. One told him that often piping would not match up the way it should according to the blueprints. In that case, the only solution was to use heavy machinery to pull the pipes close enough together to weld them shut. Inspection of piping was often cursory and the backs of the pipes, which were hard to reach, were often ignored. Since the inspections themselves were generally cursory and done by visual checks, it was easy to ignore them. Repair jobs were rushed; no one wanted to be exposed to nuclear radiation longer than necessary.

Onda adds, “When I first visited the Fukushima Power Plant it was a web of pipes. Pipes on the wall, on the ceiling, on the ground. You’d have to walk over them, duck under them—sometimes you’d bump your head on them. It was like a maze of pipes inside.”

It’s not very difficult to explain what happened at reactor one and perhaps the other reactors as well, Onda believes.

“The pipes, which regulate the heat of the reactor and carry coolant are the veins and arteries of a nuclear power plant; the core is the heart. If the pipes burst, vital components don’t reach the heart and thus you have a heart attack, in nuclear terms: meltdown. In simpler terms, you can’t cool a reactor core if the pipes carrying the coolant and regulating the heat rupture—it doesn’t get to the core.”

Hasuike Touru, a TEPCO employee from 1977 until 2009 and former general safety manager of the Fukushima plant, also notes: “The emergency plans for a nuclear disaster at the Fukushima plant had no mention of using sea-water to cool the core. To pump seawater into the core is to destroy the reactor. The only reason you’d do that is that no other water or coolant was available.”

Before dawn on the 12th, the water levels at the reactor began to plummet and the radiation began rising. Meltdown was taking place. The TEPCO Press release on March 12th just after 4 a.m. states: “The pressure within the containment vessel is high but stable.” There was one note buried in the release that many people missed. “The emergency water circulation system was cooling the steam within the core; it has ceased to function.”

According to the daily Chunichi Shinbun and other sources, a few hours after the earthquake, extremely high levels of radiation were recorded within the reactor one building. The level of contamination was so high that a single day exposed to it would be fatal. The water levels of the reactor were already sinking. 6 hours and 20 minutes after the earthquake on March 11th at 9:08 the radiation level was 0.8 mSv every ten seconds. In other words, if you spent 20 minutes exposed to those radiation levels you would exceed the five-year limit for a nuclear reactor worker in Japan.

At 9:51 pm, under the CEO orders, the inside of the reactor building was declared a no-entry zone. Around 11 pm, radiation levels for the inside of the turbine building, which was next door to the reactor reached levels of 0.5 to 1.2 mSv per hour.

The meltdown was already underway.

Oddly enough, while TEPCO later insisted that the cause of the meltdown was the tsunami knocking out emergency power systems, at the 7:47 pm TEPCO press conference the same day, the spokesman, in response to questions from the press about the cooling systems, stated that the emergency water circulation equipment and reactor core isolation time cooling systems would work even without electricity. The emergency water circulation system (IC) did in fact start working before the power loss and continue working after the power was lost as well.

Sometime between 4 and 6 am, on May 12th, Yoshida Masao, the plant manager decided it was time to pump seawater into the reactor core and notified TEPCO. Seawater was not pumped in until hours after a hydrogen explosion occurred, roughly 8:00 pm that day. By then, it was probably already too late.

On May 15, TEPCO went some way toward admitting at least some of these claims in a report called “Reactor Core Status of Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station Unit One.” The report said there was pre-tsunami damage to key facilities including pipes. “This means that assurances from the industry in Japan and overseas that the reactors were robust is now blown apart,” said Shaun Burnie, an independent nuclear waste consultant. “It raises fundamental questions on all reactors in high seismic risk areas.”

As Burnie points out, TEPCO also admitted massive fuel melt --16 hours after loss of coolant, and 7-8 hours before the explosion in unit 1. “Since they must have known all this -- their decision to flood with massive water volumes would guarantee massive additional contamination - including leaks to the ocean.”

No one knows exactly how much damage was done to the plant by the quake, or if this damage alone would account for the meltdown. However, eyewitness testimony and TEPCO’S own data indicates that the damage was significant. All of this despite the fact that shaking experienced at the plant during the quake was within it’s approved design specifications. Says Hasuike:

“What really happened at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant to cause a meltdown? TEPCO (Tokyo Electric Power Company) and the government of Japan have provided many explanations. They don’t make sense. The one thing they haven’t provided is the truth. It’s time that they did.”



David McNeill writes for The Independent, The Irish Times and The Chronicle of Higher Education. He is an Asia-Pacific Journal coordinator.

Jake Adelstein worked primarily as a police reporter for The Yomiuri newspaper from April 1993 to November 2005; he was the first foreigner to write in Japanese for a national newspaper. He now runs the website www.japansubculture.com, writes for Japanese periodicals and The Atlantic Wire, and does risk management consulting for foreign firms in Japan. He is the author of Tokyo Vice: An American Reporter on the Police Beat in Japan.

Freelance photographer Ikuru Kuwajima started photography while studying journalism at the University of Missouri, Columbia. He is currently based in Kazakstan. His work has appeared in Courrier Japon and National Geographic Romania and Japan. His many awards include the Picture of the Year International. His web site is here Galleries | Ikuru Kuwajima.

Recommended citation: David McNeill and Jake Adelstein, "What happened at Fukushima?," The Asia-Pacific Journal Vol 9, Issue 32 No 2, August 8, 2011.

Ron Jacobs: London's Melted Furnace

Ron Jacobs: London's Melted Furnace:

Britain in Flames
London's Melted Furnace

By RON JACOBS

Like many radicals, the wave of rebellions sweeping across Britain has engaged my consciousness for the past week. However, despite many hours of reading and viewing the mainstream (and other) media, I have yet to come up with an understanding of the nature of these riots that satisfies my political curiosity. Naturally, I can't help but be reminded of Margaret Thatcher and her neoliberal 1980s, complete with a soundtrack by the Clash and post mortem by British novelist David Peace. However, that was almost thirty years ago and times change, even when they stay the same. I am also reminded of the series of riots and rebellions that broke out in the French banlieues in 2005. So, this past week I engaged a couple working-class activists from London in an email exchange about what they were seeing and what their impressions were. For security reasons, they prefer to remain anonymous. After all, Scotland Yard is going after facebook and blackberry users reporting on the rebellions. The interaction follows. –Ron J.

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Ron: What is your take on the wave of insurrection going on in Britain?

Activist 1: There is a certain inevitability to it: the recent experiences of confronting the police during the student demonstrations and the TUC march earlier in the year, combined with the ridiculously two-faced attitude of the police and various Coalition politicians towards the pacific occupiers of Fortnum and Masons (nearly all of whom have had their charges dropped in the past fortnight) has led to a radicalisation of many people - who are now not remotely scared of the judicial system or its enforcers.

Of course, now that the Coalition's cuts are really beginning to bite across all segments of the population, all the pissed-off bile that has been fermenting for the past year is rising up. Passive, democratic methods of protest have been perceived to be inadequate.

Activist 2: My take on what’s happened is the following:

You have a vast underclass youth who's suffered multiple forms of structural violence:

- Endemic neighbourhood and familial poverty in one of the most superficial and commodified consumer societies there is, where one is constantly bombarded with the manufactured desires of modern marketing, advertising, and PR.

- Neighbourhoods rife with social problems, criminality and gang violence, due to endemic poverty, unemployment, and political/economic neglect.

- Neighbourhoods with ancient, crumbling, underfunded public infrastructures.

- The government’s swingeing public service and welfare cuts that directly affect these youths and their families: Youth centre closures, old people's homes closing, all manners of social support services closing, etc.

- Endemic unemployment with no job prospects except rare precarious, underpaid, unrewarding jobs that present no opportunities and that effectively strip workers of their rights.

- “Workfare” policies for the unemployed whereby in order to keep their meager job seekers' allowance, unemplyed youths must work, effectively for no wage, regularly, like veritable slaves, doing menial jobs for exploitative corporate outlets.

- No prospects whatsoever for upward social mobility: underfunded second rate colleges to which these youths can no longer even afford to go because EMA (Education Maintenance Allowance) benefits have been scrapped; these kids know they have NO CHANCE of going to university because of the massive tuition fees and debt involved -- University fees have just been trippled to an average of £9000 a year. They know they have almost no chance of securing the loans to get to these universities.

- Constant police harassment, disrespect and arbitrary section 40 and section 60 stop and search based on class and racial profiling.

- Constant class and race discrimination from the white middle and upper classes.

Furthermore these kids are far from stupid and uninformed: they have an unprecedented, very clear political and economic awareness of being completely defrauded, disenfranchised, disempowered, and oppressed by the ruling classes for the economic and social collapse that the ruling classes themselves caused, because:

- They are extremely social-media and alternative-media savvy: these kids are broadly aware of the fraudulent causes of the economic meltdown via various news sources. They know that the economy's tanked because of the banks and the rich. They know that they, as a class, are at the sharp end of the welfare cuts, and are being made to pay for the mismanagement and theft of the economy by the rich.

- Many of these kids went out and protested against the EMA cuts and Tuition Fee hikes. They were met with constant police intimidation, kettles, beatings, police manipulation, and the general contempt of the political classes, elites and middle classes.

- They are fully aware of the corruption of the political classes.

- They are fully aware of the bias and lies and distortions of the media: they saw how the media misrepresented them during the student uprising.

- They are fully aware of the cynicism, pathetic disengagement, navel gazing, and indifference of the upper and middle classes; and the contempt and prejudice the middle classes display towards them.

Then, finally, the police shoot one of theirs under very suspicious circumstances. The police then proceeded to totally ignore a peaceful protest where the community, lead by the family of the deceased, pleaded not only for answers, but also demanded that the police provide the family with the support that the law obliges them to provide and which they neglected to do. Then, when a 16 year old girl advances on the police line to demand an explanation, she apparently throws a bottle at them in anger and frustration, and the the police retaliated by batoning her.

The result: all the years of pent up, explosive frustration detonates.

Add social media networking via blackberry phone messaging and you have an unstoppable horizontal network fuelled by pure rage. In addition, you obviously have masses of deprived kids who find the opportunity not only to get back at the police, but to assuage the years of frustrated, though completely illusory, consumer cravings stoked by the marketing and advertising industry.

Some call it looting. I call it a natural leveling of the totally skewed distribution of wealth under the state and capitalism.

Yes it is mainly a negative, negating, angry, raging, destructive, self-harming reaction. Yes poor innocent working class people are suffering from this indiscriminate rage. Yes this is a deplorable aspect of these riots. But isn’t that to be expected from youths who have been completely abandoned and oppressed by almost every social structure there is?

This is a complex phenomenon and should not be taken as one big whole block. I claim the right to cherry pick: I totally agree with some aspects of the rioting, the legitimate political aspects, and I totally and absolutely reject and deplore other aspects of it, the wanton blind violence against innocents. As someone who believes in the need for a libertarian-socialist revolution, I find these aspects very hopeful and I wholeheartedly support them. Burning police cars, running battles with police, barricading the streets, and looting and trashing big corporate outlets is totally fine and legitimate by me; but burning down homes and small shops, mugging ordinary people, destroying public infrastructure, trashing post offices, and burning down means of production that could be collectivised, that is totally wrong and counterproductive. Not only that: it will inevitably stoke a reactionary, authoritarian and populist backlash that will just make things worse.

The mainstream journalists, the politicians, and the police would have us believe that this is an expression of the inherent, latent “Hobbesian” wolf-horde that dwells within the heart of the masses, and that the State's repression is necessary for keeping in check.

That is rubbish.

What you are seeing in London is the sociopathic violence inherent to the State and Capitalism, which has infected the underclass through its injustices, created a massive psycho-social trauma of pure and absolute frustration, and which has been transduced into pure rage that lashes out blindly at everything around it.

This is a typical reaction of all victims of trauma: they feel infected by a poisonous "gift" of arbitrary evil, injustice and misfortune whose reasons and causes are so impossible to fathom that the only thing they can do is throw it back out at those whom they feel infected them with it: the police; the big consumer outlets whose goods they craved but could not afford and which employed them as underpaid precarious wage slaves; adults in general.

I am somewhat baffled by attacks on small shop owners; I think that might be explained by the fact that many locals described seeing kids from other boroughs taking the opportunity to vent and loot... It can also be explained, like their burning and the burning of homes above the shops, as resulting from the blindness to consequences and lack of awareness of very young minds that are completely possessed by rage. A number of my anarchist/libertarian-socialist comrades in Hackney were out on the street attempting to direct the rioting away from illegitimate targets and onto more legitimate ones (it should be underlined that they were not rioting themselves and had nothing to do with “organising” the riots; they were just trying to mitigate its negative aspects and redirect it towards legitimate targets). They reported that many of the youths involved immediately took in the point of being more discriminating in their targeting, and willingly turned away from small shops and houses when sympathetic young activists intervened. My comrades in Hackney thus managed to save a number of small shops from looting and arson like this; but that’s something you’ll never hear in the mainstream media.

These riots are a symptom of deep-seated systemic problem. What they are doing is a symptom of the total dereliction of this bankrupt and corrupted social, economic and political system, the responsibility of which lies squarely on the shoulders of the ruling classes.

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Ron: Who is participating? Would you consider the rebellions class-based, ethnic-based or some combination of the two?

Activist 1: I think to limit the protagonists to class and ethnicity would be misleading, it's much broader than that. What is curious is the extreme youth of some of the participants; according to reports in The Guardian and The Daily Mail some are as young as ten or eight respectively. This gives an interesting insight into Teresa May's comments earlier on Radio 4's "Today" programme about not letting London become a "new Belfast".

Activist 2: This is first and foremost a class-based rebellion, though it is not necessarily fully class-conscious (as one Fellow IWW member puts it, a lot of the behaviour present capitalistic, egoistic, consumeristic, dog-eat-dog elements). It does present some elements of rebellion against the structural racism inherent to both state authority and society as a whole. However, it is sociologically an uprising of the poor urban youths that has obviously crossed ethnic divides.

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Ron: I can't help thinking of the 1980s, the rebellions in Brixton and elsewhere, the miner's strikes and the neoliberal policies that brought those situations on. Do you all see a historical comparison being the case here? If so,how? If not, why?

Activist 1: Yes and no. Personally I participated in one of the Brixton riots and had many friends who were at Broadwater Farm in Tottenham. These were very much directed against the Police in particular - and justifiably so under the circumstances. I understand that Toxteth (Liverpool) and St Pauls (Bristol) were very similar.

The current waves of unrest - and this may indicate why I'm avoiding loaded terms like "insurrection" and "rebellion" - seem to be much more diverse and localised. There is a much greater focus on appropriation of commodities this time around too it seems, but that may just be me falling into the current media pose or viewing my past overly-romantically.

Certainly comparisons between the neoliberal policies of Thatcher and the Coalition should be made, but it should also be recalled that we'd already had two years of Thatcher's vicious policies by 1981. Many of the Coalition's policies are in fact only starting to be put into practice, so I'd also look at things like the global rise of food and fuel prices as well as the suppression of wages, cutting of benefits and so on. (Although, there have actually been a couple decades of Thatcher and post-Thatcher neoliberal policies that led up to Cameron and his latest mutation of said policies—Ron) Mind you, as someone who has just started working again after two plus years of unemployment it was a lot less hassle on the dole under Thatcher: much less "sanctioning" of benefits, far fewer training courses... and of course the age which you could claim Unemployment Benefit was lower then too.

Activist 2: I was not in the UK at the time and am too young to have been involved, so I cannot answer this question. I have heard many people evoking these parallels.

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Ron: The mainstream media is repeating the police characterization of the rioters as thugs and members of a conspiracy. What is your take on this portrayal?

Activist 1: If I remember correctly in the eyes of the law conspiracy to riot is three people with a common purpose, so on that level they'd be right. After all, anyone who stands up against the state is by necessity labeled criminal for breaking the social contract. The thugs bit is just pejorative nonsense though.

Activist 2: I find such characterisations to be ridiculous, dangerously naive, and sociologically myopic. I do not know if it is deliberate, but all it breeds is misplaced resentment, and all it will do is encourage a misplaced, reactionary, authoritarian and repressive populist backlash which will do nothing but intensify the very roots of the problem rather than provide any solutions. As usual, those responsible for the root systemic causes are not only escaping all blame, they are being called upon as authorities with solutions -- it is no surprise since the mainstream media is structured to serve ruling class interests.

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Ron: In my mind, it is the thuggery of the police that has helped to precipitate the angry response of the people in the streets. When one adds the economic thuggery of the austerity measures, one wonders where this might end. What is your prognosis?

Activist 1: Yes, the economic thuggery is certainly a factor common to all the areas that have so far been reported as having riots: all poor areas with the poorer London boroughs.

I can't speak for all the different regions regarding the thuggery of the police, but all the reports so far have made it plain that the original murder of Mark Duggan in Tottenham was utterly unnecessary, and it has shades of the De Menenzies case writ large across it. There is certainly some interesting psychological thuggery going on though; the Metro newspaper this morning carried a report of "a senior policeman" who stated: "My only message to them is this. We will find you, we will bring you to justice, when you are watching your brand new 42in flatscreen TV, fear every single knock at your door, we are coming". If people are dumb enough to keep the stolen property at home you may get some, mate, but pretty soon loads of you are going to be redundant too...

Which may actually explain why many of the rabid right-wing commentators seem to be expressing surprise at the so-called "stand offishness" of the police and are calling for the Army to be bought in. As I was writing that I got a call from my partner warning me that there are now supposedly 16,000 police between my workplace and my home... guess they've finally got their overtime authorised.

I think the best that can happen is that it may split the government, though this seems unlikely given that Cameron has recalled Parliament, so all parties can "stand together in condemnation" of the events. What is certain is that the will be a huge backlash: the Deputy Commissioner has issued the Met with rubber bullets today, and it only takes a brief glimpse at the public's comments on the BBC news website to see just how horribly keen a large sector of the population is to start using them on these "feral" kids.

Of course it may be that the youth have actually seen a way through our economic difficulties: with all these razed buildings, burnt-out cars and damaged businesses someone somewhere has to make some money out of the forthcoming regeneration and repair work!

Activist 2: As is clear from my answer to the first question, I think it is pretty obvious that the thuggery of the police has not only helped to precipitate the angry response, by acting as the spark and catalyst, but is also one of the systemic causes of the accumulated explosive anger that has exploded during the past three days.

Many of us are not only active syndicalists but also activists in other libertarian-socialist or socialist movements which means that we participate in numerous forms of civil protest and direct action. I am a student activist, and I have also been deeply angered and radicalised by the perverse and sometimes brutal tactics that the police have used on myself and my comrades, deliberately used as tools of intimidation and repression of dissent: such as the use of kettling, squeeze-kettles, baton charges, mounted horse charges, and stop and search.

I completely sympathise with these youths anger towards the police. Many of these youths participated in the protests against EMA cuts and were also at the sharp end of these tactics in addition to the daily police intimidation they face in their own neighbourhoods for simply being young, poor and black/brown.

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Ron: I noticed that your group Facebook page has issued statements of support for the firefighters and rescue workers. Can you explain why you think this is necessary?

Activist 1: Did we? I must be out of the loop on that one, sorry.

Activist 2: Yes, as the mandated administrator of the London Wobblies Facebook page I did that because it seemed the obvious and right thing to do. We are a union for workers and the working class. Firefighters and rescue workers are members of that class. I have many friends in the fire brigade. They too are facing major funding cuts and unjust changes to their employment conditions. They have been working non stop to douse the many fires and in some cases have faced attacks by misguided rioters. I felt it was important to show solidarity with these fellow workers.

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Ron: Would you like to add anything?

Activist 1: Not really. I'll have enough trouble justifying what I've already said to some of my fellow workers ;-)

Ron Jacobs is the author of The Way the Wind Blew: a History of the Weather Underground and Short Order Frame Up. Jacobs' essay on Big Bill Broonzy is featured in CounterPunch's collection on music, art and sex, Serpents in the Garden. His collection of essays and other musings titled Tripping Through the American Night is now available and his new novel is The Co-Conspirator's Tale. He can be reached at: rjacobs3625@charter.ne

Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed: Burning Britain

Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed: Burning Britain

The Economics Conditions Driving Riot Fever
Burning Britain

By NAFEEZ MOSADDEQ AHMED

London.

The rioting, looting and plunder that started in Tottenham on Saturday has now spread like wildfire throughout the capital. Shops were broken into, properties vandalized, and flats and vehicles set alight by gangs of mostly young men in Croydon, Clapham, Brixton, Hackney, Camden, Lewisham, Peckham, Newham, East Ham, Ilford, Enfield, Woolwich, Ealing, and Colliers Wood. Trouble was also reported in Birmingham, Bristol, Liverpool, and Nottingham.

Described by witnesses as a 'warzone', these are the worst riots to hit London in decades. Over the next few nights, groups of young men, some armed with make-shift weapons and petrol bombs, overwhelmed suburban areas in what was essentially a spontaneous ransacking spree. The chaos has disrupted the lives of thousands of people, rendering them homeless, destroying their businesses, and endangering their livelihoods.

On Monday, at about 4pm, I was talking on the phone to my friend Muddassar Ahmed, CEO of Unitas Communications, while he was driving about town in East Ham where he lives. We were chatting about our plans for a meal round his place to celebrate Ramadan. Suddenly, he said, "Oh my God. There's a group of, like, 50 young guys and they're running straight towards me!" Fortunately they ran passed his car, but they continued onto Ilford Lane, which they'd barricaded using crates and boxes.

On Tuesday morning, my dad and stepmother who live in Croydon, where some of the worst violence occurred, told me over the phone how they'd watched as the previous night a gang of about 20 lads smashed their way into the Staples opposite their house and emptied almost the entire superstore. Indeed, many of the images of the carnage captured by journalists have also been revealing – apart from the stealing of expensive luxury items like flat screen televisions and hi-fi systems, a lot of the pillaging has focused on clothes and food.

Police Brutality

So it would be gravely mistaken to assume that the rioting and violence erupting throughout London was motivated fundamentally by opposing police brutality exemplified in the killing of Mark Duggan. Police brutality almost certainly played a role in sparking the initial rage. Early inaccurate media reports claimed that Duggan had fired first at the SO19 police officers who were tracking him, and that the officer who was hit was only saved by the bullet lodging itself in his radio. Forensic analysis later confirmed that the bullet was in fact police-issued, throwing doubt on the whole story.

Semone Wilson, Duggan's girlfriend, said: "I spoke to him at about 5pm and nafeezhe asked me if I'd cook dinner. He said he spotted a police car following him. By 6.15 he had been gunned down. I kept phoning and phoning to find out where he was. He wasn't answering. I rushed down to where it happened. They let me through the police lines but they wouldn't let me see his body."

According to eyewitnesses, Duggan had been disabled by police and was lying on the ground when he had been shot. "About three or four police officers had both men pinned on the ground at gunpoint", said one who was at the scene. "They were really big guns and then I heard four loud shots. The police shot him on the floor."

Pending further disclosure, the jury is still out on what exactly happened, but at the moment the available evidence does not lend confidence to the original version of events put out by anonymous police sources.

To add insult to injury (or this case, murder), when a 16-year old girl amongst the protestors who had gathered in Tottenham on Saturday approached the police to ask questions, the officers "set upon her with batons", according to one resident interviewed by the BBC.

Confusing the Issues

Then the fires started. What began as a peaceful but angry demonstration against Duggan's killing by members of Tottenham's local community was quickly overrun and overtaken by hundreds of youths, who exploited the circumstances to cause havoc and loot local businesses.

The scale of the violence on Saturday alone, and the inability of police and emergency services to respond and contain it effectively, was instrumental in inspiring youths all over London's suburbs to mimic the violence and, quite literally, use the opportunity to take what they wanted.

Unfortunately, some activists have been confused by these events. Jodi McIntyre described the riots as an "uprising", and suggested it should "continue in an effective manner" with better "organisation" – "Random looting", he explained, "is not going to overcome police injustice.

But until then, the language of the unheard will continue to be spoken." But to what end should such admittedly pointless random looting therefore continue? How does exhorting its continuation in any way fit into a genuinely progressives agenda for the inclusive, community-led, radical systemic transformation necessary to overcome our converging social, political, economic and cultural crises?

Responding to criticism for expressing support for the riots, McIntyre wrote: "If it is a question of where my solidarity lies, and the options are M&S and Footlocker versus young people in the streets, then there is only one answer." To be fair McIntyre expressed "sympathy" for those who had their "homes or cornershops damaged" and noted he has never supporting looting or arson – but ultimately, his comments illustrate a serious lack of understanding of what had happened.

There is no binary moral choice between support for the 'corporate establishment' and 'young people' – as if the riots somehow manifest young people challenging corporate power in a genuinely progressive way. The riots, the looting, the plunder, did not in any way constitute an "uprising" against corporate or even state power. On the contrary, the violence represented the most regressive manifestations of corporate and state inculcated values of crude materialist, market-driven hedonism. The looters and vandals were not politically-motivated, let alone progressively-inspired. On the contrary, what precisely illustrates the entirely self-destructive nature of this phenomenon is that its main victims were not the government, nor large corporates shielded by the promise of insurance pay-outs – but simply ordinary working people. If this was an uprising, it ended up targeting the very communities from which these young people came, even if these are communities from which they feel ostracized.

Boiling Point

McIntyre is right about one thing, though, when he says, "Inequality is at the heart of this." Indeed, the violence is a disturbing symptom of the protracted collapse-process which industrial civilization now finds itself in.

The vast majority of perpetrators were young people, both men and women although mostly men. Young people in Britain have been hit hardest by the impact of recession. Unemployment in the UK is now at a staggering 2.49 million, having risen steadily over the last decade – increasingly so since the 2008 crash – with 1.46 million claiming jobseekers allowance. Across the country, one in five 16-24 year olds – just under a million young people – are unemployed.

Figures released just this summer showed that the economic gloom was deepening particularly across the capital, with 20 people chasing each available job in 22 of London's 73 parliamentary constituencies. In other areas, such as Peckham and Hackney which were also sites of major rioting, the number of people going after each job is over 40. And in almost every seat, this measure has worsened in the last few months.

It won't get better soon – this year will see unemployment rise to 2.7 million. And young people will face the brunt of it, as they already have. In the quarter to May 2011, the employment rate of working age men in London was lower than the national average, and underwent a "dramatic fall of 0.9 percentage points, while the national rate remained the same." Almost a quarter of working-age Londoners are economically inactive – 1.3 million people, and of these 397,000 people are aged 16 and over.

And there is an unmistakable race-dimension to class inequality. Black and ethnic minority (BME) groups face the brunt of the impact of economic crisis. Across the UK, BME groups have the highest rates of income-poverty, and in London, more than half of people living in low-income households are from ethnic minorities. According to the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, 70 per cent of those in income poverty in inner London are from minority ethnic groups, as are 50 per cent in outer London.

There is an interplay between the wider racial contours of social inequalities and institutional police racism. Despite commendable progress in significant areas, black people are still seven times more likely to be stopped and searched than white. Asians are twice as likely to be stopped and searched as white people. More than 30 per cent of all black males living in Britain are on the national DNA database, compared with about 10 per cent of white males and 10 per cent of Asian males. Black men are about four times more likely than white men to have their DNA profiles stored on the DNA database.

Meanwhile, the British government's flagship 'Big Society'-inspired policy to support young people amounts to nothing less than ruthlessly slashing youth services, and hoping the 'market' – which of course brought us into this economic mess – will magically take care of them. "One in four of England's youth services face catastrophic cuts of between 21-30 per cent – three times higher than the general level of council cuts", reports Kerry Jenkins, operations officer of Unite the Unions – a merger between two of Britain's leading Unions, the T&G and Amicus.

"Many authorities intend to get rid of their youth services completely, while 80% of voluntary organisations providing services for young people have said programmes will be cut. Local authority chiefs predict that youth service budgets will be slashed by £100 million, leading to the loss of 3,000 full-time youth worker jobs."

Indeed, the government was warned. Less than a year ago, Sir Paul Ennals, Head of the National Children's Bureau, predicted that the combination of unemployment and cuts to services would lead to young people becoming "progressively disengaged from their own communities in a way that we are seeing in France", which has already seen riots and social unrest "driven by young people who are alienated from their community."

And as late as 2nd August – less than a week before the riots – criminologist Professor John Pitts, an advisor to several local authorities on violent crime and youth culture, warned that government cuts would lead to an increase in violent crime this summer.

The Failure of Neoliberal Capitalism

The unprecedented economic crisis, linked to the global political economy's fundamental breaching of ecological and energy limits, has already generated outbreaks of civil disorder all over the world in different regional and socio-political contexts. In the Middle East, we have seen the Arab spring, triggered by rocketing food prices, driven by a combination of environmental, financial and energy factors. In Europe, we have seen protests and rioting in Greece, Italy, Spain, Germany, Austria, Turkey and France, fuelled by the devastating impact of the global recession. It is only a matter of time before these crisis-conditions catch-up with the United States mainland.

In the UK, converging energy, economic and environmental crises are being refracted through the lens of a deeply unequal, yet vehemently consumerist, society. As Professor Pitts argued in a later interview directly about the riots: "Many of the people involved are likely to have been from low-income, high-unemployment estates, and many, if not most, do not have much of a legitimate future." Widening social exclusion has pushed these young people onto the margins of conventional morality – "Those things that normally constrain people are not there. Much of this was opportunism but in the middle of it there is a social question to be asked about young people with nothing to lose." Entrenched structural inequalities thus generate a sense of justification for looting: "They feel they can rationalise it by targeting big corporations. There is a sense that the companies have lots of money, while they have very little." Simultaneously, the rioting and violence lacked any progressive content whatsoever – driven by conventional neoliberal values of excessive consumerism, most looters used the opportunity not to challenge capitalism, but to indulge manically in its most materialistic values by simply stealing the items they could not normally afford: "Where we used to be defined by what we did, now we are defined by what we buy. These big stores are in the business of tempting [the consumer] and then suddenly these people find they can just walk into the shop and have it all."

The young people involved in this spate of violence are beyond the conventional alienation of repressed labour. Instead, they suffer from a deeper, more dangerous alienation of being utterly surplus to capitalist requirements, irrelevant and ostracized, and thus doomed to subsist on the margins, functionally illiterate, without hope or aspiration. That is a mode of being which is no longer capable of recognizing ethical constraints or boundaries, precisely because the state has already breached its contract of citizenship to them. The shooting of Mark Duggan, and the underbelly of class and race inequality it followed, was merely a match to a flame that has already burned for too long.

However the government chooses to now respond to the escalating violence, there can be no doubt that the episode represents a fundamental turning-point for British society, in a world that has already passed the tipping point on a whole range of interconnected systemic crises. The danger is that the authorities will offer the traditional, knee-jerk, business-as-usual response of maximizing police state powers, rather than addressing the root causes of our predicament. Of course, robust measures are clearly necessary to contain the violence and hold those responsible accountable. But we are already on the slippery slope of intensifying state-militarization – and we won't be able to get off as long as we refuse, as societies, to take responsibility for the systemic crises we all now face.

Dr. Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed is Executive Director of the Institute for Policy Research & Development. His latest book is A User's Guide to the Crisis of Civilization: And How to Save It (Pluto/Macmillan, 2010), which inspired the forthcoming documentary feature film, The Crisis of Civilization, to be released in October this year.