178.Matt Clement.Pdf

MATT CLEmENT A People’s History of Riots, Protest and the Law The Sound of the Crowd A People’s History of Riots, Protest and the Law Matt Clement A People’s History of Riots, Protest and the Law The Sound of the Crowd Matt Clement Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences University of Winchester United Kingdom ISBN 978-1-137-52750-9 ISBN 978-1-137-52751-6 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-52751-6 Library of Congress Control Number: 2016943982 © Th e Editor(s) (if applicable) and Th e Author(s) 2016 Th e author(s) has/have asserted their right(s) to be identifi ed as the author(s) of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Th is work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifi cally the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfi lms or in any other physical way, and trans- mission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. Th e use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specifi c statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. Th e publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. Cover illustration: © yu liang wong / Alamy Stock Photo Printed on acid-free paper Th is Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature Th e registered company is Macmillan Publishers Ltd. London To Ali and Bob, my nearest and dearest v Foreword In advanced capitalist regions of the globe, acts of collective resistance remain unusual events even if they do occur with some frequency, as Matt Clement in A People’s History of Riots, Protest and the Law: Th e Sound of the Crowd demonstrates. Such acts appear unusual in part because they arise within countries whose economic ‘success’ has been built on the forging of an individualist mindset under which the majority of us, the majority of the time, are compelled to play the dull and isolating game of getting by to the best of our, individual, abilities. Th ose of us whose ‘daily grind’ has been interspersed with moments of collective action, protest and resistance have experienced the breaking of this stultifying, life-limiting framework if only for brief moments which are all too often dissipated as quickly as they fi rst arose. Th ese moments are not forgotten, however, and live in our, individual, consciousness as examples of pos- sibility, of how things could be diff erent, and of how, to use the slogan of the anti-capitalist movement of the early 2000s, ‘another way is possible’. Th e Sound of the Crowd reminds us that society has been changed in numerous ways through collective struggle—examples presented within this text span more than 2000 years of history and reveal the part which the ‘crowd’, ‘the mob’, ‘the rabble’, has played in bringing power to account and in helping to build progressive movements within society. Th e outlawing of slavery, the overthrow of absolute monarchies, the for- mation of trade unions, votes for women, the ending of legalised segre- vii viii Foreword gation in the USA, of apartheid in South Africa, and the legalising of same-sex unions, are just some of the many such progressive moments to be celebrated and in which the crowd has played a signifi cant part. Each might have happened without the bravery of those who were willing to engage in the collective breaking of the law and standing together against the prevailing current, but I doubt it. Th e crowd throughout history has played a signifi cant part in signalling to authority, and that there has been a change in the collective imagination as well as a growing unwillingness of the people to tolerate further indignities and discrimination either on their own or on others’ behalf. Th e crowd is a universal phenomenon. It continues to reconstitute itself throughout history and across the globe. We have witnessed a global resurgence of the crowd since the 1960s as waves of economic crises have hit various regions of the world. Th e growing internationalisation of capital and the interdependence of the diff erent national economies, accel- erated by the fall of the Soviet Union and China’s entry into the global economy, have thus led to ‘a greater degree of simultaneity and similar- ity in what might broadly be referred to as “class struggles” around the process of capital accumulation and…government measures to resolve crises’ (Walton 1994:21). In this process, Walton argues, the relationship between the state and civil society, between government and the people, is being fundamentally redefi ned and old certainties cast out into the wind. Under these circumstances we will experience more protest, it will take diff erent forms and draw in a wider layer of people. It is clear that mainstream criminology cannot begin to comprehend the crowd and the part which collective rule-breaking has played in the removal of injustices in society; neither does it contain the tools which would allow it to empathise with those who take part in such disruptive behaviour. The discipline, after all, emerged out of the state’s need to control its citizens and to mould their behaviour to its own needs and political ends. The classical ‘founding fathers’ of criminology were liberal philosophers who considered the modern legal system a moral good and were concerned with maintaining the individual’s responsibility in upholding the rule of law. While disciplines such as philosophy, history and literature have been more open to an understanding and acceptance of the role of dissent in shaping contemporary society and social history, Foreword ix the role of criminology has been to condemn and to suppress dissident and law-breaking behaviours. What is more disturbing is that many of the critical voices which have been raised within criminology have also started from the assumption that the riot is a problematic and damag- ing event that must be understood and responded to in some way so that it is less likely to occur in the future. The perspective which they take is inherently reformist, suggesting that the inequalities of capitalism can be somehow ironed out and that western democracies can offer a space in which the crowd can be heard and their demands incorporated into policy changes, that, if we were only to listen to the voices of the oppressed and to act on their demands that social stability and justice might be restored. The voices of the crowd, however, are all too often shouting out that there is no justice, that they have never known justice and that liberal democracy is a sham which affords them no political or social representa- tion. Of course this cry is often poorly articulated, but whether ransack- ing shops, setting fires in anger or marching on Parliament with specified demands, the crowd, in its collective refusal to comply with expected codes of conduct, is presenting a challenge to the existing order of things. It is a visceral expression of a complex, deep-seated sense that the world is not as it should be. This is as true of the crowds with which we can empathise as it is with those whose motivations we find difficult to comprehend or which are distasteful to us. In an address to the American Society of Criminology in 1988, Maureen Cain reminded us that in order to transgress the very real limitations of our discipline it is necessary to engage in more than merely ‘photographing the garbage can’ (Cain 1990:7). It is not enough to document and comment on the reaction and response to any given situation but it is imperative that we understand what it is a reaction to. Furthermore, we must incorporate the knowledge that pain, anger and emotion do not always have a language through which they can be expressed. As a consequence, the actions of the crowd can be complex, contradictory and mystifying but we are compelled to look through these, to demystify and to find a language which can reflect and more clearly represent the realities of life and longing in the crowd’s participants. It is necessary to interrogate the nature of social ordering in society and its harmful consequences, to look at the whole picture and x Foreword to understand the law and law-breaking from this, clearer, vantage point. This is a political more than a criminological project. The work of Clement is overtly political. He utilises a Marxist framework and analysis to interpret the sound of the crowd and to remind critical criminologists of the importance of taking such a standpoint. The Marxist method demands a historical and a comparative overview of the subject and this is his starting point and his concluding stance. Marxist analysis also requires active commitment to the struggle itself, to fully empathise with the subject of study and to gain knowledge and understanding through praxis—the fusion of theory and practice—and to resist the temptation to comment from the side-lines.

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