On 10/08/11 15:58, Jim Devine wrote: > a couple of months ago, my son (age 21) asked me why riots occur (in > reference to the 1992 "Rodney King" riots in LA). He clearly had no > clue, so I gave him a short and quick answer. Here it is, changed a > bit: > > 1) there's a community inside society that's outside of the mainstream > and/or dominated by the rest of society. It's not well organized. > > 2) there's a reason for this community to be angry (cf. Rodney King). > > 3) opportunists and/or "hot heads" start looting, burning, and/or > anti-personnel violence (which turns it into a "riot"). > > any thoughts? By the way, I think that this fits such riots as the > "white riot" against Martin Luther King, Jr., in Chicago in 1965. It's > not just a matter of ethnic minorities.
Whenever there are western/urban riots I always re-read Debord's "The Decline and Fall of the Spectacle-Commodity Economy", which is about the riots in LA in 1965: http://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/decline.html -martin -- http://commoning.wordpress.com "...I thought we were an autonomous collective..." _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
