DanaC, that it's a "primal yell" rings true to me.
I've never been even as close to London as Heathrow on a layover. But the idea that this comes out of a disenfranchised class and generation without the eloquence or clarity or whatever it takes to be recognized as "legitimately political" makes a lot of sense to me. In a certain way, that so many figures of traditional power dismiss the riots as apolitical and "just crime" is, itself, a sign that there is a deep, probably fairly widespread common cause -- one which is so endemic that they cannot even pretend to relate.
This seems maybe a relevant, if sort of anarcho-philosophical in a dense way, essay about the (previous?) apathy of British students relative to French:
Reflexive Impotence
In it, he basically argues that there is a bleak future for young people, where they're simultaneously trained to be manic entertainment/stimulus junkies, but also to take on debt and join the rat race.
Quote:
Reflexive impotence amounts to an unstated worldview amongst the British young. Many of the teenagers I work with have mental health problems or learning difficulties. Depression is endemic. The number of students who have some variant of dyslexia is astonishing. It is not an exaggeration to say that being a teenager in late capitalist Britain is now close to being reclassified as a sickness. This pathologization already forecloses any possibility of politicization. By privatizing problems - treating them as if they were caused only by the individual's neurology and/ or family background - any question of social systemic causation is ruled out.
[...]
If the figure of discipline was the worker-prisoner, the figure of control is the debtor-addict. Cyberspatial capital operates by addicting its users; Gibson recognized that in Neuromancer when he had Case and the other cyberspace cowboys feeling insects-under-the-skin strung out when they unplugged from the matrix (Case's amphetamine habit is plainly the substitute for an addiction to a far more abstract speed).
[...]
It is worth stressing that none of the students I teach have any legal obligation to be at college. They could leave if they wanted to. But the lack of any meaningful employment opportunities, together with cynical encouragement from government means that college seems to be the easier, safer option. Deleuze says that control societies are based on debt rather than enclosure; but there is a way in which the current education system both indebts and encloses students. Pay for your own exploitation, the logic insists - get into debt so you can get the same McJob you could have walked into if you'd left school at 16 ...
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The people who control the narrative freak out about their pensions or 401ks or stock portfolios going into the shitter when the economy collapses. But the youth, who are already predisposed to be somewhat angsty about what the future may hold, are watching the older generation lose their shit over it, too. Is it worse to lose it all, or to watch what could be yours some day get lost?
I have both a day job and an active entreprenurial pipe dream. But if I were there, or the riots here, I wonder what I would do: it doesn't seem that foreign. Every generation "theatricializes one's lack of prospects": mine did it with body decoration and narcotics. But, we had prospects.