Watching the riots in England these days, one line from the video above keeps echoing in my mind:
There’s a term for this: “class politics,” and it usually ends badly.
I first heard him last October, on an All Things Considered segment titled “Austerity: A Virtue That Could Have Us Paying Twice,” which concludes:
“There are many contradictions in these arguments,” says Blyth, “and they’re born of a sense of frustration out of what I think is the intuitive understanding people have that something deeply unfair is going on.”
Definition of austerity
“Austerity” is a noun rooted in the adjective “austere,” which Dictionary.com defines as follows:
- severe in manner or appearance; uncompromising; strict; forbidding: an austere teacher.
- rigorously self-disciplined and severely moral; ascetic; abstinent: the austere quality of life in the convent.
- grave; sober; solemn; serious: an austere manner.
- without excess, luxury, or ease; simple; limited; severe: an austere life.
- severely simple; without ornament: austere writing.
- lacking softness; hard: an austere bed of straw.
- rough to the taste; sour or harsh in flavor.
“Austērós” is the Greek root word for austerity, meaning, “harsh, rough, bitter.”
As Professor Blyth points out, while austerity is being pushed through the governments of the Western world as a virtue — something smart and sleek like “thrifty” — in practice, it produces strife.
“This is why austerity is not common sense, it’s a nonsense — and a dangerous one at that,” he finishes.
UK rioting
Listening to Dan Damon’s World Update live reports from Croyden on the riots in England this morning on the BBC World Service, “austerity” came up in his discussion with Louise Cooper, an analyst at BGC Partners, who made a connection between the rioting and the plummeting stock market:
I mean, to be fair, I see these two stories linked. By no means am I saying I understand the violence, but I think in economically austere times — and we are in for years of economic austerity, with tax rises, with people struggling to pay back their debt, with high youth unemployment, with public sector, you know, youth groups being cut, all those kinds of things — and I think that that only makes this kind of action that we’ve seen
more and more likely. And we’ve seen riots in Greece and Spain over cuts and frankly, I just think civil unrest is likely in economically austere times, and we are in for many years of economic austerity.
Damon’s next segment on World Update featured two young women who had participated in the looting at Croyden. Laughing and drinking stolen rosé wine, they hoped for another night of riots tonight. “It’s the rich people,” one said. “It’s the rich people — the people that have got businesses, and that’s why all of this has happened, because of the rich people. So we’re just showing the rich people we can do what we want.”
World Update finished with a segment on parallel violence in Chicago with Hoop Dreams director Steve James. His latest documentary, The Interrupters, ” examines a year in which Chicago drew national headlines for violence and murder that plagued the city,” according to Wikipedia.
Clearly, these are times of tension and stress.
Want a deeper examination of how austerity creates social unrest? Find a comfy chair and curl up with the Center for Economic Policy Research report, “Austerity and Anarchy: Budget Cuts and Social Unrest in Europe, 1919-2009.” (PDF). It opens with:
In this paper, we assemble crosscountry evidence for the period 1919 to the present, and examine the extent to which societies become unstable after budget cuts. The results show a clear positive correlation between fiscal retrenchment and instability.
Of course, there are other ways to cut our deficit besides austerity and budget cuts. We could, for example, just do nothing.
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