The Prince and the Pauper
The general lesson learnt by political England from its experience of pauperism is none other than that, in the course of history and despite all administrative measures, pauperism has developed into a national institution which has inevitably become the object of a highly ramified and extensive administrative system, a system however which no longer sets out to eliminate it, but which strives instead to discipline and perpetuate it.
— Karl Marx, “Critical Notes on ‘The King of Prussia and Social Reform. By a Prussian’”
Everyone on the left has pointed out that the riots in London are rooted in capital’s assault on the working class, couched in the ideological language of austerity — and that this was the kindling sparked by the racist police brutality that culminated in the murder of Mark Duggan. But our task — like Marx’s task, when he defended the violent upheaval of the Silesian weavers — isn’t to give a moral evaluation of the riots, like schoolmasters diligently stacking the pros against the cons, but, rather, to grasp their specific character.
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