the site of a power struggle. Adult commentators assume that everyone out of work is miserable, but the question posed by Britain’s riots (and by some of the rioters in Zurich, Berlin, and Amsterdam over the past year) is whether such misery must be passive. The young are less tied to the family than the adult unemployed; they have a more fluid relationship to the economy. It is easier for them to hustle. And as hustlers, surviving in the interstices of a declining welfare state, the immediate political problem is how to deal with a cruelly niggling authority. Riots are a spontaneous, destructive expression of the resulting frustration and rage, but the question they leave behind is whether the communities in Brixton and Toxteth, in London and Manchester, can act together in any other way. The common strand uniting all the riots was youth (even if some of the stonethrowers were children and many of the looters adults), but it is still difficult to decide how this makes the English riots different from what happened in the USA in the 1960s or in Northern Ireland throughout the 1970s. Youth is a social category as a matter of policy; it is the effect of young people’s special treatment by welfare bureaucrats and housing committees, by employers and governments. In Britain, youth unemployment is a new phenomenon—it has been a problem of any sort only since 1972, and today’s teenagers are in the first generation not to leave school, go to work, and grow up quite smoothly (their parents were the affluent, rock and roll teenagers of the 1950s). One effect of this is that young people identify not with their class or their families, or with workmates of all ages, but with their friends and neighbors on the streets. It is in these groups (no longer broken up by jobs) that the fight for independence goes on, and so, immediate political identifications are not socialist but nationalist—hence skinhead fascism. But youths are also involved in struggles that transcend these divisions. The fight for independence—for money and resources of their own—is a fight with the state and the police in which the young unemployed share an interest not just with each other but also with a growing number of adult social groups. The most striking thing about inner-city areas like Brixton and Toxteth is that they are not ghettos but, rather, communities made up of all sorts of people on the fringes of the social system. Decaying housing is cheap housing; dead factories can be occupied; cheap shop space is available for co-ops and communes and political groups. Both Brixton and Toxteth are inhabited by whites as well as blacks, by students, ex-students, and bohemians, by Trotskyists and militants, by single parents, women’s groups, and gays. The resulting communities, hippie meets punk, are places of pleasure as well as despair. British economists now assume that no matter who decides economic policy Britain will soon have at least one million unemployed in 1990—workless youths are going to be the norm. The political fight to come, the fight prefigured by the riots, is not for work, but for space—space to live, space to play, space (if we’re all very lucky) in which to put together new race and sex and class relations. Adult commentators have belatedly been listening to old records—finding the despair of youth in punk, the violence in oi, the bitterness in reggae. What they have missed is the fun and defiance, the ways in which black and white groups like the Beat and UB40, inner-city intellectuals like the Fall and the Au Pairs, have turned tension into a dancefloor drive. After the Asian killings in Coventry, the Specials organized a daylong protest concert. It got grudging support from the local council and the police—they imposed such stringent staging conditions that it cost the group 9000 pounds just to get the venue ready. In the wake of National Front threats, only 2000 people came—they were young, tense, friendly, and defiant. Coventry youth was on display and on a damp evening, the stadium was ringed by policemen, the Specials played the most intense music they have ever made. “This town is coming like a ghost town,’’ they sang, and for a moment the demons were exorcised. Reprinted from the Village Voice, July 22-28,1981 escential lotions ond oils Over 70 Escential Perfume Oils • Specializing in custom scents • Fine skin and hair products • Soaps at prices you can afford Tues-Sat 10-5:30 727 N.W. 21st Ave. Portland, Oregon 97209 248-9748 28 Clinton St. Quarterly
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