Abstract
The mainstream media has a propensity to portray protests as manifestations of instability that must be tackled as well as presenting protesters as criminal ‘mobs’ that must be controlled. For instance, the French Interior Minister Nicholas Sarkozy belittled the 2005 rioters as racaille (rabble); the Daily Mirror represented the 2011 English riots with images of a masked young man wandering down the street near a burning car with the headline ‘Anarchy Spreads’ and the pro-government Yeni Şafak lashed out at the 2013 Gezi protestors in Turkey by calling them çapulcus (marauders) easily mobilised by ‘foreign agents’. Despite dominant narratives of blaming the victim, Matt Clement’s A People’s History of Riots, Protest and the Law: The Sound of the Crowd is a radical challenge to both mainstream criminology literature, which regards riots, protests or mobilisations as deviant, pathological events that should be avoided, and laws that function to express the will of a ruling elite who control the state apparatus.
In each chapter, the book provides an historical account of ‘appreciating events labelled as criminal or the product of a deviant subculture’ (p. 4). The ‘Democracy and protest in the ancient world’ chapter values Athenian direct democracy that represents the vox populi (voice of the people), as well as the tribunes of the plebs in the Roman republic. The following chapter, ‘Medieval riots’, analyses the riots in England between 1000 and 1500, as well as the 1378 revolt in Florence (known as the Ciompi Revolt), through the lens of demands for social justice. According to Clement, the protesters who initiated occupy movements against powerful financial institutions in New York and Hong Kong echoed poor citizens’ demand for debt abolishment – especially wool combers – during the Ciompi Revolt. The chapter also warns against the possible threats of the retreat of riots or uprisings, which can lead to the emergence of counter-revolutionary waves. As an example, Clement points to Nazism and the Holocaust following the defeat of the German Revolution (1918–1923) and the return of military rule or the emergence of the Islamic State following the defeat of the Arab Uprising. By vividly inviting the reader to take a journey from past to present, Clement supports Karl Marx’s observation that historical events occur ‘the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce’.
The writer continues to refer déjà vécus in the following chapter, ‘Artisans and citizens: Riots from 1500–1700’, by drawing analogies between the iconoclastic 17th century English Revolution, which overthrew James II in 1688, and the 21st century Occupy movement; between the English government’s attitude toward the 1833 Coldbath Fields clashes in the 19th century and the French Government’s attitude to ban climate protests in 2015 using the state of emergency. The writer aptly argues that riots emerged out of resistance to the degradation of dispossessed people’s communal rights, a process that can be seen in enclosures and land-grabs of communal land by 15th century hedges.
In chapter 5, ‘Custom, law and class’, Clement makes a particularly iconoclastic argument: what the law presents as ‘theft’ is indeed ‘the act of robbing the poor of their customary entitlements’ (p. 103). This leads him to conclude that the poor’s resistance to this threat is a clear manifestation of their ‘redress of grievances’ (p. 104).
Chapter 6, ‘1968: Protest and the growth of a critical criminology’, aptly addresses ‘the anti-social sources of crime’ – such as exploitation, oppression, racism and sexism – rather than blaming the offender. It directly suggests that capitalist society – a barrier to human emancipation – is itself deviant. The chapter therefore suggests that we need to appreciate the context of ‘deviant’ acts, riots and protests and take into account the insider’s perspective, without demonising them. The chapter strongly argues that when social mobilisations encounter isolation and harsh state repression, they transform into terrorism. Matt Clement and Vincenzo Scalia, the co-writer of this chapter, illustrate their points using the tragic consequences of the Italian Communist Party in Italy’s false strategy, which formed a ‘national solidarity’ government with the Democratic Catholics between 1976 and 1979. This strategy incapacitated the already existing popular resistance, creating a political vacuum that was filled by the left-wing, paramilitary Red Brigades organisation.
Chapter 7, ‘The 2010s: A decade of riot and protest’, appreciates the English riots of 2011, where rioters challenged consumerism and capitalism and highlighted ‘racialised state violence’ (pp. 192, 196). The writer points out the role of state agency – the police – in escalating violence, and thereby creating a political context in which protesters act.
By questioning pejorative terms such as ‘rabble’, ‘mob’ and ‘idle’, Clement invites the reader to recognise the context in which people march, shout, protest and act for a common purpose. Moreover, the writer reiterates throughout the book that major historical achievements – such as tax reduction, curbing nobles’ power, preventing greater oppression, reducing factory hours to 10 per day, the legalisation of trade unions and the introduction of universal education and voting rights – were products of collective mass power. Therefore, this book challenges the elitist view of history that despises the crowd, presenting them as merely a collection of ferocious, impulsive and irrational people. Having said so, the author’s argument that the state security apparatus reproduces and foments crime reveals his critical–radical perspective. This critical stance leads him to clearly address the state’s violent responses to the ‘deviant’ act, which takes the form of threats, imprisonment, repression and violence. However, by adopting an instrumentalist theory of the state as ‘bodies of armed men’ (p. 99), the author neglects to see how both the state manufactures hegemony in class societies and the state’s ideological apparatuses serve the dominant classes. It is important to note that the state apparatuses ‘reproduce hegemony by bringing the power bloc and certain dominated classes into a (variable) game of provisional compromises’ (Poulantzas 2000: 140). It is the hegemonic, not only coercive, power of the state that leads to the subordination of dominated classes. In other words, the stability of the capitalist order is also contingent upon the cultural dominance of the ruling classes that function in the realm of civil society (Anderson 1976: 26). Consequently, the state’s hegemonic power creates a process of people’s internalisation of the law, which in turn functions to demobilise the masses. In addition to this theoretical deficiency, the book also has a tendency to romanticise every ‘act’ of popular mobilisation, regardless of their progressive or regressive purposes. The inability to differentiate between progressive and reactionary mobilisations is problematic, as it can lead to the homogenising of all kinds of mobilisations. That is to say, this lack of differentiation risks normalising and even appreciating, if not justifying, neo-fascist mobilisations and protests – such as the English Defence League in the United Kingdom and PEGIDA in Germany, where racism plays a unifying role for the masses. Nevertheless, despite its theoretical and practical deficiencies, this book wards off both intellectual nihilism that suggests that action is meaningless and elitism that underestimates the power of the masses. Therefore, against those who propose the infamous neologism ‘there is no alternative’, Matt Clement generates hope in the slogan ‘another world is possible’.