Urban rioters of all historical eras tend to engage in a fairly standard set of behaviours: they stage marches (often from one space of symbolic significance to another); they chant slogans (both advocating their cause and denigrating their opponents); they perform petty acts of vandalism (for example, smashing windows, doors, street signs, etc.); they loot stores and houses of valuable objects (or, in food riots, of basic staples); they make threats through symbolic actions …; they skirmish with rival gangs or mobs (or sometimes are content with mutual displays of intimidation); they threaten hated individuals with violence (and, occasionally, actually lynch them); they set fires (a more serious action that often provokes a response from the authorities); and finally, they attack or are attacked by representatives of the government (such as police, soldiers or militia). These behaviours are all familiar enough to require little further elaboration. (Aldrete 2013, 425)
Interestingly, these examples are not from the twenty-first century, but describe the pattern of protest in ancient Rome. Clearly there are parallels between past and present which may help us to gain a more appreciative understanding of how and why riots and other acts of protest such as demonstrations and strikes come about. Criminology mushroomed in the 1960s through its ability to explain how and why millions were ‘becoming deviant’ (Becker 1963; Matza 1969). Before this time, social science categorised actions (and people) as either normal or deviant. This functional approach tended to see ‘normal’ as something desirable—‘deviance’ was its anti-social opposite. If any group were opposed to the norm—which by definition would include protestors—they were deviating and needed correction. Mainstream criminologists would tend to blame the deviant themselves, whereas more liberal views acknowledged the role of structures in shaping attitudes and therefore sought to change the structures. The sociologists of deviance in the 1960s and 1970s started to develop a more critical perspective, which viewed those trying to change the way in which mainstream society denied their civil rights not as victims of structures but active agents for change whose situation—with the movements that developed around these issues such as racial and gender oppression—needed to be appreciated. For David Matza,
Appreciating a phenomenon is a fateful decision, for it eventually entails a commitment—to the phenomenon and to those exemplifying it—to render it with fidelity and without violating its integrity. (Matza 1969, 24)
As the movement of resistance to capitalism expresses itself in various different actions, those who fail to commit themselves to an active appreciation of the struggles going on around them will end up joining policy makers in stigmatising the poor and criminalising protest. This book explores how adopting an appreciative viewpoint towards the actions of the crowd becomes increasingly important in an era of riot and protest on the global stage: ‘the moral bind of law is lessened wherever a sense of injustice prevails. It is tantamount to asserting that chaos and tyranny reign instead of order and society’ (Matza 1990, 102).
The sound of the crowd, or more accurately the actions and intentions of a large group of people who find themselves resisting the normal atmosphere of compliance with the rules and methods set by society’s ruling institutions, is important because it is a collective statement. It comes out of peoples’ interdependence—their reliance on each others support in stressful situations of extreme injustice and blatant disrespect. As Joop Goudsblum summarises it:
- 1.
Sociology is about people in the plural—human beings who are interdependent with each other in a variety of ways, and whose lives evolve in and are significantly shaped by the social figurations they form together.- 2.
These figurations are continually in flux, undergoing changes of many kinds—some rapid and ephemeral, others slower but perhaps more lasting.- 3.
The development of human knowledge takes place within human figurations, and is one important aspect of their overall development. (Goudsblom 1977, 6, 105)
Social scientists must therefore take an interest and develop an appreciation of crowds protesting, whether we call them groups, figurations, classes or mobs, in whatever form the action takes. As Egypt showed in 2011, crowd action can lead to revolution and there is discussion and examples below of how revolutions in the ancient world, in Rome, in medieval Italy, early modern England and later France place mass popular action at their centre. These actions can be called direct democracy—where groups of people are assembling, arguing and acting decisively in situations that often begin as a form of self-defence, a desperate attempt to counter what has been called the barbarism of the existing order, or a civilising offensive by the ruling powers (Powell 2013). Processes of decivilisation, where society is thrust backwards by its rulers towards violence and anti-social barbarism (Mennell 1990), can provoke resistance from groups of people (figurations) against—for example—measures that are unjust and austere.
When France’s Louis XVI left the poor to starve, the French revolutionaries in 1789 called the Queen, Marie Antoinette, ‘Madame Deficit’. The Paris crowd stormed the Bastille, the giant fortress and prison at the heart of the city, freed the prisoners and burnt it down: they started the 1789 French Revolution. When Louis’s troops in turn massacred hundreds at the Field of Mars ‘it was easy to see that the violent compression of so powerful and elastic a spring would be followed by as violent a recoil’ (Macaulay 1889, 350). Macaulay’s phrase was actually describing the events of another revolution, in England 101 years earlier, and are reproduced here to illustrate how these themes of acts of violent repression provoke popular resistance. In the process, the people within the crowd—the body, or constitution of this group, or figuration—themselves change their consciousness, the blinkers narrowing their vision of a possible future come off, and they can start to believe that collective action can change their world for the better (Rudé 1964). This book contains only a small sample of such struggles. Many other events could, and maybe should, have been included, such as the 1917 Russian Revolution (Lenin 1917). But because the focus here is on appreciating events labelled as criminal or the product of a deviant subculture, I concentrate more on ‘second-order’ struggles that do not overthrow the existing order, but are so often present and which emerge out of the contradictions between different sections of society. I focus on crowds of people assembling, marching, demonstrating, rioting and occupying spaces, such as public squares, main streets and workplaces. Much of the evidence is a product of reviewing the histories of crowds acting together to change their circumstances. Once again, Aldrete’s Roman examples illustrate that these kinds of actions have been with us for at least the last 2000 years:
Statues often became the focal point for urban unrest, and a number of riots culminated in the pulling down of or attack upon the statue of a hated public figure. Thus, in 55 BC, statues of Pompey were stoned by an angry crowd, in 40 BC, statues of Mark Antony and Octavian were smashed during food riots … Crowds might also express their hatred for an individual by attacking his house, a symbol closely associated with his identity. This was a popular type of behaviour during the late Republic, when Cicero, his brother Quintus, Milo, Lepidus and the assassins of Julius Caesar all had their houses burnt or damaged by vengeful mobs. (Aldrete 2013, 430)
The events that sparked the idea of writing this book were the global renaissance of crowd actions that occurred in 2011 (Žižek 2012; Badiou 2012). Most prominently, the uprisings against tyranny in the Middle East, known as the Arab Spring, but also the European and American social movements centred around city squares protesting against austerity and inequality, and the British equivalent which consisted of several mass demonstrations throughout the year and a series of riots concentrated into five days in August. We were told by many commentators from the academic world and the media that the 2011 English riots were not political or social in the way riots had been in the past. Politicians also weighed in with their self-interested condemnations which seek to distance the act of riot from any kind of legitimacy. And yet, in past riots we tend to find the kind of political, social, economic and moral rationales employed by those taking part which have clear parallels with twenty-first-century injustices in the minds of protestors today.
As we have just seen, throughout history crowds have expressed their hatred for an individual by attacking his house. In Britain you could add the Chief Justice Lord Mansfield in the 1780 Gordon Riots, or the Conservative ex-prime minister and general, the Duke of Wellington, in 1831, who was so worried about such attacks he installed metal window shutters that earned him the nickname the ‘Iron Duke’. Aldrete adds that ‘a similar displacement of hostility felt for a group being directed against its “home” can be seen in the burning or threatened burning of the senate-house, as happened in 44 BC and 56 BC’ (2013, 430).
This is an important area for criminology for several reasons. Firstly, it was the spike in mass protest in the Western world around May 1968 which provided the ammunition for the growth of a radical sociology of deviance whose key ideas have become central to the understanding of criminology today. Labelling theory, moral panics, media critique and appreciation of so-called deviant subcultures all emerged out of this atmosphere of protest, as I will explore with particular reference to the UK and the USA. Secondly, the way in which the major concerns for criminology have shifted over subsequent decades tells us a lot about the forms of repression practised by states anxious to maintain social control, and the manner in which many of these pioneering sociologists of deviance adapted their interpretations of social reality as the possibility of fundamental social change appeared to recede, accelerating the emphasis on realism and reform rather than idealism and revolution. I maintain that the return of the crowd to the centre of world events over the last five years or so highlights the shortcomings of some of the grander claims of realists and post-modernists about the supposed irrelevance of class inequality and the dissension it produces.
This account will take a long-term view of this phenomenon and illustrate how people have been protesting for thousands of years. Summarising Engels and Marx I will describe how the process of the formation of those key institutions, the state and private property, emerged out of these protests as social forces undermining the mass of peoples’ control over their lives. Those classes became established in authority over the great majority, their aim was to make all others outsiders—that is to undermine and remove the grip they once had over aspects of their existence. Criminologists need to appreciate how the concept of the law has evolved over the centuries. The law is never simply a monolithic tool of oppression, not even today. Lawyers, after all, earn their living by interpreting it in the interests of their clients. Of course, for much of history, the law has been a tool in the hands of the state to protect its interests and those of its powerful friends, but that is not where law began. Originally, law was made by people collectively and justice was the result, that is they enacted judgement, allegedly to protect the weak from the strong, but certainly to ensure the business of everyday life was governed in the interests of the community. People were not rebels, seeking to overthrow authority, but constituted authority themselves—in common.
Of course, as societies developed, hierarchies and inequalities emerged. The powerful forged institutions advancing their specific, or class, interests. Often, these would clash with the ways of life and the desires of the mass of the community concerned.
In fourteenth-century Europe people often asserted political rights by taking control of city squares. In Florence, companies of citizens assembled in the piazza and voted on the recommendations of their leaders. The nobles had historically believed they were the only class fit to rule and this was the way the new rising classes, the merchants and artisans, could contest their monopoly. Sometimes, lower ranks of workers, such as the Ciompi or wool-workers guild in 1378, rioted in order to win voting rights and a say in government. In the nearby highlands of Tuscany ‘the men of the mountains still elected their own priests in convocations [assemblies or figurations] that enlisted the presence of all the adult men of the parish … at the sound of their church bells’ (Cohn 1999, 50–52).
Cohn shows how these communities were able to rise up and resist unfair taxation by Florence’s rulers. Even though the official chronicles describe these revolts as defeated, in fact they won significant concessions which ushered in the introduction of a fairer and more universal system of taxation, thus probably ensuring the future economic suc...