Guy Debord

Guy Debord says everything else I could say about the riots far better. He wrote this after the Watts riots in 1965.

“The Los Angeles revolt was a revolt against the commodity, against the world of commodities and of worker consumers hierarchically subordinated to the measuring rod of the commodity. The blacks of Los Angeles.. take modern capitalist propaganda, with all it’s touting affluence at it’s word. They want all the objects displayed, and available in the abstract, right now- because they want to use them.”
The ‘Rise & Fall of the Spectacular Commodity Economy’ 

Guy DeBord (translated by Donald Nicholson Smith)

My understanding of this quote is that if you create a culture that imparts status only through material possessions, then at some stage, the people who do not have these possessions and have no way of getting them, will take them by force. This principle seems very relevant in Hackney on the 9^th August of 2011.