Vive La… Discontentment?
So there’s a big G20 summit coming up in London where politicians are going to try to figure out how to un-break the global economy. It’s important for politics and solving the recession and blah blah blah. To be honest I’m a bit bored of news and analysis about the economy.
The whole thing has had one interesting effect, though, which hasn’t really been reported on that much. Touched on a little, perhaps, but that’s about it. Probably discussed more so by bloggers and suchlike but since I don’t read topical blogs I wouldn’t know. In any case, as the economy has gotten progressively worse I’ve noticed that people have become more and more disillusioned with politics and politicians.
People not being huge fans of politicians is no new thing, of course, but the general outlook has changed.
Where previously people would favour one party over another and perhaps dislike certain politicians, they now simply suppose that all politicians are the same, that no party can do any better than another and that the entire system of democratic party-politics seems to be totally broken. Again, this isn’t really a shocking new development, rather it’s just becoming more pronounced – people who would previously state that we ‘need an election to get rid of these idiots’ and suchlike will now suffix that with ‘though the other lot will be just as useless’. It’s a subtle thing maybe, but it seems to show that people are losing faith in the entire system of government. I suspect that this is probably not the case in America, where belief in the system has been revitalised by Obama’s magical powers. For now, at least.
Of course, a little extra resentment of politicians and politics in itself isn’t anything spectacular and on it’s own I wouldn’t even bother writing anything about it because I’m too lazy to consider it worth the effort. But politicians have been joined – probably even surpassed – by finance executives and suchlike. Again, this isn’t really anything amazing on it’s own, but something in the news today caught my eye; specifically that Sir Fred Goodwin’s house was attacked. I wasn’t really that surprised by it, but I still find it quite remarkable anyway. There have been similar cases to the whole Goodwin situation before, with rail administrators getting huge bonuses despite missing all targets and the rail system gradually failing, them being on the receiving end of media and public scorn, but so far as I’m aware none of them were ever the target of actual attacks.
Let’s flash back to something seemingly totally unconnected to all of this which happened in December; the riots in Athens. After the initial media reaction to it, which was mostly focused on making it sound like the entirety of Athens was burning in some sort of civil war type scenario, there were some analysts and journalists who suggested that although the root cause of the riots was apparent police brutality and were mostly conducted and ‘organised’ by pre-existing anarchist groups, the fact that they became quite so widespread and large may have been, at least in part, due to increased resentment of the government and general situation caused by the economic crisis.
There’s also been plenty of speculation that a creeping increase in unemployment in China as demand for their exports decreases could lead to instances of social unrest there, too. I’m not aware of any reported cases of this in China, but unrest because of economic turmoil isn’t exactly unheard of. There were riots just a few years ago throughout various French cities, sparked by unemployment and resentment of the government. And let’s stick with France for a bit, but go back even further.
You see, earlier I was reading about the French Revolution over at Wikipedia. Not because of anything to do with other stuff discussed here, rather because currently I am addicted to Empire: Total War which happens to be set in the same period, and have been realising how really my knowledge of that period of history is only really quite general. And since I like history, this is something I’ve been rectifying. In any case, I was of course already aware of the famous reasons for the French revolution; a dislike for the king and queen and their lavish lifestyle. Of course, that’s horribly simplistic (and actually quite inaccurate; turns out a lot of the original revolutionaries were in favour of a constitutional monarchy to replace the absolutism).
A quick glance at the Causes of The French Revolution article gives a more rounded picture; and shows that the economic situation played a huge part. A brief (and possibly somewhat flawed) summary; the country was effectively bankrupt due to debt because of expenditure on wars and royal extravagance and this debt could only be financed with taxes. The nobles and church (by far the richest groups) were effectively exempt from the tax burden, which left it all to the middle and working classes, which of course was not popular with said classes. There was also the view that the taxes were effectively paying for upper class extravagance rather than going toward solving the problems at hand, and this was compounded by the failure of the king and his ministers to successfully tackle the problem of debt. Add into the mix rising food prices and enlightenment idealism, and you pretty much have the causes.
Let’s come back to our current situation. Here we are, 230 years later, and we have a bunch of the same problems. A country in economic crisis, where national debt is rising while the capacity to pay for it is falling, where this debt is used to fund unpopular and failed ventures – in this case the financial sector, not wars and palaces – and is expected to be paid for with future tax increases of an as yet unspecified (and likely undecided) nature. All of which is causing a growing resentment for the national leadership, the general system of that leadership, and those people who have been successful under that leadership – the financial executives and suchlike - whose extravagance the public now feel like they’re funding. Quite the parallel really. Certainly not perfect, of course, since we don’t have the new ideas of the enlightenment flying around, and perhaps more importantly food prices are unlikely to raise to the point where people are unable to afford their daily bread.
Now we’re going all the way back to the beginning of this piece; the G20 summit. Although from inside the summit itself there will most likely only be more terribly dull economy news, G8/10/20 summits always attract protest groups. And this time around, the recession and accompanying resentment has apparently caused a swell in support for a lot of protest groups, agendas and ideals which haven’t even been active recently, in the UK at least. Among these are a number of direct action groups.
All of which puts the Goodwin attack in a slightly different light. I’m not supposing that it’s the herald of a revolution, that’s a little sensationalist. But the fact that such an attack happened, and that direct action groups of all varieties and agendas – anarchism to environmentalism – are suddenly finding more support for themselves suggests that maybe China isn’t the only country that should be keeping an eye out for an increase in social unrest.