A reply to Richard Seymour “ The word ‘austerity’ does not appear in Seymour’s piece; ‘region’ features only once, even though practically all the riots took place in areas hit hard by Cameron’s cutbacks, many of them counted among the poorest in Northen Europe. If a Korschian outlook can lapse into lazy apologism, there is also a species of anti-economism which risks obscuring the social terrain and thereby relinquishing the prospect of changing it. To understand the flammable situation at which the pyromaniac far right has taken aim, we need less mass psychology and more political economy . “In focussing on the ‘perplexing passions elicited by race and ethnicity’, for instance, Seymour neglects how economic factors underpin the peculiarly schizoid status of immigration in British public life. “Today’s neo-Powellism is an attempt to rhetorically manage and contain this contradiction at the heart of British financialization: an economy dependent on cheap labour for its meagre growth r...
“The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion (to which few members of other civilizations were converted) but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.” —Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilisation and the Remaking of the World Order, 1996, p. 51