Karl Jaspers said that he considered sporting events to be an outake valve for the modern masses to blow off the excess steam unavoidably accumulated by each individual living in a society governed by normatives that prevent acts in accordance to passions of strong emotions such as hatred or violent impulses. One can easily follow his argument to see how the racist slurs, war chants and police-observed brawls that happen on stadiums could be a controlled valve that enable the spectator to fulfill his more primitive passions and return to another week of repressing them as a cog in the civilized society.
However, perhaps this far-sighted man only developed such a theory because he lived in a time when riots and protests were met with deadly force. A riot met with deadly force is far from our today's definitions of rioting. Such an instance where the oppressive mechanisms of the power structures enter an armed conflict with organized citizens is more of a revolution than a riot. It is a political and a strategic act with clear purpose and a risk of death or other serious consequences such as imprisonment. Characterizing it as a valve to blow off steam would be beyond cynical.
Today's riots, on the other hand, are not the revolutionary charges of the past century. Today's riots have more in common with controlled violent outburst on English or Balkan soccer fields. They are announced in advance (allowing the police and traffic regulations to accommodate for them), they are surprisingly well organized and televised live from numerous on-sight cameras by journalists that often outnumber the participants. It is as if the leftists, usually philosophically opposed to the sporting lifestyle or just unwilling to associate themselves with the nationalist banner-waving crowds on European soccer fields, have found their own national sport for blowing off steam.
There are many caricatures circling the internet about the "one percent" who are shown as degenerate rich pigs (an image the commie side of me much approves of) surrounded by an army battalion and guarded by a cordon of riot police. Now, this image would imply that overpowering a riot police cordon in a street riot would somehow hurt the power structure and personally affect the "one percent" in economic power. While the caricature is a nice piece of art- it is difficult to find any cause and effect chain that can prove its symbolic assertions. So where are these artistic archetypes coming from?
This picture would be quite an accurate representation had it been made two thousand years ago in, say, Persia or some Greek city-state under tyrannical rule. The oldest known method of saving excess resources is to use them to build a home which can be passed down to one's offspring and so the tyrants of the past have built palaces and these palaces were guarded by elite guards. Instances of this ancient despotic mode of governing still exist in some "banana republics" today. In such a society the only thing that stands between the subjects and their ruler's wealth truly is a palace wall and a "cordon" of palace guards. Still, applying this ancient political archetype to our modern society is poetic rather than political.
What has become the purpose of today's riots? It would be easier to observe a more common phenomenon than riots- protests. What have modern protests become? Relying, again, on Jaspers who asserted that a man in the modern society is reduced to a number checked out in a head count (such as voting), one can observe protests as a head count. The media certainly devote much attention to the number of protestors involved in each rally, this information is presented to the audiences almost before the information about the protestors' demands (usually quite implied and procedural, such as the Labor Day workers' marches or gay prides). There is always conflict between the head count done by police or government authorities (putting at 10 000, for example) and protest organizers (putting it at 32 000 for the same event) which serves to prove that the head count is the main preoccupation of both parties involved. In this way, taking part in a protest has become comparable to judges who want to make statements exempting their opinions from the verdict- even though they were overruled by the court.
There are, however, much more efficient ways to conduct head counts than to line people up in the street (voting is, of course, the most efficient one). "Cyber activism", for example- changing one's profile picture to exclaim they disagree with some upcoming legislation, joining social media groups or signing online petitions is, for today's inactive generation of internet dwellers, becoming a much more favorable prospect than going outside and holding up banners. And the media outlets (which also find surfing social media much easier than rushing to protest sites) are starting to devote equal attention to cyber activism.
So if head counts are not the true purpose of protests, what is? This purpose is quite institutionalized in various political, apolitical, anti-political, non-government or anti-government organizations and their need for self-preservation and self-replication. What is a syndicate supposed to do if they don't organize strikes and marches- that's the question people would be asking if these manifestations stopped. Thus protests can be seen as institutionalized- a drill conducted by a peace-time army that is never going to see war- a purpose in itself.
Policemen compliment the protesters for their good behavior, the government (against whom the protest is being held) hands out free water bottles and organizes info-booths for the protesters to get information. Traffic is redirected and a free space is established for citizens to voice their concerns or be counted in head counts- whichever way one chooses to look at it. All this organization and self-replication makes protesters reminiscent of a bureaucracized institution of the state which provides citizens with means and space to fulfill their needs in a way that is safe and a compromise for everyone- not much different from an academic institution or a motor vehicles bureau.
And while activism is, in its roots, a civil bourgeois phenomenon that can and will survive this institutionalization that its undergoing in the modern world- rioting is not. Open institutionalization of riots would be impossible, but that does not mean that on a social scale rather than the political one this has already happened. Because, in essence, riots are not all that different from protests described in the previous paragraph. The very name "riot police" implies that riots have become a sort of an institution in the modern world for which a proper (armed) bureaucracy was designed. As they did in Jaspers' time, the power structures could probably institute repressive legal or even deadly authoritarian measures against rioters but they refrain from doing so and stick to tear gas and reprimands rather than tanks and life-sentences for dissidents.
This is because the nature of today's power structures isn't confrontation but assimilation. Riots make people believe that change is possible in the same way that football games make them believe their country is great. In the end, of course, it is all just political theater: whether its eleven men shooting a ball or eleven men throwing rocks at riot police- these acts are theatrical and their purpose is contained either in the performances themselves or in the emotional effects they have on the audience (catharsis). They are not means for achieving any political or historical goal.
Finally, if organized movements of the masses against the power structures truly were the driving force behind most of past few centuries' famous and infamous leaps of history (from the French revolution to the rise of Hitler and the fall of eastern European socialisms) then today's colonization of movements in the masses by the power structures presents the prospect of a true end of history called upon by many ideologues of the globalist age. It is a dialectic synthesis between the thesis (the power structures) and the anti-thesis (the dissident structures), a reverse revolution. Instead of first overthrowing a tyrannical government to establish a new tyrannical government as the old revolutionaries did, today's more far-sighted revolutionaries just skipped both steps and capitulated to the present tyrannical government.
In such a world where riots are scheduled to begin at 12 AM and riot fences are put up for the sole purpose of being shaken and rattled by the protesters behind them one could even draw a very far-fetched Orwellian thread and imagine a future world where even terrorism (questionably the only true form of opposition uncolonized by the position) becomes institutionalized. Where terrorist attacks are scheduled in advance and targeted buildings are cleared from occupants to avoid casualties while policemen guard the site and firefighters arrive to be on standby. A scheduled terrorist act paid for by non-government extremist organizations and executed in agreement with the government and with the sole purpose of "venting steam" of the extremist citizens and convincing everyone else that change is possible.
A remote controlled plane crashes into a cleared out skyscraper and the organization responsible, avoiding cuss words and racial slurs, makes a HDTV statement for the evening news. Political analysts comment on their demands in a special show afterwards, concluding they are a bit far-fetched. Absurd, to an equal degree of absurdity as today's radical activism.
