by Colin Clarke
This article attempts to make a short and rough analysis of the riots. Writing the article from a distance of 11,000 miles makes it hard to get a real grip on the meaning of events. In the fullness of time, we will produce other accounts of the events.
The social and economic background to the riots
Riots almost only occur in societies that are in crisis. While there are always particular incidents that might set them off, it is the bigger picture of what is happening in society that gives us a clue to what is going on.
Britain, since the riots of 1981, has been on a downward curve, economically, politically and socially. Successive governments, Labour, Conservative and the current coalition, have made it a point of principle to attack the living standards of the working class, both directly and indirectly. The economic policies of the governments during the same period have seen a total embracing of the doctrines of neo-liberalism. Despite its relatively small role in GDP, the finance and banking sector has been held up as the key to Britain’s future success. Of course, it is only the people in these sectors who gain from this.
The deliberate destruction of manufacturing industry begun under Thatcher, the cutting of workers’ rights and the subsequent fall in union membership has led to a growth in low paid, temporary work. The idea of a job for life which was common even in the 1970s has long gone. The state sector which grew in terms of employment throughout the Blair/Brown years is now undergoing severe cuts under Cameron and Blair.
At the same time, the privatisation of state assets and the opening-up of what is left to private companies has not only led to a long-term fall in wages but has also resulted in major cuts in the quality and quantity of social provision. Both of these latter points can be seen in particular in the housing sector. The selling of council (state) houses to individuals has led at various times to bubbles in the housing market as well as a decline in council houses available to rent.
However, the neglect of the remaining council stock has led to whole estates being dumping grounds for those who have nowhere else to go, thus breaking down community spirit and social ties that had been built up over generations. This has, in turn, given rise to huge social problems in these areas as well as a growth in the quantity, though not the quality of rental properties elsewhere
All of the above, and many other factors, including the pushing of Multiculturalism as a state-sponsored ideology have created a fractured society that has no obvious shared or coherent values. From the same roots, an underclass has grown that has embraced a culture that idolises violence and crime for the sake of it.
As the Independent Working Class Association (IWCA) put it in an article in 2009, http://www.iwca.info/?p=10134:
… once a lumpen mentality is allowed to take root over a generation or more, a pattern is set seemingly for other socio/ political relationships too. In place of civic pride, community spirit, or basic empathy and solidarity (none of which have any place in their world) there is instead an over-developed sense of individual entitlement combined with a perverse pride in subverting a core socialist tenet: ‘you only take out exactly what you’ve put in’. It follows that outside of what affects them directly as individuals or maybe immediate family there is a malign indifference. After all what is society to them, or they to society? All told, the corrupting consequences of the no-work ethic appear to be numerous and hardwired.
At the same time that all this has happened, the ruling class and its hangers on are openly corrupt in a way that harks back to the Nineteenth Century. Look at, for example, the links between Rupert Murdoch, politicians and the police that have been revealed in the last month or so. Then there were the revelations about MPs fiddling their expenses a few years back. Less publicised but happening frequently over the last 30 years or so, has been the exposure of collusion between the police and criminal gangs, and especially those who are drug dealers.
The background to the riots is that Britain is an economically, politically and socially unstable country where there is a glaring class divide between the lives of the majority and those at the top. The student demonstrations at the end of last year showed the level of anger around and it was clear that a spark would set it alight.
The riots
As has been the case so often in the past in Britain, the riots were sparked off by the killing of a black man. Mark Duggan was shot dead by police in the back of a cab in Tottenham Hale. Initial claims by the police that shots had been fire at them turned out to be untrue. While he was carrying a loaded gun in a sock, he made no attempt to reach it and was killed by a shot to the chest. In short, it was a police execution. And as usual, they lied about the incident.
British police have a long history of killing people, both in the street and in custody in police stations. 333 in custody since 1998 and not a single police officer convicted. In short, the police continually get away with murder. It’s no wonder that things kicked off in such a spectacular way.
Two days later, a demonstration outside the local police station in Tottenham asking for answers as to why he was died became the start of the riots when a 16 year old girl was hit by police with shields. The riot immediately got out of the control of police. Shops and other buildings were burnt down. The nearby Tottenham Hale retail centre was attacked and looted and it spread around the whole area.
The initial period of the rioting showed the way that riots spread; incoherently and out of control. Crowds of people fired up by a chance to just show their anger and defiance of authority. The crowds grew in size and seemed to be from all parts of the community. There was even footage on the BBC of Hasidic Jews joining in the riots. Over the next few days, the riots began to spread, first to nearby areas and then to other parts of London. Then, other areas of the country took over.
What became clear early on was that while the initial riots took the pattern of riot first and then looting, very soon it was reversed to be looting first and only. Anecdotal reports from London suggest that by the second day, there were organised gangs travelling from one area to another, not to confront the police but to loot. This puts a different gloss on the events than the one pushed by some sections of the left that the riots are an uprising of the oppressed.
Interestingly, local rumour suggests that there was something more going on than just a spontaneous response to the death of Mark Duggan, who, incidentally, was a well known player in gang circles. A few days previous to Duggan’s murder, the police raided around 30 houses on the Pembury estate in nearby Islington and arrested a whole swathe of leading gang members. These arrests were part of the same operation that ended up killing Duggan.
The local view is that the riot was started by gang members as a warning to police about what would happen if the crackdown was continued. As someone said to me via email, ‘the police won’t be doing this the week before the Olympics start’. This, of course, doesn’t mean that the majority involved in the initial riot in Tottenham weren’t genuine in their actions; just that we should be conscious, if it is true, that the power of the gangs is something we should be worried about.
The nature of riots
Whilst, as I have argued, there are political, economic and social reasons behind why riots happen, riots themselves explode out of nowhere, triggered by a particular incident. Riots are by their very nature contradictory and incoherent. They are both political in one sense and apolitical in another. The anger that they encapsulate is against all authority but at the same time, because of their nature they are not able to articulate anything better. That is why they are so unpredictable. Riots produce a negative rage, which is capable of destroying everything in their path.
We have to be very careful about praising riots just because they are seen as fighting against the state. They happen at a juncture where society is sharply divided between classes but they can also foreshadow a future where things just get worse. Riots express the anger of individuals; revolutions express the anger of the whole working class. In the current situation, it is hard to envisage the class as a whole moving in a progressive way as a result of it.
In Tottenham, after Mark Duggan, the first victims of the riot were the people who lived above shops in the area that were burned out, as well as those who had their cars destroyed. While these people were just unlucky in living were they did, as the riots developed, more and more such incidents were reported. In the 1981 Toxteth riots, massive damage was done to the local area but by and large, incidents like the above didn’t happen. I remember walking through there on the second night of the riots and being seen just as part of the crowd. There was no menace in the air and people were in an almost celebratory mood.
Aside from the beginning in Tottenham, this doesn’t seem to be the case this time round. While I am not going to condemn people for looting goods that they couldn’t ordinarily afford, it’s difficult to see that there was anything more to much of the rioting than this. It is also clear that much of the working class has seen this as an outbreak of criminality, rather than something they should be involved in. The worrying aspect of this is that it seems to fit in with the analysis referred to above from the IWCA that the working class is split between those who work and a growing underclass that don’t and pursue a life of criminality.
The aftermath
It is no surprise, but no less sickening, to see the hypocrisy of the ruling class in condemning the riots and demanding the highest possible of sentences for those involved. Already, a family has been threatened with eviction because a son was arrested in the riots. The reaction will only get worse as the politicians and liberal commentators whip themselves up into a frenzy of indignation. At the end of the day, they are the ones who are culpable for the situation the country is in. As a friend said in a perceptive text, “They’ve created a sub strata of society for whom ‘The Wire’ is an inspiration rather than a nightmare.”
The working class, as a conscious class barely exists, though, in a faint way, the riots provide the beginnings of what can be done when we move together. As in New Zealand, the left has failed, is irrelevant and has no real connection with the working class. Working class organisation is essential for the class to move forward. Not perhaps the idea of a Leninist style vanguard party but instead a party that comes from the working class and is a part of it. Only then, will there be a possibility of a progressive future.
If this doesn’t happen, the future will make the present seem like the good days. While many on the left have written off the BNP, due to recent poor election results, they haven’t gone away and they still have a sizeable constituency. Their problems are essentially internal rather than external. In addition, the growth of gang culture throughout the country presents a direct threat to the working class.
Redline 
Great article, but the riots took place in ENGLAND not in ‘Britain’. Scotland and Wales experienced no ‘copycat’ rioting last week. These disturbances took place only in English towns and cities. Scotland and Wales are subject to similar political pressures, but the existence of devolved parliaments in the Celtic nations are a factor in terms of meeting to an certain extent the political deficit. Scotland and Wales have elected governments which, at least on paper, oppose the policies of ruling government at Westminster and which at least try to pursue a public spending programme and socially inclusive policies that the ConDem government rejects for England.
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Thanks for writing this. I’ve been keeping an eye on redline lately since I heard you were ex-IWCA and was hoping you might contribute some thoughts on these riots. A few incoherent thoughts from me:
“What became clear early on was that while the initial riots took the pattern of riot first and then looting, very soon it was reversed to be looting first and only. Anecdotal reports from London suggest that by the second day, there were organised gangs travelling from one area to another, not to confront the police but to loot. This puts a different gloss on the events than the one pushed by some sections of the left that the riots are an uprising of the oppressed.”
While there is little doubt that many quite anti-social elements have used these riots as an opportunity for personal gain tbh I this dismissal of the looting just doesn’t sit very well with me. This quote from the Situations on the Watts riots has been thrown around a lot over the last few days however the fact is the points it makes remain highly relevant:
“The Los Angeles rebellion was a rebellion against the commodity, against the world of the commodity in which worker-consumers are hierarchically subordinated to commodity standards. Like the young delinquents of all the advanced countries, but more radically because they are part of a class without a future, a sector of the proletariat unable to believe in any significant chance of integration or promotion, the Los Angeles blacks take modern capitalist propaganda, its publicity of abundance, literally. They want to possess now all the objects shown and abstractly accessible, because they want to use them. In this way they are challenging their exchange-value, the commodity reality which molds them and marshals them to its own ends, and which has preselected everything. Through theft and gift they rediscover a use that immediately refutes the oppressive rationality of the commodity, revealing its relations and even its production to be arbitrary and unnecessary. The looting of the Watts district was the most direct realization of the distorted principle: “To each according to their false needs” — needs determined and produced by the economic system which the very act of looting rejects.”
For all of their faults, I think the SI hits upon a pretty important point here. Looting like this is a contradiction because on the one hand it expresses the extent to which the values of capitalist society have become internalized, ‘consumerism’ and all that. Yet at the same time looting is itself a very practical rejection of the relations of private property. Not that I have any idea what that ultimately implies but the contradiction is there and worth considering.
Another point is that for many people nowadays looting is basically one of the only means of expropriating some amount of the social wealth. I mean either they’re unemployed or they might be working shitty, precarious jobs where the possibilities for organising (let alone striking) are just not there. Further over the last year we have seen in the UK and other part of Europe like Greece some very large and relatively militant anti-austerity movements. In all cases they have failed to turn the tide of austerity by forcing some kind of political solution to the problem of austerity. Given the context then, is it any wonder that plenty of people in the UK have just said fuck it and are seizing upon an opportunity get a little wealth back when the political groups, the trade unions and anti-austerity groups have totally failed to stop the coming austerity? I don’t think so. And to be honest I do think that any upswing in class struggle in the UK and also in NZ will probably involve a significant amount of looting since other methods of struggle have by and large failed to produce any real results as of late. That probably isn’t a good thing and I’m really not too sure what an appropriate response is other than to defend looters from inevitable state repression without glorifying or even condoning many of their actions.
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Comparisons of the riots in England and Watts actually serve to point up the difference between the two. In Watts you had a thoroughly ground-down oppressed community, black Americans, in a ghetto, rising up against years and years of suppression and police brutality. It was the first of a wave of urban rebellions in the States in the 1960s, and radical black organisations emerged in the course of those rebellions. 1965, when Watts occurred, was also still the era of Jim Crow – although the 1964 Civil Rights Act and, later in 1965, the Voting Rights Act, *legally* abolished Jim Crow wa snot yet dead.
Although California wasn’t part of the Jim Crow south, it did have a strong record of racism, despite its liberal veneer. A year after Watts, the Black Panther Party was founded in Oakland, California by Bobby Seale and Huey P. Newton.
So the whole Watts scenario is quite different from last week’s riots in England.
In fact, last week’s riots are also different from the 1981 riots in England as well. I was living in London during the 1981 riots and lived in Streatham, the next suburb south form Brixton. I used to be in Brixton quite a lot and was there on one of the evenings of the rioting. What was very noticeable throughout the 1981 riots was the selective targeting. Posh shops, for instance, were targeted while venues like the Ritzy Cinema, the middle of Brixton, were unotuched because the Ritzy was an arthouse cinema and one where various benefits for local campaigns and various causes were held: it was seen as part of the community and was left alone. People’s homes weren’t attacked either. The impression Ihad at the time was that this was also true of the other places those riots spread to – Moss Side (Manchester), Toxteth (Liverpool), St Paul’s (Bristol) and so on.
But last week’s riots seem to have involved fairly indiscriminate looting and burning.
Indeed, one of the issues raised is what would poltical activists in working class areas do when working class homes come under attack?
Join in, because the riots are some kind of carival of the oppressed? Sit back and pat the rioters and looters on the back, through being too scared to join in the carnival of the oppressed? Or organise workers’ self-defence against attacks on workers’ homes and property and on small businesses like corner dairies?
In areas where workers’ homes and property are under attack, the most progressive position may well be to organise local working class communities to defend themselves from both the rioters and the cops. And, of course, to oppose any clampdown by the state – as the institution which acts as guarantor of ruling class theft of wealth crearted by the working class, the capitalist state being self-righteous about looting and rioting is entirely hypocritical and sickening.
Phil
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” is it any wonder that plenty of people in the UK have just said fuck it and are seizing upon an opportunity get a little wealth back when the political groups, the trade unions and anti-austerity groups have totally failed to stop the coming austerity? “
Like you Olly, I have sympathy with the looters. The system has brutally deprived thousands of people to an extraordinary degree. I agree that the failure of the left and decline of unions are definitely a factor in the rise of impulsive individual behaviour. But these actions were not really those of “plenty of people”; in terms of population, the number of looters – and rioters- were relatively very few. That fact needs remembering when we try to discern the social weight of the looting.
“I do think that any upswing in class struggle in the UK and also in NZ will probably involve a significant amount of looting since other methods of struggle have by and large failed to produce any real results as of late.”
I would expect the contrary. Various individual adventures are sometimes described as “class war”, but I think that’s a misnomer. Sustained struggle by sections of a class demands solidarity and discipline to make any headway at all. Whenever there’s a big strike one of the first organizational things the participants do is take steps to protect their collective, by measures like banning booze on the picket line.
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Don:
“I would expect the contrary. Various individual adventures are sometimes described as “class war”, but I think that’s a misnomer. Sustained struggle by sections of a class demands solidarity and discipline to make any headway at all. Whenever there’s a big strike one of the first organizational things the participants do is take steps to protect their collective, by measures like banning booze on the picket line.”
I don’t agree that looting and rioting can necessarily be termed a mere ‘individual adventure’. Whatever its negatives may be, looting is very different from simple shoplifting (which I agree could be termed ‘individual adventure’), it requires a fairly large degree of social participation to occur at all. Chaotic, undisciplined and dangerous, sure. But I do not see how it is individual.
However I stand by my previous statement about the likelihood of looting during an upswing in class struggle in the future. I agree it is not a tactic which is sustainable or which is likely to win significant benefits for the class as a whole but that does not mean it isn’t part of a more generalized class conflict.
I say this because, at least for us westerners, the nature of capitalism has changed quite considerably since the onset of neoliberalism (I’m sure you’re well aware of all of this but it helps me to tease out my argument by restating it). The productive sector of the economy has to a large degree been moved offshore, much of the productive work in our current society involves the distribution of commodities now produced elsewhere. Further a good chunk of the working class which may have previously been employed in productive parts of the economy are now simply unemployed. For this section of the working class their experience of the alienation of capitalist social relations is generally at the point of distribution rather than production. As such it is likely that, should this group begin to attack class society, they will do so by simply taking things en masse; looting.
I don’t feel that the answer to this is necessarily to reject looting per se, to quote the man himself; ‘men [and women] create history, just not in conditions of their choosing’. The problem is how can this tendency be developed into something which actually presents a unified and coherent means of advancing the position of the working class? Should the unemployed and/or the precarious workforce just sit around and wait until the rest of the working class decides to strike and/or union activists try and organise them? I don’t think so.
I think it is possible to attack class society and advance the position of workers by attacking capitalism at the point of distribution. The self-reduction movement of the 1970s in Italy may be instructive here, where working class people would refuse to pay or refuse to pay the full amount for things like groceries, bus fairs, movies etc. they called it ‘proletarian shopping’. This was a movement which had the support of large segments of workers. It had to or otherwise it would only work through mere intimidation as is unfortunately the case with looting/rioting.
We (AWSM) have been discussing organising such a campaign, or at least some kind of regular demonstrations at supermarkets which calls on them to lower the prices of some basic necessities. I wonder what redline member’s thoughts are on this idea?
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Looting such as recently occurred in England is, like smash and grab raiding, a less furtive form of theft than shoplifting. Dead right, it is it is not a tactic which is sustainable or which is likely to win significant benefits for the class as a whole.
The effects of looting such as we’ve just seen are to further divide the working class, and allow hypocritcal politicians and the state forces to parade as defenders of poor people’s property.
Looting is a desperate dead end action carried out by deprived people with little to lose. It may be described as part of a more generalized class conflict., but that does not mean there’s anything progressive in it.
I don’t know anything about the Italian’s self-reduction movement, but I was politically active in the ’70’s and recall well that it was a time of various radical movements, when corporate culture had much less of a hold. There was one New Zealand consumer resistance tactic that made a stir for a little while; the housewives boycott movement. This spontaneous initiative called for a boycott of chocolate biscuits to make a general protest at food prices. Elements of the left tried to spread and emulate this without success. My conviction from experience is that workers have far more political and economic clout at the point of production.
While many food prices are exorbitant it should be noted that the current price of some basic necessities is extremely cheap. Like clothes from China.
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