UPDATE 2: George Cicariello-Maher, a participant in the protests in response to the killing of Oscar Grant by BART police in Oakland in 2009, examines the complex sociology of riots such as those that convulsed London:

Essential to the imagery of the irrational mob is the insistence that the bulk of the destruction is centered on working-class communities, and here the logic is fundamentally colonial. The poor and the Blacks can’t be trusted: look what they do to their own. Incapable of governing themselves, they must be taught civilization, by blows if necessary. Here again Oakland resonates, as after the riots there a solitary African braid shop, one of many whose windows were smashed, became the media symbol of the irrationality of rioters hell-bent on destruction and nothing more. It is worth noting that the poor rarely own anything at all, even in their own communities.

To break this narrative, we must read the actions of the rebels as well as listening to their words. While working-class communities have indeed suffered damage (we should note that working-class communities always bear the brunt of upheaval), there has been less talk of more overtly political targeting: police stations burned to the ground, criminal courts windows smashed by those who had passed through them, and the tacitly political nature of youth streaming into neighboring areas to target luxury and chain stores. On just the first night, rioters in Tottenham Hale targeted Boots, JD Sports, O2, Currys, Argos, Orange, PC World and Comet, whereas some in nearby Wood Green ransacking the hulking HMV and H&M before bartering leisurely with their newly acquired possessions.

This tendency was seemingly lost on analysts at The Guardian, who were left scratching their heads when the riot locations did not correspond directly to the areas with the highest poverty. And it’s not just the lefty news outlets that let such details slip: Danny Kruger, ex-adviser to David Cameron observed that: The districts that took the brunt of the rioting on Monday night were not sink estates. Enfield, Ealing, Croydon, Clapham... these places have Tory MPs, for goodness’ sake. A mob attacked the Ledbury, the best restaurant in Notting Hill.

While refusing to denounce the rebellions, socialist thinker Alex Callinicos nevertheless suggests that such looting is a form of do-it-yourself consumerism… reflecting the intensive commodification of desires in the neoliberal era. This view misses the far more complex role of the commodity during a riot, which was as evident in Oakland as in Venezuela: not only is the looting of luxury consumer items far more complex than Callinicos suggests, but the argument of looting as consumerism would have a hard time explaining both the destruction of luxuries and appropriation of necessities that often ensues.

Referencing the attention to police misconduct engendered by the riots in Tottenham, Cicariello-Maher observes:

This isn’t the only time riots have worked, either: in 2009 Oakland, it was riots and only riots that led to the arrest, prosecution, and conviction of BART police officer Johannes Mehserle for the death of Oscar Grant.

UPDATE 1: lenin explains Starkey within the context of the racist right in the UK:

But this raises the question of what Starkey was trying to do. Clearly, he earnestly expressed his own views as a High Tory historian with a monarchist, nationalist bent. Yet, he evidently went farther than the political establishment, including the mainstream right, is prepared to go at the moment, and may well have gambled with his future television career. In fact, there would be a strong case for his being arrested and charged with incitement to racial hatred. There are two answers that make sense. The first is that is that the entire aggressively offensive performance was a calculated attempt to injure and smear the targets of its racialised invective. It was malice. And it was intended that racists should enjoy this degradation, uttered with relish as it was. The second is that the presentation, in its deliberately excessive way, invited the disgust and disorientation of the audience, such that, amid a generalised moral panic, he would recalibrate the scales of what is publicly acceptable in a radical way. The pathfinders of the racist right often seek the "chorus of execration", as Powell put it, revelling in the temporary ex-communication, enjoying the ambiguous status of the heretic and the prophetic. This is both because they expect to be vindicated, and because they can enjoy the spectacle of their execrators making use of the space of relative 'respectability' that their provocation has created.

INITIAL POST:

Why did British youth loot their neighborhoods after the killing of Mark Duggan? British historian David Sharkey has the answer. British society has been degraded by blacks and black culture, inducing whites to talk like illiterates and steal whatever strikes their fancy. Contrary to BBC claims to the contrary, the interviewer, Emily Maithis, allowed him to elaborate on his theories of racial contamination without criticism. Other participants in the panel discussion, Dreda Say Mitchell and Owen Jones, did challenge Sharkey, but in remarkably understated fashion. Personally, I think that they should have just walked out.

Such gentle inquiry was in marked contrast to how another BBC interviewer, Fiona Armstrong, treated Darcus Howe when he sought to explain the social conditions associated with the riots, going so far as to assert he had participated in a riot himself:

It was so bad that the BBC was forced to issue an apology. Expect a more and more blatant recourse to racism and xenophobia to mask the sub-proletarianization of Europe as suggested by these BBC interviews.

Labels: Dubstep Rebellion, Europe, Germany, Mainstream Media, Racism, United Kingdom

UPDATE 4: According to historian David Starkey, the riots have confirmed the prophecy of Enoch Powell as the whites have become black. Of course, the BBC allowed him to express his racist perspective about blacks and black culture unchallenged by the moderator, in marked contrast to the treatment of Darcus Howe when he attempted to explain the social context of the riots.

UPDATE 3: More, from Peter Oborne:

A great deal has been made over the past few days of the greed of the rioters for consumer goods, not least by Rotherham MP Denis MacShane who accurately remarked, What the looters wanted was for a few minutes to enter the world of Sloane Street consumption. This from a man who notoriously claimed £5,900 for eight laptops. Of course, as an MP he obtained these laptops legally through his expenses.

Yesterday, the veteran Labour MP Gerald Kaufman asked the Prime Minister to consider how these rioters can be reclaimed by society. Yes, this is indeed the same Gerald Kaufman who submitted a claim for three months’ expenses totalling £14,301.60, which included £8,865 for a Bang & Olufsen television.

Or take the Salford MP Hazel Blears, who has been loudly calling for draconian action against the looters. I find it very hard to make any kind of ethical distinction between Blears’s expense cheating and tax avoidance, and the straight robbery carried out by the looters.

What the looters wanted was for a few minutes to enter the world of Sloane Street consumption. Yes, this is why it is difficult to ascribe a leftist social ethos to many of the rioters. Instead, they participated in a populist embrace of the values by which they have been governed for decades. They did, however, collectively organize themselves in ways common among anti-authoritarians. Perhaps, this is a seed that can germinate into a rejection of the hierarchical world of commodity consumption that they sought to enter, however fleetingly, in the last few days.

UPDATE 2 Novelist Hari Kunzru gets it:

In a society that has abandoned or devalued most forms of mutual assistance in favour of a solipsistic entrepreneurialism, it's hardly surprising that, faced with the end of the good times, people help themselves. Fear and greed are our ruling passions. That's true of the kids smashing shop windows to steal trainers. It's also true of the MPs fiddling their expenses, the police officers taking backhanders, the journalists breaking into phones. Why wouldn't they? Why wouldn't any of us? The example has been set by our new masters, the one per cent for whom and by whom we're governed. The ability of powerful actors in the financial markets to socialise risk while privatising profit appears, to the financial peasantry, indistinguishable from organised crime. No reason for the rest of us to stand on ceremony.

Kunzu hits the nail on the head when he highlights the importance of the devaluation of mutual assistance. If the English unrest is to have any possibility of developing into a rejection of the existing social order, the rehabilitation of mutual assistance is a necessary precondition.

UPDATE 1: Oops, the Internal Police Complaints Commission make a mistake:

The police watchdog investigating the death of Mark Duggan, whose shooting by police sparked the first bout of rioting in London on Saturday, has said it may have inadvertently misled journalists into believing the Tottenham man had fired at police.

Responding to inquiries from the Guardian, the Independent Police Complaints Commission said in a statement: it seems possible that we may have verbally led journalists to believe that shots were exchanged.

Someone over at Lenin's Tomb described this process as lie immediately, recant at leisure, as manifested in other notorious episodes such as the killings of De Menezes and Tomlimson.

INITIAL POST: Prime Minister David Cameron rambled on and on about responsibility in relation to the London riots:

The prime minister revived his pre-election concerns about a broken society as he said that one of the main lessons from the riots was that too many children grew up not knowing the differences between right and wrong.

This is not about poverty, it's about culture. A culture that glorifies violence, shows disrespect to authority, and says everything about rights but nothing about responsibilities. In too many cases the parents of these children – if they are still around – don't care where their children are or who they are with, let alone what they are doing. The potential consequences of neglect and immorality on this scale have been clear for too long, without enough action being taken.

The fact that many children ended up in gangs would be the subject of renewed ministerial interest. The prime minister said: At the heart of all the violence sits the issue of the street gangs. Territorial, hierarchical and incredibly violent, they are mostly composed of young boys, mainly from dysfunctional homes. They earn money through crime, particularly drugs, and are bound together by an imposed loyalty to an authoritarian gang leader. They have blighted life on their estates with gang-on-gang murders and unprovoked attacks on innocent bystanders.

Much of the left response will probably be about the cause of the conditions condemned by Cameron, leaving aside the question as to whether he has exaggerated them. But there is another issue here that deserves more attention. For example, consider this statement: A culture that glorifies violence, shows disrespect to authority, and says everything about rights but nothing about responsibilities. And who are some of the avatars of this culture? Let's identify them.

Former Prime Minister Tony Blair, former President George Bush, President Barack Obama and, yes, Prime Minister David Cameron, not to mention French President Nicolas Sarkozy and Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, among others. All of them have perpetually emphasized violence as a means of achieving their objectives, regardless of any legal, institutional or international impediments. Bush and Blair are, of course, notorious for their invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, wrapped in the cloak of human rights. Neither acknowledged any responsibility for the death and destruction that they inflicted upon Iraq and Afghanistan, except as a profit making opportunity for US and UK corporations supposedly involved in rebuilding the country.

Meanwhile, Obama has expanded US military operations in Afghanistan and Pakistan, participated in airstrikes in Libya, and relied upon covert operations in Yemen. Sarkozy and Cameron have played leading roles in the Libyan debacle. As for Netanyahu, do will really need to chronicle his brutalities in the occupied territories? Barely a week passed when one of these leaders did not either engage in military attacks upon other countries or threaten them. In making these remarks, Cameron indicted himself as a cause of the riots.

Leaders like Bush, Blair, Cameron, Sarkozy and Obama have sent a clear message to young people: violence works. Or, to put it differently, might makes right, a message that has been most effectively reinforced by the conduct of the police in their neighborhoods. So, when the young people of north and south London discovered that the police could not prevent them from looting and burning businesses, they went for it. Just like Bush and Blair went for it in the fall of 2001 and the spring of 2003. A culture of imperialist state violence gave birth to a culture of collective violence against property. It remains to be seen whether this imperfect collective culture, a form of contemporary nihilism, is transitory, one that can be exploited by capital, as discussed yesterday, or one that has the potential to evolve into a challenge against the global capitalist order.

Labels: Barack Obama, Dubstep Rebellion, Europe, Neoliberalism, Political Violence, Tony Blair, United Kingdom

UPDATE 2: A glimpse of the variegated participants in the riots:

And as multi-ethnic areas from London to Birmingham, Liverpool and Bristol burned, a myth was being dispelled: that so-called black youths are largely behind such violence.

In Tottenham on Saturday many of those who gathered at the police station to protest against the shooting of Mark Duggan were, like him, black. But others were Asian and white.

By the following day, as the looting spread to other north London suburbs, there appeared to have been a slight shift in the demographic, which started to look younger. In Enfield most of those who gathered in the town centre were white. The youngest looked about 10-years-old.

Those taking part in the battles in Hackney's Pembury estate on Monday included many women. Teenage girls helped carry debris to form the burning barricades or made piles of rocks.

One, with a yellow scarf across her face, was seemingly at the forefront. She helped set a motorbike alight, walking away with her hands aloft. Other women shouted instructions from the windows of nearby flats and houses.

Croydon is burning down, shouted one woman who looked about 40, from her flat above a shop. Another warned the crowd when police were spotted nearby.

UPDATE 1: An anarchist group, the North London Solidarity Federation, has issued a statement about the riots:

Over the last few days, riots have caused significant damage to parts of London, to shop-fronts, homes and cars. On the left, we hear the ever-present cry that poverty has caused this. On the right, that gangsters and anti-social elements are taking advantage of tragedy. Both are true. The looting and riots seen over the past number of days are a complex phenomenon and contain many currents.

It is no accident that the riots are happening now, as the support nets for Britain's disenfranchised are dragged away and people are left to fall into the abyss, beaten as they fall by the batons of the Metropolitan Police. But there should be no excuses for the burning of homes, the terrorising of working people. Whoever did such things has no cause for support.

The fury of the estates is what it is, ugly and uncontrolled. But not unpredictable. Britain has hidden away its social problems for decades, corralled them with a brutal picket of armed men. Growing up in the estates often means never leaving them, unless it's in the back of a police van. In the 1980s, these same problems led to Toxteth. In the '90s, contributed to the Poll Tax riots. And now we have them again - because the problems are not only still there, they're getting worse.

Police harassment and brutality are part of everyday life in estates all around the UK. Barely-liveable benefits systems have decayed and been withdrawn. In Hackney, the street-level support workers who came from the estates and knew the kids, could work with them in their troubles have been told they will no longer be paid. Rent is rising and state-sponsored jobs which used to bring money into the area are being cut back in the name of a shift to unpaid big society roles. People who always had very little now have nothing. Nothing to lose.

And the media's own role in all of should not be discounted. For all the talk of the peaceful protest that preceded events in Tottenham, the media wouldn't have touched the story if all that happened was a vigil outside a police station. Police violence and protests against it happen all the time. It's only when the other side responds with violence (on legitimate targets or not) that the media feels the need to give it any sort of coverage.

So there should be no shock that people living lives of poverty and violence have at last gone to war. It should be no shock that people are looting plasma screen TVs that will pay for a couple of months' rent and leaving books they can't sell on the shelves. For many, this is the only form of economic redistribution they will see in the coming years as they continue a fruitless search for jobs.

Much has been made of the fact that the rioters were attacking their own communities. But riots don't occur within a social vacuum. Riots in the eighties tended to be directed in a more targeted way; avoiding innocents and focusing on targets more representative of class and race oppression: police, police stations, and shops. What's happened since the eighties? Consecutive governments have gone to great lengths to destroy any sort of notion of working class solidarity and identity. Is it any surprise, then, that these rioters turn on other members of our class?

The Solidarity Federation is based in resistance through workplace struggle. We are not involved in the looting and unlike the knee-jerk right or even the sympathetic-but-condemnatory commentators from the left, we will not condemn or condone those we don't know for taking back some of the wealth they have been denied all their lives.

But as revolutionaries, we cannot condone attacks on working people, on the innocent. Burning out shops with homes above them, people's transport to work, muggings and the like are an attack on our own and should be resisted as strongly as any other measure from government austerity politics, to price-gouging landlords, to bosses intent on stealing our labour. Tonight and for as long as it takes, people should band together to defend themselves when such violence threatens homes and communities.

We believe that the legitimate anger of the rioters can be far more powerful if it is directed in a collective, democratic way and seeks not to victimise other workers, but to create a world free of the exploitation and inequality inherent to capitalism.

INITIAL POST: The Independent Police Complaints Commission determines that Mark Duggan, the man whose death at the hands of the police ignited the London riots, did not fire upon the officers:

Mark Duggan, whose shooting by police sparked London's riots, did not fire a shot at police officers before they killed him, the Independent Police Complaints Commission said on Tuesday.

Releasing the initial findings of ballistics tests, the police watchdog said a CO19 firearms officer fired two bullets, and that a bullet that lodged in a police radio was consistent with being fired from a police gun.

One theory, not confirmed by the IPCC, is that the bullet became lodged in the radio from a ricochet or after passing through Duggan.

Duggan, 29, was killed last Thursday in Tottenham, north London, after armed officers stopped the minicab in which he was travelling.

The IPCC said Duggan was carrying a loaded gun, but it had no evidence that the weapon had been fired. It said tests were continuing.

The officer who fired the fatal shots has been removed from firearms duties, which is standard procedure, pending the IPCC investigation.

Officers from the Met's Operation Trident and Special Crime Directorate 11, accompanied by officers from CO19, the Met's specialist firearms command, stopped the silver Toyota Estima minicab in Ferry Lane, close to Tottenham Hale tube station, to arrest Duggan.

He was killed by a single gunshot wound to the chest, and received a second gunshot wound to his right bicep. He was pronounced dead at the scene at 6.41pm.

Would this information have been released in the absence of the riots? One wonders. I do know that out here in California, in Oakland in January of 2009, the Alameda County District Attorney's Office displayed no interest in prosecuting BART police officer Johannes Mehserle for the killing of Oscar Grant, until after the riots in downtown Oakland.

Laurie Penny also has an interesting insight about this:

The people who do will be waking up this week in the sure and certain knowledge that after decades of being ignored and marginalised and harassed by the police, after months of seeing any conceivable hope of a better future confiscated, they are finally on the news. In one NBC report, a young man in Tottenham was asked if rioting really achieved anything:

Yes, said the young man. You wouldn't be talking to me now if we didn't riot, would you?

Two months ago we marched to Scotland Yard, more than 2,000 of us, all blacks, and it was peaceful and calm and you know what? Not a word in the press. Last night a bit of rioting and looting and look around you.

Eavesdropping from among the onlookers, I looked around. A dozen TV crews and newspaper reporters interviewing the young men everywhere.

There are communities all over the country that nobody paid attention to unless there had recently been a riot or a murdered child. Well, they’re paying attention now.

Penny touches upon an important subject here, the inability to bring about any progressive or radical change through socially acceptable political activity. Elections? Please. Protest marches? Largely ignored as in the instance described by the man in Tottenham. Civil disobedience and direct action? They have either been reduced to a form of street theatre, or, alternatively, when effective methods have been used, they have thereafter been criminalized and broken up by the police through preemptive surveillance, raids, and, once initiated, mass arrests.

Penny hints at the real question, which will go unanswered by the media: what is the alternative to riotous violence for the young people of the lower middle classes and the lower classes of Britain? And, the answer is, of course, none. Antonovich succinctly addresses the subject in a comment over at Lenin's Tomb:

One can tut tut about the efficacy of the riot, but really its one of the few forms of fighting back left to people in the face of one of the most serious ruling class assaults in decades and in the absence of any meaningful union action, reformist party or effective revolutionary party.

In the short term, the riots are likely to reinforce the power of capital, and this is probably one of the reasons for the ambivalence on the left towards them (see, for example, the comments on both Penny's and lenin's blog). The government is likely to increase spending on the police, while further empowering officers in regard to their ability to arbitrarily detain, arrest and even inflict violence upon people. It may even distribute some crumbs in the form of social assistance, which can be conveniently rationalized as an anti-recesssionary measure. But not so much as to repudiate the neoliberal trend of leaving the people of these communities at the mercy of the market and intensified surveillance.

Meanwhile, the long term is less clear. My educated guess is that anarchists see hope in the explosion of spontaneous anger over the killing of Duggan and the treatment of people in lower income communities, as it presents the possibility of the emergence of a collective resistance to the police, and, ultimately, capitalism. Even some Leninists appear to believe that some resistance, however turbulent, is better than none, although they seem to find the lack of any political connection to the participants in the riots, as noted by Antonovich, unnerving. In London and elsewhere, the riots have exposed the class separation, and the lack of understanding that goes along with it, between the residents of the affected neighborhoods and their allies on the left, a separation given a powerful emotional expression by Penny.

Accordingly, while the organizational efforts of the rioters have been impressive, outflanking the police in many instances, the ideological orientation is less so. As mentioned here yesterday, the looting of stores for goods in order to sell them is not a leftist act, rather, it is a type of conversion of goods for profit that has long been associated with capitalism. Similarly, the destruction of buildings used by corporate retailers and local merchants can facilitate the implementation of pre-existing gentrification schemes. Don't be surprised if Cameron, Clegg, and Boris Johnson, the mayor of London, announce a fund for rebuilding neighborhoods damaged by rioters, with the beneficiaries being large development groups. As in the US, residents of these neighborhoods will be dispersed, so as to reduce their ability to collectively organize themselves in the future. Riots can easily be incorporated into the narrative of disaster capitalism, and avoiding such outcomes is the challenge facing people in these communities.

Labels: Activism, Anarchism, Dubstep Rebellion, Marxism, Neoliberalism, Police, Political Violence, United Kingdom

UPDATE 4: Masked youths confronted the police in east London during the afternoon:

For three hours mayhem ruled in Hackney's Pembury Estate, the centre of the violence in east London. The police were there, but there was no doubt who set the law in the estate, comprised of local authority mansion-blocks of flats.

Masked youths – both men and women – helped carry debris, bins, sticks and motorbikes, laying them across the roads to form a flaming boundary to the estate.

The crowd in Hackney – numbering at least 300 – appeared larger than any from previous nights of rioting.

In one of the most shocking incidents, a police officer in a solitary parked vehicle was attacked shortly before 9pm.

His windscreen was entirely smashed as a young man scaled the roof and pounded down with a brick. Others attacked from the sides with sticks and bottles.

Trapped, and unable to see out, the officer accelerated through the crowd, and a hail of missiles.

UPDATE 3: The young take their revenge of the corporations that have so brazenly marketed to them?

On much of the footage of the widespread theft after the riots, looters can be seen brazenly taking the goods they want, some without taking the precaution of covering their face. In one video shot early on Sunday morning in Wood Green, people can be seen leaving H&M with a haul of goods, with others standing around JD Sports apparently waiting for their turn to take goods.

One north London resident, who wanted to be identified only as Tiel, described a conversation: I heard two girls arguing about which store to steal from next. 'Let's go Boots?' 'No, Body Shop.' 'Hit Body Shop after it's dead [meaning empty].' The girl came out of Boots nonchalantly, as if she'd done her weekly shop at 4:30am, he added. He described others, holding up clothes to themselves in the broken windows of H&M. They were just so blasé about what they were doing.

In Wood Green about 100 youths targeted shops, including electrical stores and clothes chains such as H&M. I've got loads of G-Star, said one teenager, emerging from a clothes shop. Other teenagers were seen with suitcases filled with stolen goods, and in the early hours of Sunday residential front gardens were used to sort and swap them.

If the elites can loot, why can't they? Is this what happens after the neoliberal expediency of transnational capital is exposed in the public square for all to see? There are accounts of kids as young as twelve years old involved in the looting of these stores.

UPDATE 2: Locations of confirmed riots in the United Kingdom.

UPDATE 1: lenin engages the ongoing riots and their social implications:

So, even if politicians are in denial, the rich aren't. You may well say, bollocks, they're not taking on the ruling class, they're just destroying their own nest, hurting working class people and small businesses. I can hear this, just as I can hear the sanctimony in its enunciation. The truth is that riots almost always hurt poor, working class people. There's no riot that embodies a pure struggle for justice, that is not also partly a self-inflicted wound. There is no riot without looting, without anti-social behaviour, without a mixture of bad motives and bad politics. That still doesn't mean that the riot doesn't have a certain political focus; that it doesn't have consequences for the ability of the ruling class to keep control; that the contest with the police is somehow taking place outside of its usual context of suspicion borne of institutional racism and brutality. The rioters here, whenever they've been asked, have made it more than abundantly clear what their motives are - most basically, repaying years of police mistreatment.

INITIAL POST: For the third day, there is widespread rioting in London, and reports that it has spread to the city of Birmingham. British youth, many of color, are no longer limiting themselves to non-violent protest and direct action, as they did in December 2010. Initially erupting in Tottenham, after the shooting death of Mark Duggan on Thursday, August 4th, the riots have spread throughout north London and Brixton. The police prevented Duggan's family from seeing his body for 36 hours, and forensics evidence has contradicted the initial police account that Duggan fired at them from a minicab.

As with the Los Angeles riots in 1992, the London ones have expanded into an all out assault upon the symbols of affluence and police power. Officers have been shocked at the level of violence directed against them, and cannot keep up with the mobility of the rioters. Meanwhile, looting is organized and widespread, reminiscent of a 1992 account about how people went into a leather goods store on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley after the Rodney King verdict and marked the items that they came back and seized a few hours later. It is tempting to address the rioting in sociological terms, as Alexandra Topping did in this eerily anticipatory article published on July 29th, but there is probably more to it than the social work calculus of austerity equals crime. Austerity is the issue, but in broader terms than examined by Topping.

In Europe, especially, France, the United Kingdom and Greece, as well as the United States, young people live, in most instances, in conditions of poverty, with less and less opportunity to escape it. Racial divisions become acute during times of austerity, with, for example, unemployment in the US markedly worse among young African Americans and Latinos. To be poor is bad enough, to be poor and black, poor and Latino or poor and African American and Latino is even worse. Austerity, and the accompanying concentration of wealth within elites, disproportionately concentrates poverty among people of color, whether in the banlieues of Paris or the northern estate towns of London. In Paris in 2005, the electrocution deaths of two teenagers of color chased by the police ignited the riots, while the shooting death of Duggan has done so in London.

Not surprisingly, people respond by ransacking local businesses that sell goods that they would otherwise struggle to purchase. Unable to find a place within the classless society promoted by figures as disperate as Blair, Cameron, Bush, Sarkozy and Obama, they seize what they can only purchase with great difficulty, if at all. Others, acting upon the neoliberal entrepreneurial ethos, loot stores and fence the goods, turning a nice profit on transactions with a zero investment cost. Lost in the condemnation of gangs, animals and thugs by the middle and upper class media is the fact that many rioters have actually internalized capitalist values. Like the great oligarchs, they don't hesitate to use violence to achieve their ends, and, also like the oligarchs, they expropriate the property of others.

In other words, the social nihilism of the elites has been embraced by some of their victims, to strikingly impressive effect. Furthermore, just as these elites have exploited new communications technologies to manipulate markets and financial transactions, the rioters have relied upon encrypted Twitter and Blackberry messages to organize themselves, select targets and evade the police, resulting in pathetic condemnations of these social networking platforms by the police. Possible ideological differences aside, anarchists no doubt appreciate the success of the decentralized communications methods of the rioters against the centralized CCTV network monitored by the police. Like those in the media, Scotland Yard public relations officers persist in claiming that gangs and thugs are responsible for the riots, but such perjorative terms have little meaning in a world where hundreds of people, many of whom do not know each other, can be organized for an attack upon a commercial district within a few hours. If it were merely a gang problem, the police could contain it, but it is the willingness of hundreds, and, probably, thousands of people, throughout London and Birmingham, to respond to such calls that makes the riots impossible to contain at this time.

For the left, the riots present a quandary. On the one hand, the rioters are from communities where many are victimized by police brutality and the austerity of neoliberal capitalism. There is a refreshing spontaneity to their actions, and they have shown a remarkable capacity for social organization on the fly. But, on the other hand, in the absence of additional information, it appears they have chosen their targets rather indiscriminately, with the result that many merchants of their own communities have been attacked, which stands in marked contrast to the calculated actions of people like the Greek anarchists, and possibly the youth of Lyon last fall, who have targeted transnational banks, luxury goods stores and surveillance firms. Accordingly, while many in their communities understand their sense of grievance, many are dismayed at the property destruction carried out by the rioters. Of course, there are personal and generational reasons for this, but it does point towards the urgency of developing a more coherent ideological motivation for the riots, beyond the mimicry of the powerful by the powerless (a subject masterfully examined by Fassbinder in many of his films), if they are to serve as the inception of an ongoing challenge to the neoliberal order.

Labels: Activism, Anarchism, Dubstep Rebellion, Europe, Neoliberalism, Police, Political Violence, Sub-Proletarianization of Europe, United Kingdom

NOTE: wikileaks can be found here

A fascinating on the scene report from the protests over the student fee increases in London by BBC reporter Paul Mason:

They marched to parliament square, got stopped, surged through police lines and trampled onto the grass that had been so painstakingly regrown after the eviction of the peace camp. And then they danced.

The man in charge of the sound system was from an eco-farm, he told me, and had been trying to play politically right on reggae; however a crowd in which the oldest person was maybe seventeen took over the crucial jack plug, inserted it into a Blackberry, (iPhones are out for this demographic) and pumped out the dubstep.

Young men, mainly black, grabbed each other around the head and formed a surging dance to the digital beat lit, as the light failed, by the distinctly analog light of a bench they had set on fire.

Any idea that you are dealing with Lacan-reading hipsters from Spitalfields on this demo is mistaken.

While a good half of the march was undergraduates from the most militant college occupations - UCL, SOAS, Leeds, Sussex - the really stunning phenomenon, politically, was the presence of youth: bainlieue-style youth from Croydon, Peckam, the council estates of Islington.

Having been very close to the front line of the fighting, on the protesters side, I would say that at its height - again - it broke the media stereotype of being organised by political groups: there was an anarchist black bloc contingent, there were the socialist left groups - but above all, again, I would say the main offensive actions taken to break through police lines were done by small groups of young men who dressed a lot more like the older brothers of the dubsteppers.

The fighting itself is still going on - I am seeing people break the windows of HM Revenue and Customs live on TV. At one point after 2pm there were just two lines of riot cops between the students and parliament and it was at this point, with nowhere to go, that people began to push forward and attack the police.

Despite that, those involved were a minority and it was fairly ritual involving placard sticks and the remains of the metal fence around Parliament Square, until people realised there was nowhere to break through *to* and changed direction.

I saw them swarm up Victoria Street, at first pushing back a line of mounted police and breaking through various attempts by riot police to form a cordon. But then in successive charges, both the mounted and the foot police charged back.

I saw heavy objects land among the police, amid a much larger volume of paint, fireworks and flashbangs. At one point the horses were unable to contain this and a policeman fell off his horse, being carried away on a stretcher by colleagues. Later the police - who were themselves trapped between two lines of protesters, lost control of their own rear and only contained the breakthrough by batoning people to the floor, including women. By the side of a pub in a nearby street there was a line if injured protesters being triaged by ambulance crews.

Personally, I really enjoyed the part where the kids showed up, pulled the plug on the reggae and started cranking out the dubstep. As much as I understand that there is a place for old protest standards, like We Shall Overcome here in the US, I can't tell you how many times I have gone to ralles and wished that someone would do the same sort of thing and start putting down some punk, noise or hip hop. Political assertiveness and cultural assertiveness are inextricably linked.

On a more serious note, this is another manifestation of what happened in Lyon during the recent French protests against cuts in pension benefits, radicalized young people lashing out against a hypocritical social order that will consign them to lives of poverty if they don't resist. As noted by Mason, they stand outside any generally recognized political grouping on the left, even the anarchists, and this is probably a good thing, because they need to organize themselves so as to speak in their own voice. Otherwise, they risk being compromised by those who would purport to speak on their behalf.

lenin has elaborated further on this phenomenon, and how it plays into law enforcement efforts to suppress protest against austerity:

We are probably witnessing a move to re-tool the state, the better to cope with civil disobedience and strikes. Police have deployed a strategy of provoking violent confrontations with small bands of protesters. By using pre-emptive kettling, by charging at protesters with mounted police, by staging baton charges, and by lashing out at peaceful protesters with almost lethal force, the police have set up physical confrontations. They have then attempted to use their overwhelming superiority of organisation and force to coerce protesters into retreating into preemptively kettled territory. This would galvanise a small minority who would physically seek to break out, but would be effectively held back. Thus intimidated and physically coerced, they would come to resent the minority isolated as professional troublemakers and wait meekly to go home in the late hours of a chill December evening, resolving never to attend a protest again. This strategy is based on the assumption that protests break down into a well meaning but duped and passive mass, and a nefarious, organised conspiracy of upstarts, and that the police can prise the two apart.

But it didn't actually go down like that. Most of those protesters who did end up in direct combat with the cops are, as Paul Mason points out, working class sixteen and seventeen year olds from Britain's banlieues. They are not the committed anarchists that the law and order mob are braying about, and they were not resented by other protesters. More worryingly for the police, when they did attempt to baton charge, they were often effectively resisted. Using whatever ad hoc instruments were at their disposal, large numbers of protesters physically out-manouevred police on numerous occasions. Sometimes, for example, they used the same crowd control barriers that were intended to pen them to push back ranks of baton-wielding, helmeted and shielded riot police. And when the police attacked people, they often fought back. They were not cowed, despite the physically imposing stature and superior weaponry of the cops, and despite the horrifying record of the Territorial Support Group. So, far from protesters blaming a small minority of troublemakers for the violence, they are almost unanimous in reporting that the police engineered the violence. And because the police didn't get it all their own way, the FT's headline today was: Police lose control of street protests.

No wonder the Tory/Liberal Democrat coalition wants to impose a cap on housing benefits for low income people that would drive many of them out of London and southern England in the coming years, despite the warnings of its own advisors. For them, the dubsteppers are an angry, abrasive lumpen class of people that should be relocated to places where they can be more easily monitored, places such as the more economically stagnant northern regions of the country.

Labels: Activism, Dubstep Rebellion, Neoliberalism, Police, Political Violence, Sub-Proletarianization of Europe, United Kingdom