Riot thoughts

Writing again about the riots of 2011 - this long response to a Facebook discussion got out of hand, so am posting it as a blog-ish thing.

I am prepared to go further than most in defending the riots, tho unfortunately even I am not yet able to declare them as revolutionary - not least cos of the manifest absence of a revolution. But the riots are NOT over - despite the various left attempts to either write them down (to use the language of the markets) or write them off. But the olympics aint the only event with a Legacy...

First we need to dispense with the rhetorical fantasy that working class communities were so cohesive and undivided before those pesky riots. What about considering the idea that the riots are what the beginnings of unity - or at least collective action against capital - look like in an already horrifically divided and repressively ruled working class? And what is unity, in the present config of capitalism? Could it be that post-riot 'division' is the symptom of a portion of workers subtracting their consent for eg state murder? Division is in fact necessary to break with the ideological unity presented on the working class's behalf - ie the 'we're all in it together' that the TUC et all roll out, the bogus calculus of sacrifices in exchange for... more sacrifices later when the feeble non-demands are rejected.

The riots represented an accurate recognition of the obdurate indifference of the political class, the emptiness of the political process, and was the most large scale collective refusal of the austerity which everywhere else workers are being cajoled and cudgeled into accepting ('growth' demands it). Not using political forms or terms is the whole point - ie that no one was trying to 'make a political point' or as the riot queen of Hackney bemoaned - they had 'no cause'. This in the year of protests without demands, but minus the insistence on idealist and symbolic action/process fetishism etc. The riots refused, or rather did not need to bother to try, to reproduce the idea of a nice reasonable working class capital can negotiate with (ie relentlessly fuck over).

To go further in the direction of the kind of genuinely radical THINKING that only working class activity such as the riots provoke (thus their enormous advantage over most leftie political practice in UK?) - what if the riots teach us that revolutionary tendencies today do not 'unify the working class' but 'Split the atomised'? Communist fission makes a lot more sense than the old programme of progressively papering over the constitutive (race, gender, sexuality, caste) cracks in pursuit of a redistribution of wealth and power which never comes. As Blaumachen wd probably concur, maximising our intolerance for all forms of oppression rather than trying to muster a unitary working class seems more realistic given that the riots epitomised working class indifference for affirming working class identity. That stuff is for Danny Boyle, actually existing workers have moved on.

Also - as for purely negative results of the riots: Remember how much people started to talk and discuss after the riots, the conversations on the street, in the shops, on the net? Compare that to the marches and demos. Which were really the source of repression (as in silencing and shutting down discussion and THINKING)? Were the protests not *already* repressed, in many very important senses? Given the greatest crisis in capitalism's history and the destruction of social reproduction in the UK wasn't there something repressed about the protest, repressive about the institutions regulating it? Weren't the riots the first sign that people would not indefinitely tolerate this repression and this onslaught from capital? And remember, we already did socialism, the long march toward a unified working class - and empirically it got us precisely HERE. Those who seek the abolition of labour rather than its perpetuation should consider the riots as much closer to successful than eg the unions' current pathetic complicity with austerity. Successful never did mean 'resulting in the universal happiness of the working class right now' - cf the 'successes' of socialism hitherto. Someone is always left out, gets their flat burned down or their country turned into a gulag. (Eric Hobsbawm, RIP).

The riots weren't all nice, there was a lot of damage much of it sustained by workers, but the same goes for all the activities of socialists recently - eg the failure of the anti-cuts movement is being paid for by all those now facing workfare, homelessness, wage cuts etc. People don't blame those workers who participated in the education and cuts struggles while demanding extraordinarily little (eg UCU - minimise pension cuts! Whoah - hardcore!) for bringing down even more repression and austerity. But those who blame the rioters for demoralising people and bringing down repression should apply the same judgement to themselves. Yeah, it was OUR fault for fighting back....  

In my 'community' there are plenty of people young and old, black and white, who found the riots heartening. Many of them describe the riots as the poor standing up for themselves at last. If you talk to really existing workers (in Hackney at least), you get a far more complex view of the riots. Perhaps those doing the Othering of workers here are the ones who insist rioters were just destructive of working class solidarity, murderously attacking other workers? But the point is there were many perspectives on the riots, and many forms of activity going on within them - not all good, but certainly not to be dismissed as a disaster for the working class. This complexity  in itself makes the riots more interesting and important than most other UK protests post-crisis. The form of the riots AS self-organised and as direct action (eg not only targeting consumption but also distribution outlets and police stations, affecting the entire reproductive process of the towns and cities where they occurred) is already more important to explore and discuss. But look how little has been written or researched on this compared to the education struggle! And consider Marx on the Silesian riots - 'the educator must be educated'. The left assumes they are in the know; i think the riots were a lesson the left have yet to pay attention to. The Guardian, LSE et al conspired to 'read' the riots into a displaced form of the kind of protest they find legible (a kind of begging for assistance), but not the least of the riots' success was in going BEYOND protest, and not being that kind of speech act. A show of strength and power, of collective possibility, by actual workers soon gets written off by the official representatives of the working class, perhaps because it threatens to show them up for the uselessness they are.