Well, the vengeance of the ruling class and its state continues. Heavy prison sentences are being dished out. Two men were charged with inciting disorder in Cheshire – they used Facebook to start a riot; no one turned up but they were still sent down for four years. Laughably, Cameron, the Prime Minister, is supplementing state repression by dreaming up measures to fix his ‘broken society’, the latest being to stop payments to parents on benefit if their children truant from school.
The governments displays its usual ‘ingenuity’ in its explanations for the events in early August. While Theresa May (the Home Secretary) now concedes that the riots were not caused by the activity of gangs, others in the government – Justice Minister Ken Clarke at the fore – are focussing on the rioters as ‘a feral underclass’ or members of the ‘criminal classes’. Clarke underpins his claim with statistics: “the hardcore of the rioters were, in fact, known criminals. Close to three-quarters of those aged 18 or over charged with riot offences already had a prior conviction.” And just how were those charged selected? One method involved the police examining photographs taken during the riots and comparing them with faces with those they knew and mug shots on record. Perhaps face recognition software too. Ergo, these are designated ‘hardcore’ and then by association the entire social outburst is characterised as criminal in its propaganda with a view to aiming at the population as a whole.
Sander’s questioning of my earlier observations made me look again at what I had written. I had thought that my view was clear, but evidently it was not. So I now affirm it explicitly: leaving aside a small minority, the participants in the rioting and looting were overwhelmingly strata of the working class. This was not the expression of an underclass as some of the bourgeoisie assert, nor of the lumpenproletariat that Marx described in very different historical circumstances. My remarks were not, however, intended to be interpreted as comment on social composition. To my mind there is no “advantage” in “saving the honour of the working class” by distancing it from the riots. On the contrary, that would be to disservice the class. We have to face the realities, good and ill, warts and all. That’s why an honest critique must not turn a blind eye to weaknesses and certainly not minimise the significance of activities that are profoundly contrary to the interests of the proletarian struggle.
Content and action cannot be analysed only at the level of social composition. Many of the participants in the August events are estranged from productive work and face long-term unemployment, and have little or no prospects in this society. In the current phase of capitalism’s development we might also call them the ‘disemployed’. These young people also face in their daily lives an increasingly brutal police force and it is little wonder that they exploded against the police in the way they did.
The looting is another matter and on this matter I would refer anyone reading this note on our website to refer to the debate with Blaumachen in Internationalist Perspective 55 – specifically the last few paragraphs in the response by Sander and MacIntosh. Looting can be part of a proletarian struggle, as Sander and MacIntosh point out: “Looting to distribute use-values is one thing; looting as an expression of mere rage is another.” The smash and grab activity here was not for social redistribution, nor was it a basis for expropriation; it was individualistic.
And what of the trashing of working class neighbourhoods, the torching of workers’ homes, the muggings of working class men and women? As far as I’m concerned violence within the class has to be criticised strongly, a criticism from within the class. For some commentators, such as on the Libcom thread about the UK riots, there’s good things and bad things about the riots and “the best thing to do against the bad aspects of the riots is pushing forward what was good in it.” Amplifying the looting to attenuate the arson? This is complacent at best.
There is a world of difference between the actions of crowds and collective action. The latter may well start in the former, but when action is collective it surely means there is some discussion going on, some organisational expression of struggle. There could be little realistic expectation in August of full-blown assemblies or councils but, however embryonic, these struggles need some forum where members of our class can discuss the issues they face. True, the conflicts with the police certainly generated a battlefield cohesion to some degree, but collective action isn’t just that. And collective action against stores? Apart from the sociological dimension what criteria can be used to argue that this looting and arson in the English events had a proletarian content? My previous remarks – some posed hopefully – were an open invitation for anyone to point to actual gatherings having taken place at which a collective will to act on a class terrain could be expressed; to date, so far as I am aware, no one has done it. So, in the absence of such an expression of struggle, I don’t see how we can talk about class activity.
Sander appeals for our critique to attack the distance between ourselves and the young rebels. Our critique should also attack the distance between them and the rest of the working class. If it doesn’t, and instead overlooks the damage that intra-class violence does to the social fabric of common proletarian interest, then it’s a price too high. It would be dreadful if another breakout was confronted by other strata having to organise to defend themselves; you can just imagine the glee in the state propaganda describing the police as guardians of the non-rioters, of ‘ordinary people’, as they put it. Such scenarios cry out for some means for organising on a class basis if only to fight the next wave of police aggression.
What legacy has been left? Certainly, no model for future collective action. What will really matter is the depth of consideration that all workers give in the coming months to what happened in August. And in the widest way we can, we have to emphasise that intra-class violence only benefits the bourgeoisie. We won’t hear all the discussions that go on in small groups, in homes, in social meetings, at the workplace, so it’s not possible to tell what will come out of the immediate period of quiescence until we see it emerge. .
Marlowe
11 September
