The New Dark Age

10 August 2011 — New Left Project

Obviously this isn’t exhaustive, but here are a few things that have come up:

1. A group of community activists have called a demonstration for this Saturday: Give Our Kids a Future! A North London Unity Demonstration

Details: 1.00pm : Saturday, 13th August. Meet Gillett Square, Dalston and march to Tottenham Green

You can sign up at the Facebook page. Here’s the accompanying statement:

This march is called by The North London Assembly, a temporary assembly which saw 70 local community activists meet at the North London Community House on Tuesday 9th August to discuss our reaction to the riots of early August in Tottenham and Hackney.

It includes people from many Turkish and Kurdish community groups, including Day Mer and Gik Der, and also the Haringay and Hackney Alliances for Public Services who are all supporting this march.

We state that this is not us seeking to represent the community but it is our attempt to try to bring unity to the community in which we live. It is neither supporting nor condeming the events but seeking the most positive outcome from them.

This will be a positive and peaceful march with an Assembly at the end for people to express what they are thinking about recent events.

2. On Tuesday, North London Solidarity Federation released this response to the riots. This gives a sense of their position:

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.’

3. Compass have also released a statement, which focuses on our common humanity rather than on class identity:

…our first reaction to the frightening extent of looting and disorder that has swept our cities must be to reaffirm our common humanity. Those on the streets, in their houses, the police, the politicians, all of us should recognise that we share the same essential hopes of security, freedom, love and creativity. But we are separated by largely one thing, the accident of birth. As social mobility dwindles and the inequality gap widens, the brute luck of who our parents are dominates our lives. Some come to the debate from Eton via Tuscany, others have never left the streets that now burn. We go our separate ways but this common humanity inevitably keeps breaking through.

4. The Socialist Workers Party have also put out a statement. But more interesting is the analysis given by one of their leading members, Alex Callinicos. So far it seems it’s been posted only on Facebook, so here’s the whole thing:

The riots are essentially an elemental explosion by young deprived working-class people in the inner cities. The driving force was their hatred of the police, which acted as a lighting rod for all the different sources of their discontent. In its fundamentals, Chris Harman’s classic analysis of the 1981 riots applies to what has been happening these last few days. All the features that have been denounced were features of the 1980s riots, and indeed of the American ghetto risings of the 1960s and the LA rising of 1992.
But there are some differences. For example,

(i) The political alienation is greater than thirty years [ago] – partly thanks to New Labour, but also because of the decline of black nationalism and the hard Labour left, both lively and increasingly intertwined phenomena in the 1980s;
(ii) This doesn’t mean that the riots are depoliticized ‘criminality’, as idiots of all persuasions keep on repeating: I am sure that many of the rioters participated, as FE and 6th form college students, in the student protests last winter. This is reflected in the way in which the abolition of the Education Maintenance Allowance has been repeatedly cited as a grievance these past few days;
(iii) Looting as a form of do-it-yourself consumerism is a stronger feature than it was thirty years ago, reflecting the intensive commodification of desires in the neoliberal era: this doesn’t mean that the looters are automata driven by commodity fetishism, but their rebellion is inevitably shaped by the prevailing values in society;
(iv) More interesting is the impact of the changing economic geography of London: site of one of the top two global financial centres, London is of course marked by a flagrant polarization between rich and poor. But, because of how gentrification has developed, you have neighbourhoods – Clapham is a good example, but even my own Dalston these days – where rich and poor live cheek by jowl. The makes possible outrages like the one reported by a shocked Danny Kruger, ex-adviser to David Cameron: ‘A mob attacked the Ledbury, the best restaurant in Notting Hill.’ (http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/fac0b38e-c1d1-11e0-bc71-00144feabdc0.html#axzz1UZKq74AI) This co-existence of rich and poor was much less advanced in the early 1980s. Hence the element of class hatred you can feel in the scenes of broom-waving debs in Clapham and Ealing.

These riots are not conscious political movements. But they can only be understood by a political analysis that starts from the class antagonism that ever more deeply shapes all our lives. Any revolutionary left that plans to have a future must stand firm in the face of the moral panic being shouted up by the media and politicians and refuse to condemn the rioters – not because they are a new vanguard but because the responsibility for what happens lies with those who have allowed inequality, poverty, racism and police violence to fester and grow.

Alex Callinicos