Anarchists respond to the London riots - Solidarity Federation
Rob Ray | 10.08.2011 11:44 | August Riots | Other Press | Policing
With media sources blaming “anarchy” for the unfolding violence in London and across England, the North London Solidarity Federation has released the following statement as a response from an anarchist organisation active in the capital.
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 Barely-liveable benefits systems have decayed and been withdrawn.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.
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.
Rob Ray
Homepage:
http://libcom.org/news/north-london-solfeds-response-london-riots-09082011
Comments
Hide the following 8 comments
sol fed to the right of darcus howe
10.08.2011 14:14
resister
there is nothing wrong with burning/sabotaging the transport network
10.08.2011 14:40
@
misguided and over-defensive
10.08.2011 14:51
Otherwise we are just doing the right-wing media's job for them!
"...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..."
You SHOULD condone it, you should CELEBRATE it, as long as they are looting corporate big businesses not corner shops! FFS!
.
this is a little reactive
10.08.2011 15:05
How about a solidarity network for those arrested?
And just because the news go on about people's homes being trashed and small shops being burnt out, well don't believe everything you see - they have a vested interest in hyping up these events and playing down the big businesses getting trashed.
If owners of corner shops that have been hit by rioters are clever, then can get back more from the insurance than they lost in the riots, and come out of this better off!
anon
the fetishisation of work
10.08.2011 15:54
anarchist
"anarchists respond"?
10.08.2011 19:37
anon
Same old same old.
11.08.2011 13:37
Rob
Rsponses to criticism
15.08.2011 08:05
...
without getting too aggro here you've completely missed the entire point of the piece, which was
1. To point out it isn't anarchists in charge and pretending (as the media has been trying) that a shadowy bunch of chaos-merchants are "coming in from outside" to cause trouble is bullshit.
2. To point out the reasons behind what's happening and push thinking about it into the territory of "this is understandable".
3. To be clear that anarchists don't support attacks on working class civilians. This may seem obvious to you, but many of the comments I've been seeing have expressed genuine surprise - because the normal thinking about anarchism is that it represents and endorses random violence.
Which I think is mostly down to your own preconceptions of what we're about. No-one in SolFed is panicking, no-one is condemning the rioters and no-one is trying to distance the organisation from class conflict.
...
we were trying to pick a line which bears in mind people's preconceptions about anarchism and doesn't play to them while also trying to dilute some of the reactionary bullshit which otherwise is dominating the entire spectrum from left to right - we're also trying to keep it relatively short.
At the moment most people are calling for strict crackdowns or even for the army to come in. We're mostly dealing with scared people looking for information, not with rational processes where people are going to read anarchist writings thoroughly and without prejudice. In such circumstances personally I think going on about the positives of the riots would have undermined the rest of the piece.
Basically it's a bit of a balancing act to try and inject that critical thinking given who we are and what we (openly) represent.
...
revol68 wrote:
As others have said, SolFed are also sneering in their portrayal of the lumpenproletariat, and saying that real political activity occurs in workplaces
JK responded:
I think you're reading far too much into it. There's a single reference to SolFed being "based in resistance through workplace struggle" (which isn't even that accurate fwiw), but there's also plenty of time spent arguing how riots can be targeted and class conscious and how these ones have been less so than in the 80s (fwiw i don't know if this is is true, wasn't PC Blakelock killed escorting firefighters to a shop fire in a residential block?), but nevertheless looting is "the only form of economic redistribution they will see in the coming years". Hardly sneering and hardly narrow workerism.
Steven. wrote:
I didn't spot that before - I thought it just said they didn't condemn it. I think we should definitely condone it - it is working class people taking what we desire from those who have exploited others.
JK responded:
while i'm inclined to agree, i assume the thinking behind this is to resist the establishment framing of the debate, which is obsessively demanding condemnation or condoning with no nuance allowed (e.g. see Darcus Howe being basically accused of rioting on the BBC because he wasn't surprised it had happened, or anyone with any explanation being dismissed as an apologist for home burning to be rounded up in a stadium). I think it's vital to resist that framing, since 'the riots' and even looting are not singular uniform phenomena but complex and contradictory, with class content alongside anti-social and anti-working class elements (which of course the press is focussing on, and probably aren't as widespread as we're lead to believe).
also there's the issue two people were trying to stay within a not clearly specified mandate, so they couldn't unilaterally take a position that wasn't agreed, and on which there's considerable debate. personally i think there's plenty of room for discussion over the looting from 'proles directly asserting their needs that should be supported' through to 'consumerism taken too seriously that shows the grip of individualist values on workers'. that's probably a thread worth starting as the dust settles and we get a better idea of what happened, but this wasn't attempting to be a nuanced reading of the jouissance of looting, but to get out a class struggle anarchist perspective on developing events while there was possibly a window to influence the debate (and of course practical efforts to organise things like the Deptford Assembly to pre-empt a reactionary backlash from people fearing for their homes etc).
...
And as an addition, SF actually brought out a second version for the protests afterwards which if you weren't on them you wouldn't have seen:
The Riots- Not just ‘’Mindless Violence’’
The fury of our estates is what it is, ugly and uncontrolled.
But we all knew these riots were on the cards. Britain has hidden away its social problems for decades, surrounded by a brutal picket of cops.
Benefits are being cut, social and advice centres closed, rent and unemployment is rising. People who have always had very little now have nothing, nothing to lose.
And even when the great and the good are put on notice, with the blatant police fix that is the Mark Duggan case, the media and politicians would have been as silent as ever if all that had happened was a vigil outside a police station.
It seems that it’s only when people fight back on the streets that the media feels the need to give it any sort of coverage — and then they only talk about the anti-socials, the people who’ll hurt anyone, never about the people who are just grabbing a bit of the wealth where they can because there’s never any chances otherwise.
There’s no talk about why the arsonists and muggers and gangs are how they are, or why the estates are they way THEY are, or what can be done about it not just today, but tomorrow and in years to come.
These problems have been here as long as most of us can remember. They led to riots in the ’80s and ’90s — and things are getting worse.
The anarchist view
There should be no shock that people living lives of poverty and violence have at last gone to war and that people are looting plasma TVs which will pay for a couple of months' rent.
For many, this is the only chance they’ll get for a bit of economic redistribution as jobs go and the rich grab everything.
Our entire society is based on worshipping wealth and stealing from the poor, if people choose to strike back and get some of the goods from Argos or Lidl, then we won’t condemn that.
But burning out shops with homes above them, muggings etc are an attack on our own and should be resisted because the end result is the same as when we let anyone else exploit and divide us — we all lose.
We say target the rich, the bosses and the politicians.
They didn’t care about Hackney or Lewisham yesterday and they won’t tomorrow.
The politicians have already been talking crackdown, they just want to sweep the problems under the carpet again and label this as just “mindless criminals.” The rich are calling for more guns to be put on the estates — they’d happily start a civil war with us in the middle.
Don’t let them get away with that!
We need to get together and start organising to make these people back down, to build a world where we run our society direct without bosses, landlords, poverty and police baton charges.
Kicking off is just kicking off. We need to go further. We need to organise and take back the world that has been stolen from us.
RR