Smiling faces, some beneath scarves and balaclavas. This is Hackney, London. Or this was Hackney last night. It is somewhere else tonight and somewhere else again in just a couple of hours. The smiles are because the streets have been taken and nobody is afraid of the police anymore.
Some people say the burning of a police car is not political, that the looting of a shop is egotistical and thuggish, that the smashing of windows is irresponsible. For those who say this is not political they have been living in this city with their eyes shut, not seeing the massive and increasing inequality and social and economic repression. Policy. Housing policy. Urban policy. Welfare policy. Financial policy. With what results – not only are people living in shit housing, with shit jobs, getting shit from police on a daily basis – most can only look forward to more shit as the cut backs and financial crisis hit the bottom hardest.
There are also those who say it is not political because the targets are all wrong – local shops and some housing are unfortunately also amongst the victims. They also say it is not political because the looting is for the black market rather than food and necessities, or because people are stealing bikes and cameras off of spectators but this is not a neatly organised riot as some would have it. This is a reaction, a revolt, a bursting of a bubble of angst, repression, lack of options and possibility and pure boredom and depression. And once that bubble is burst everything is a potential target for revenge for a police murder, but also entertainment, gaining possessions and regaining power over ones existence for a moment, and over the whole city for some days.
Like all street action, each person involved will have their own expression meaning there are constantly ongoing political discussions and arguments between people on the streets on the causes and the actions to be taken. To say these people are not political, to say the people involved are all thugs and not political is a lie. How can the discussion and action on ongoing harassment and police murder not be political? How can discussion about how to react to the problems in the community, the government cuts to education and youth activities, the lack of employment, the lack of even the smallest level of self-determination not be political? How can this many young people all of a sudden be understood only as common thugs and criminals?
In a comment in one newspaper, a newcomer to Hackney complained that while he used to feel safe in the neighborhood, knowing that all the social issues and shootings were internal to the gangs, he was now terrified to leave his house. This is telling of how segregated even the most diverse neighbourhoods are and how problems in communities can be so easily ignored as long as the victims are young and black. In these days the victims are not the young and black.
Apart from fear, how are the rest of the people reacting? Some are furious, furious about the destruction of neighborhoods that have it hard enough, some are organised and defend their neighborhood like the Turkish community in Stoke Newington as the chased a group of rioters away from the area, and some are organising vigils and discussions on the streets to find a different reaction to the killing of Mark Duggan.
Day three, and sirens are still continuously blaring through the streets. All workers in central London were warned by the police to leave work early and go home to avoid the expected evening riots. A COBRA meeting has been held (cabinet office briefing room A) after the Prime Minister was convinced he had to cut his Tuscany holiday short and fly back to London. Rubber bullets have been mentioned, and more police seems to be the only remedy they want to stuff down our throats for a social disease that only became deadly when the police killed a man.
Occupied London collective 09.08.2011
23 Comments
God the amount of reactionary, racist, vile violent hatred for the rioters by so many commenters in England is so fucked up and scary.
How can British people be so ready to swallow Media propaganda, being shown the same few images over and over of a few outrages moments that rioters were engaged in. Never showing baseless attacks on kids by cops, street harassment, Mark Duggan’s dead body, etc… just showing clip after clip of the most inflammatory footage to turn people against the rioters. How is everyone so un-cynical there about the news media and the blatant propaganda going on??? I can’t believe how easy it is to turn people into monsters calling for these 16 year olds to be shot over some fucking looted cell phones and clothes.
The barbarity of the British people in defense of their privileges and unequal “civilized” society never ceases to amaze me.
I hope the police bash the skull of every little piece of scum that’s out there destroying the livelihood of good, honest people that worked hard in life to get where they are.
Next time you feel shitty about your life, try working harder instead of breaking stuff.
Get a blowjob
It is amazing, the only argument of every capitalist is to defenr work etchics… get some new material you capitalist scumbag
Are there any websites carrying live updates from the ground, other than the Guardian’s live blog, which is just atrocious ?
@ Epoliticus.
Not that i can see, The Telegraph had one but the same problems as The Guardian’s – i have been following this on reddit, good for updates but dominated by middle class liberals who’s continuing commentary was just neausiating.
True, that the majority of the comments are discustingly reactionary. We have to see, that the power of the media rules at the moment. BBC, Guardian and other fearmongers are succesful in our society so we need to focus and take them down! Lulzsec, Anonymous here’s a job for you!
Anarch – you’re a twat. Shut the fcuk up.
What Marxist worth their salt couldn’t see the possibility that Flash Mobbing could turn into Flash Robbing. The distribution of mobile technology has opened up new forms of mobile social organization. And the counter to these new possibilities is neither cheap nor particularly effective for the ruling order. The political parties of Capital will call for a ‘ruthless police response’ without the least idea of the social consequences. I adore Getaclue who embodies a fine British tradition of ignoring any problem that they couldn’t handle in infants school. I’m hoping he revisits to call for the ‘Stout yeomanry of England’ to rally round. Getaclue I personally don’t use pressure cookers. When they malfunction the resulting detonation wipes out all the possible gains from the shorter cooking times. And it also means I have to clean my meal off the wall.Similarly with the social pressure cookers that Capital maintains in the cities of England. Like all human mechanisms social mechanisms malfunction. And it would be wise to take this into account in the selection process.
Seriuosly, what has burning peoples homes(!), robbing poor people on the street and stealing from local shops around the corner to do with capitalism, being poor or whatever?
I’m a supporter of the greek riots, I’m the first one who applauds if a bank gets burned. I’m taking part in Demonstrations and Riots since I can think…
Of course the reasons behind this disorder are social inequalities, the sad truth that neoliberalism spends billions to save the banks, whilest the poor and sometimes hard working get nothing or get their wages cut.
But the answer can’t be to burn their own neighbourhoods! What has the local shopowner around the corner to do with this fucking system. He’s just working hard to survive in this era of greed and injustice. What is the sense of burning their own houses, the ruling class is just going to laugh about this!
Go, out on the streets, burn the capitalists and the parliament if you want, but dont fight each other because this is just making it worse!
Indeed Joe,
but also big company’s like where the victims of this looters. You don’t have to see the looters as a group, it are all different groups. It’s like the anonymous organisation, or anarchist riots, not everyone is responsible for what happens, some people take it to far, others don’t.
Edit companies like sony
Joe what you want is a rational social explosion. And while this might in fact be the end game it certainly won’t be the first leg. The battle against the police has opened a space into which any individual or group might move. Thieves have moved in so have scum from the English Defense League. And if you don’t want this to occur you should recommend pacifism. I do not believe that social revolutions are ever pretty, pleasant or even optimum(if there is a peaceful way to reach the same social result take it). They are either necessary or not. And they will never ever be free of extremely unpleasant actions, reactions and people.
@ Epoliticus and L’Esquimeau Ennuy’e:
Al Jazeera has a live blog but they can be hit or miss…
http://blogs.aljazeera.net/liveblog/UK-Riots
Today’s episode of Democracy Now! actually has some truthful coverage regarding the shooting and the reactions:
http://www.democracynow.org/2011/8/10/over_1_000_arrested_in_uk
I agree, the Guardian and other coverage has been absolutely reactionary and disgusting.
Consumer idiots uphold the value system of the state and it’s up to the rest of us to hold the filthy empire accountable and to fight and destroy their daily destruction around the globe.
Help each other to WAKE UP!!!
Translation in greek:
http://blogs.vrahokipos.net/mpineio/archives/2606
Solidarity & strength
Apparently, there gonna be a solidarity demo with the London events on the Syntagma square today evening. Any news?
http://athens.indymedia.org/front.php3?lang=el&article_id=1325059
http://ianbone.wordpress.com/2011/08/09/fucking-hell/
Having read and translated Ian Bone’s article ” Fucking Hell ” I continue to think this: If we can dispute the method: to burn and to destroy houses, businesses of peers will give arguments to the dominant political class to divide our class. The explosive anger of these last days is ‘legitimized’ by the violence with which the capitalist, oppressive system uses to subject the people to its destructive and wild will. We can oppose to an uncontrolled violence, to the expression which makes mistakes about targets…..
Nevertheless we have to show solidarity in front of the attempt of division which will come from the dominant class. For the greater part, the rioting demonstrators are young, very young.
Insteed bedside books they have television channels which praise them the virtues of the wild and rough capitalism and not Bakounine and other anarchists. As only future the unemployment, marginalism, the racism and…. .
And They should think about their method and targets !? …….
.As reflection before the action !
An anarchist warnes of the dangers( before or after the actions), shares its knowledge with others, informes, discusses and does not condemns. This is, in my mind solidarity.
note : “Tony Gosling and The Guardian reports on the context behind the London Riots that is being ignored – unbridled corruption and police brutality. The U.K. is ripe with police corruption and brutality and while the corporate media refuses to report on it on article from the article hits the nail on the head.
Since 1998 there have been 333 deaths in police custody and not one single conviction, which previously promoted a Guardian piece warning the police are not on our side and a movement by the masses to remove the media barons and the feral elite from power. When you add that context to the brutal execution of a black man and the beating of a 16 year old girl by 15 police officers at a peaceful protest — a story that has been scrubbed by the corporate media — you get anarchy in the U.K. which has now spread across all of England.” sources : The Guardian
Hugs and Anarchy
Turkish-Kurdish Community in Dalston Gives Press Announcement About Riots in London
English:
VIDEO: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aIr0ES-gwhc
Turkish:
Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x1TO9oaf6-w&feature=related
http://signalfire.org/?p=13188
»The potential for communism today is not centered in the orderly struggles of well off minorities of the class to defend their privileges against encroaching restructuring. Struggles all too often draped in national flags, defined by whiteness and speaking in the discourse of democracy. The coming social revolution will not be an orderly civil affair resolved upon by a majority vote in Syntagma or any other square peacefully occupied by the indignant and naive.
No on the contrary our hope for the future lies in the real majority of the class which is excluded, unemployed, precarious, malnourished, and “criminal”. Not in the hopeless demands of unionized workers for the restoration of a lost social contract or in populist movements for reform which take the moral high ground on a terrain defined by the mass media and petty bourgeois notions of what is “respectable”.
The systematic looting and destruction which has swept England is of course completely insufficient in and of itself for the development of autonomous proletarian politics. It is however a thousand times preferable to the demands for democracy which buried the Arab Spring in a cosmetic restructuring of the state. The mass appropriation of Nikes and Iphones without explanation or justification is like any struggle for higher wages and fewer hours of work a direct assertion of the material needs of the class-and as such immeasurably closer to the living content of communist politics then any nationalist and reformist movement with a “coherent” message.
Those who identify more with the vigilante gangs of the petty-bourgeois defending their small enterprises (where proletarians are exploited, humiliated and cheated everyday), then with working class youth carrying out the dictatorial expropriation of the social wealth show clearly that they are not revolutionaries but cops in waiting-and should be treated accordingly.«
Proletarians in revolt have nothing to apologise for. The repression is brutal, we expected nothing less. As the crisis of international capital intensifies, so will the resistance of the working class and the unwaged -of all ethnicities. This is just the beginning…
Community Activits Demostration From Hackney to Tottenham
Video 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Dq6Rp19fv0&feature=player_embedded
VIDEO 2:http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=ZRAlzqNPRHg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HqT81cWQZJQ
Another nice article about the riot in England, in french !!
http://www.poisson-rouge.info/2011-08/ce-nest-pas-politique-cest-du-vol/
All of the looting and scamming sounds like madness.
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