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Title: The London Insurrections
Author: Burn Shit
Date: January 7, 2012
Language: en
Topics: London, riots, 2011, insurrection
Source: Retrieved on 1st June 2021 from https://kpbsfs.wordpress.com/2012/01/07/the-london-insurrections-again/
Notes: A version of this appeared in Slingshot Issue 109

Burn Shit

The London Insurrections

‘Britain is Sick.’ The headline was correct, of course, but for all the

wrong reasons. Not so long ago, many people in the country found solace

on the weekend of an aristocratic wedding. It felt nice to all unite

behind the new ‘People’s Princess’ and her thoroughly modernised royal

spouse. How nice it was to forget about crises and austerity on an extra

bank holiday so generously granted to us by the Old Etonians of

Parliament. A collective hysteria and jingo spectacle gave us a sense of

belonging and even purpose. The pseudo-participation of a royal parade,

a street party, the flag-wavig and cheering, a country unanimous in its

appreciation of Royal tradition and ‘THAT dress’ and Pippa’s arse –

these are what define us; the people, the nation, the values, the

heritage – Britain 2011. Still cool Britannia, still the historical

convention and ancient mores, the stiff upper lip and the salt of the

earth, but adapted to the 21^(st) century. Thank God for British

Exceptionalism: Over the last few centuries a reforming establishment

has maintained relative calm and a docile populace whilst their European

counterparts – the governments and monarchs of the continent – have

struggled to contain their own rebels, radicals and agitators.

Fast forward to August. We already knew this ludicrous narrative was a

myth, and one that has been exploded repeatedly by the spontaneous

outbursts of a swindled people. This odd notion of a parochial,

gradualist, mind-your-own ‘nation of shopkeepers’ is nothing but an

idealised abstraction – a fallacious, Whiggish interpretation of history

that suits conservative tastes. The insurrections of the summer were

borne of an intense rage and disaffection. What we witnessed was a

jumbled, chaotic response to the shit the status quo is throwing at us,

the end of a delicate inertia, a loud awakening from a frustrated sleep

in which ‘protest’ was generalised to the point where everything was a

target and everything was there for the taking. It was a protest without

demands, a rebellion without a cause, a display of nihilistic anger

launching itself against the totality. No platform, manifesto or

programme, no leadership demanding some reform or the repeal of some

piece of legislation, but a succession of confused acts of destruction

that were characterised by a refusal of all the conditions of everyday

life in post-industrial capitalism. A direct assault on the commodity

form and the temporary halt of our retail rituals as people’s deep

resentiment and fury manifested itself against the high-street

chainstores, just as they discovered payment for the exalted merchandise

was now optional.

The London Riots had been a long time coming. (Insert comparisons with

the 80s here – social unrest, Royal weddings, increased industrial

militancy, Tory government, poor Police/community relations, blah, blah,

blah.) Mark Duggan’s death was a spark in a tinderbox. The financial

crisis and the subsequent corporate bailouts exposed the system for what

it really is in essence: parasitic, dead Capital, feeding off living

labour, based on state-sanctioned and legitimate looting. It was high

time the residents of Tottenham, Peckham, Liverpool and Manchester

engaged in some of their own mass-expropriations. Call it a proletarian

bailout. Qualitative Easing.

Was this short-lived revolt a hyper-capitalist display of the

consumerist ethic in dangerous overdrive; the quick accumulation of

sweat-shop commodities and status-symbols by a decadent youth corrupted

by… grime and hip hop music!?!? The mass-shoplifting opened the

floodgates of materialist false-needs and desires, but here in the place

of payment-at-the-till was a liberation of all these goods from their

status as commodities. Instead of a price-tag was a debased and

subverted exchange value – no money to perform its regulatory function,

no currency to mediate or restrict – a free-for-all (re)distribution in

which we took in reality all that is promised to us by advertising in

abstraction. Retail capital’s feeble defence left wide open by roaming

teenagers who were realising, physically and directly, that the system

only works this way because we allow it. And for a short time during the

insurrections, the system was at their mercy.

As the looted sportswear, phones, nappies, booze and food were strewn

over the roads in London, the carnival quickly spread to Birmingham,

Liverpool and Manchester. These rioters have no ideology, no political

affiliation and no leadership. This is what makes them uncontrollable

and dangerous. This is where their strength lies. They couldn’t have

been bought off with any concession or placated by the promise of an

independent enquiry: Michael Heseltine’s Garden Festival has lay in

ruins for years. Theirs was a total revolt, albeit a muddled and

disjointed one. What it showed was an untapped potential, a disorder

that exposed the weak, vulnerable Paper Tigers of authority when faced

with an enraged mob with nothing to lose. Of course we can adopt the

language of the media/press; these rioters were just selfish,

opportunistic chavs, yobs, hoodies, gangs, proles, lumpen. Or we can

start borrowing from the politicians’ diatribes; these riots weren’t

political, they were motivated by nothing but greed. So they say. But if

we take them for their word, what could be more political than greed?

This is the ultimate threat to the present (dis)order – not the Trade

Union ‘movement’ or the phoney left: The former being all too cosily

rooted in its historical role of integrating workers into wage-labour

peaceably, acting as arbiter between labour and capital and channeling

all the frustrations and grievances of their membership into nice

moderate demands (or polite requests) for quantitative increases in

wages or conditions, with paid bureaucrats destroying any genuine

militancy or desire with negotiation, compromise and pay settlements.

The ‘radical’ left meanwhile, are still soaked with patronising,

vanguardist rhetoric and are still committed to the tired old modes of

paper-pushing, representation and hierarchical organising. Capital’s

gravediggers are the recalcitrant youth, the criminals, the unemployed

and the unemployable who refuse most vehemently to be absorbed into

societies’ racket.

Presently, there is no political consciousness among them. No concept of

the possibilities, no concept of what could be. What unites them is a

shared disaffection, a general discontent and a visceral and innate

hatred of the police as the most visible figures of state authority in

our communities. We have not seen the (material) ‘immiseration’ of the

proletariat that Marx predicted and Bakunin shunned. The ‘massification’

of the workers that He foresaw, and the advent of organised labour did

not lead to our world revolution. Taylorism, scientific management,

standardisation, increased division of labour, de-industiralisation and

the rise of the service economy, Trade Unionism, cheap credit,

embourgeoisement and our beloved social safety-nets (through which

no-one can fall?) are all part of the same social pacification package.

As alienation, drudgery, uniformity and apathy have become the

omnipresent hallmarks of our society, we have seen the corresponding

perfection of assimilation techniques that have lulled many into a dull

passivity. The decades of the white-collar working class, the extraction

of surplus value from our cognitive labour, post-fordism, the promises

and the myths of social mobility, the paternalistic welfare state, –

through which we depend on Big Government for our very survival – the

huge erray of products available to all who are willing to sell

themselves over on a temporary contract with flexible hours, the plasma

screens that allow us some vicarious respite from the commute, the boss,

the office politics and the staff meeting, the choices in fashion and

gadgets that define us and communicate who we are through the Order of

Signs and Symbols, our decision to choose one ‘Made in an Eastern

Workhouse’ iTwat over another. What does your phone say about you? I am

Mercedes. I am what I am. I am Nikon. I’m the kind of liberal/creative

type that uses a Macbook. I’m the kind of busy, metropolitan man that

needs a Blackberry. Consumption, separation, representation, mediation,

alienation. Late capitalism’s ‘Bread and Circuses’. And then the riots

that shit on all that, whether consciously or not. A Grand Rejection of

everything that’s been used to buy us off and keep us kneeling.

It goes without saying that houses going up in flames in London’s

ghettoes is no call for celebration. It is also obvious that we’d have

no moral qualms if they’d instead burnt out the luxury apartments of

Chelsea Harbour, the offices of Canary Wharf or better still, raided the

mansions of Surrey stockbrokers. But we’ll shed no tears over the

charred skeleton of the SONY warehouse, the Pawn-brokers on Peckham high

street or the Brixton Nandos. It is telling that swarms of police

occupied the shopping districts around Oxford Street and stood guard,

fiddling outside the retail Cathedrals of the West End while the suburbs

burned. It is also worth mentioning a message on the so-called ‘Peckham

Peace Wall’ which reads, ‘Take it to Parliament, Not to Peckham’, and

the unsurprising prevalence of, ‘Feds had it coming’ post-its, or words

to that effect. But the rioters lashed out against their own immediate

surroundings, against the familiar. Some even smashed through the

windows of the stores in which they worked. Isn’t it obvious why? The

square mile and the City of London are worlds away. Their violence had

to be directed against the embodiments of arbitrary power on their

streets, and not only the police. The glass facades of Carphone

Warehouse and Footlocker, the purveyors of well-marketed signifiers of

social status and identity, who compensate staff with five pounds for

every hour of tedium and humiliation and somehow expect diligence and

loyalty – these were the first to go. These are the sources of our

modern malaise and simmering ennui, and they deserve no more respect

than the Palace of Westminster or the Tory HQ at Millbank. The rioter

never gave them any.

Many on the left have only talked of ‘social exclusion’, as if our

society was normally an edifice of peaceful relations that had somehow

managed to forget about an ostracised ‘underclass’. As if the solution

could be more ‘social inclusion’; to reabsorb these lumpen malcontents

into the world of wage-labour and civil society, to guarantee them a

future of minimum wage drudgery and voter registration twice a decade –

some participation, some inclusion in the racket. After the banlieue

uprisings in 2005, someone wrote; ‘Those who have found less humiliation

and more advantage in a life of crime than in sweeping floors will not

turn in their weapons, and prison wont teach them to love society.’