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13 08 2011

Joe Thorne looks for the meaning of the recent wave of inner city riots
Eventually, it always explodes. But what dream has been deferred, how, and by whom? Who are the
rioters, what motivated them and does it matter? Was there a radical kernel to the riots which would
speak to us, if only we would listen? Or were they the mute reflex of a nihilist or egoistic sub-generation
of looter-consumers pitiable, and understandable, but nothing more?

Clarendon Road, Hackney, Monday night.

To the former idea corresponds a romanticised account of the figure of the rioter as a new vanguardsubject in the class struggle, flawed, but in essence communistic. To the later idea corresponds the view
that the rioters need to be rescued by the political programme or organisation of some other segment of
the working class: the primary significance of their disorder is as a moral rebuke to the movement which
has forgotten them. Both are attempts to constrain a complex reality under too-easy an analysis. There is
no essence to the riots; beyond their expression of a particular phase in the recomposition of the classrelation in Britains inner cities. As we shall see, the riots were partly products of a real, positive and
intentional class consciousness, albeit the consciousness of a very particular sub-section of the class.
There were also elements in it that were not only nihilistic and selfish, but vicious and cruel.

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These tendencies are not expressed as distinct groups of participants: a few proper class-struggle rioters,
and a few thugs. There probably were some rioters with a clear class-related ethic, just as there were
certainly a number who saw the disturbances primarily as cover for mugging and burning their neighbours
cars. But what is more likely is that such agendas were interpolated throughout the crowd, present to
different degrees in different individuals, and differently in any given individual at different times
throughout the night.
The romantic idea is easiest to dispense with. Writing for the Commune, Daniel Harvey proposes
loyalty to the phenomenon of the riots. We have to support the eruption of the unheard and the
unspoken in our obscene society. Therefore, the problem is not the excesses of this or that action, it is
that the rioters are simply not radical enough. Of course, there is no one problem which is the
problem. But it is certainly a very big problem that 100 families have been made homeless, and terrified
in the process. It is understandable that a broad swathe of opinion will focus on such events, as well as on
the destruction of small family-owned shops. Five people have been killed in the riots since Sunday, none
by the police.
Many of the differences with the inner-city riots of the 1980s have been exaggerated (for example,
burning and looting were common then too, and race was not the major factor overall, however important
they were in specific areas.) However, it does seem that there has been an escalation in the use of
careless violence. Contrast the burning of family homes from the following sentiment expressed in
Liverpool in 1981. We do not hit family homes What about the garage on the corner, people work
there Yeah but they dont own the place, its owned by Shell. Perhaps the general context of class
consciousness has subsided, perhaps 30 years of neoliberalism has produced a material environment so
destructive for young minds that they simply dont care.
(The other major difference, in my perception, is that there were far fewer police injuries and far more
arrests. 111 police officers were injured in London over four days of rioting in London, and so far more
than 1,000 arrests have been made. In comparison, in the 1981 Brixton riots, 229 officers were injured
and 82 arrests were made at the time though at least 280 were arrested later. This partly reflects
superior police training and equipment, but may also reflect poorer organisation and less aggression on the
part of rioters or perhaps too much preoccupation with loot over and above fighting the police. Chris
Harman reported that analysis of figures from different areas in 1981 showed that the greater the number
of police injuries, the fewer were the arrests.)
Much of the looting appears from anecdotal accounts to have been more or less a black market
capitalist enterprise. Gang leaders stood back while the younger ones ran into the shops, reports
Jonathan Tomlinson. I saw in Hackney what friends reported in South London: adult men in cars
directing groups of children on bikes. A friend described the looting of the Burberry factory outlet: cars
with blacked-out windows pulled up, and men loaded in goods by the box-load. We saw opportunistic
muggings in Hackney, and one particularly disgusting occurrence of this sort was captured on film. In such
a context, it is impossible to avoid criticising this or that action, not because it would be unpopular not
to do so, but because it is impossible to pick out the valid class content of the riots without being able to
distinguish, politically, a burning police car from a burning home.
Class, hedonism, and despair
Will Davies has written one of the most interesting analyses of the weeks riots, but in doing so promotes
the idea of the rioter as apolitical consumer.
In themselves, these riots may indeed be about inequality: the concentration of wealth and
power may simply have become too unwieldy, regardless of what the rioters think is going on.
But for themselves, they are about power, hedonism, consumption and sovereignty of the ego.
Anyone who disagrees with that is simply not crediting the participants with being able to
make sense of what theyre doing.
Contrary to what Will Davies says, if we credit the participants with being able to make sense of what
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they are doing, the class politics are abundantly clear.

One man in Tottenham on Saturday night told a reporter that he saw it as a battle against the ruling
class. Elsewhere, a rioter told Sky news that there isnt a future for young people, thats how I see it
because the government they are not helping anyone out except the rich people. They dont care for us.
One of his friends demanded the restoration of Education Maintenance Allowance, more help for single
mothers, and a reversal of tuition fee rises. Two girls from Croydon, drinking looted ros at 9.30am on
Tuesday morning put it like this: its the governments fault . . . its about showing the police we can do
what we want . . . all this has happened because of the rich people, so were showing the rich people we
can do what we want. In a lull in the rioting on Mare St on Monday, one 21 year-old woman who had
lived in Hackney her whole life gave me her interpretation.
Its kids revolting against the capitalist bonds that bind them, shops like Game and JD where
they been told they need to shop by the media . . . half the people here have no politics, it
doesnt mean theres no politics in it . . . they hit the Ladbrokes, I was really pleased about
that . . . living in an area like this, you understand.
Police harassment is the other common theme. For many Black people, such harassment is interpreted,
probably in part correctly, through the prism of race, and racism. My son is 12 years old, says Michelle
from Hackney, and he already knows that police do not work for black people. A man calling himself L
concurred. This supposed law and order is dishonest. I get stopped and searched. You wont, he told a
reporter. They should just say Im stopping you because youre black. Figures show that black people
are 26 times more likely to be stopped and searched than white people. (They are less than 5 times more
likely, on average, to be convicted for related offences.) However, police harassment was also identified
as a principle motivating factor by many white rioters in areas such as Enfield and Manchester. The
nature of stop and search is that it works on the basis of identifying people based on their demographic,
which is why those stopped under evidence-led powers are less likely to be black. Consequently, a large
number of those who are repeatedly stopped often in an extremely disrespectful manner are innocent.
The proportion of stop and searches which lead to any arrest is low: most, therefore, appear to those
stopped as harassment.
At a closed meeting held by community workers in Hackney on Tuesday, a number of young people spoke
about the motivations for the riots, as they saw them. They listed a) a lack of jobs, and particular
resentment about the lack of Olympic jobs, b) police mistreatment during frequent stop and searches, and
c) resentment of newcomers or yuppies, who they believe the intense stop and search regime panders
to, and who they accuse of booking-out local sports facilities, making them inaccessible for locals. That
morning, on Clarence Road, one man of Caribbean descent told me that the number of children without
engaged fathers in the area was partly because those fathers had often been deported.
Some readers may believe that these quotes have been laboriously selected to allow me to build up a
picture which suits my ideological prejudices. In fact, the opposite is true. Virtually every published
statement in the press on the part of rioters tells the same story: the rich have got it all, weve got no
future, we want the police to stop hassling us, and, right now, were going to do what we need to do to
achieve those things. There are a few exceptions, including some racist comments the polish are taking
the jobs, so weve got to do something, one man from Manchester told Radio 4 but the comments
quoted are overwhelmingly representative of the opinions which have been reported in the media, and
which I have heard in Hackney.
What are the elements of the consciousness which we can infer from these fragments? The rioters
understand that we live in a class society, divided between the rich (in whose interests the government and
police work), and that cuts to welfare provision represent an attack on their class, by the ruling one. They
understand everything from unemployment to consumerism to gambling in class terms. In short,
participants in the riots understand everything that the liberal commentariat understand, and more. They
are as unrevolutionary as the rest of the proletariat, but accept that illegal direct action is legitimate and
necessary.

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This account is, necessarily, based on those who are able to articulate themselves, and who choose to do
so. No doubt, the same conditions which breed poverty currently breed inarticulacy, and a lack of
confidence in self-expression. And the form of the riot mitigates against allowing a visible, vocal
leadership to emerge, at least in the short term. But the point is that, insofar as any political ideas have
been articulated, they are class ones.
The idea of Will Davies is that although the riots are objectively caused by relative deprivation and police
harassment, subjectively they are not about these things, but about consumption and power. Presumably
this is also what David Broder means when he says that unlike the Brixton or Toxteth riots of thirty years
ago, there is no struggle and no enemy, simply an explosive reaction to being angry, fed-up and
downtrodden. But such ideas do not stand up to even the most casual attempt to listen to the people
involved. No one ever just reacts, everyone understands what they do through some general framework,
more or less sophisticated or accurate.

The ideas of one rioter as expressed through

graffiti. Bad: Tories, police. Good: satanism,
anarchy, automatic weapons.
This does not mean that there is no evidence of power, hedonism, consumption and sovereignty of the
ego and, we might add, the thrill of the mob. However, such motivations are themselves far from
necessarily apolitical. If ones protest is against a class dynamic which provides one with
disempowerment, material privation, boredom, and the diminution of the ego, it is entirely reasonable to
expect a response to involve a negation of those elements. Furthermore, when we re-read that list, we
cannot fail to see that it might as well describe the modus operandi of a great many senior bourgeois
politicians. Such figures repeatedly accept, uncontroversially and in public, that they enjoy the cut and
thrust of parliamentary politics. Their scandals betray their love of an ego-driven, lavish lifestyle that
makes the excesses of the rioters seem puny by comparison. This is not merely the well-worn point that
the ruling class are hypocritical the arsonist Clegg, or the vandal Cameron. It is to say that what is seen
as exceptional in the riot is rather less so than first impressions might suggest, there really is no realm of
purely principled political action. A Hackney resident called Ariom described the sense of solidarity and
community he felt during the riot in terms similar to those used by workers talking about their experience
during large strikes.
Its like the old days. Its bringing the community spirit back. Even though its a sad way to do
it, its bringing the community together. If the riots kick off again, Im going. . . I loved
Hackney during the riot. I loved every minute of it. It was great to see the people coming
together to show the authorities that they cannot just come out here bullying.
Rioting is a politics of despair, says Owen Hatherley, as if it is the product of some sort of adolescent
existential crisis, rather than a politics which responds to the material situation of those who riot. They are
frequently unemployed, hence unable to strike, and (for various reasons) unable to affect change through
voting. As Piven and Cloward put it, some of the poor are sometimes so isolated from significant

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institutional participation that the only contribution they can withhold is that of quiescence in civil life:
they can riot.[1]
In this section, I have stressed what is positive in the riots, and I have done so in order to bring to the
surface one element in what is, as I have said, a profoundly contradictory situation. I have dwelt more on
it than on the other aspect I have highlighted thuggish, nihilist criminality not because I necessarily
believe it to be more important, or prevalent, but because it is more common to deny its existence at all.
Indeed, I cannot claim that I am able to judge the balance; or even that the lines between the different
sorts of motivation are always sharp and well drawn. But I believe that I have demonstrated that accounts
which deny rioters are capable of thinking politically for themselves are based on a failure to engage with
what they themselves have to say.
The left responds
The Socialist Party, which is nothing if not predictable, says that the riots demand a mass, trade
union-led workers response. The Alliance for Workers Liberty has a broadly similar view. The riots
can have no directly positive effects on the lives of those who riot or on the lives of their families, and
all the agency is in the hands of the labour movement, by which they meant the Labour party and trade
unions. A key context for the riots is the decline of labour movement organisation, apparently, despite
the fact that riots were much bigger during the 1981 when unions were close to their peak membership.
This is the relatively institutionally-minded wing of the Trotskyist movement.
What is wrong with it? First of all, the trade unions (let alone the Labour Party!), who currently seem
unable to organise their members in defence of even their own immediate interests, have no capacity to
supply a solution to inner-city youth. Historically, unemployed people and youth have proved more than
capable of autonomous self-organisation, and there is no reason that they will not be able to do so again.
The unemployed workers movement of the US or UK in the 1930s frequently and effectively employed
looting and riot, and were organised directly by the unemployed, not by the trade unions. The same goes
for ethnic-minority youth organisations such as the Black Panthers or Asian Youth Movement.
Furthermore, the institutional-Trotskyist perspective totally denies the potential efficacy of riots as a
weapon in the class struggle. Like strikes, riots are frequently unsuccessful, but nonetheless have a more
or less effective record in winning concessions from the ruling class. For example, the end of the Sus
laws in the 1980s, and the injection of money into the inner cities which followed the Brixton riots and the
Scarman report. In other words, it achieved two of the immediate political objectives of the rioters.
Meanwhile, an article in Socialist Worker white-washed the riots, making them out to be far better and
less complicated than they were.
No one set out to try and kill or injure those living above those premises. They were venting
their anger against an unequal society. Karl Marx was exactly right when he talked about
expropriating the expropriators, taking back what they have taken from us. Thats what
looting by poor working class people represents and in that sense it is a deeply political act.
And as far as violence goes, that was aimed at the police who carry out violent attacks on
working class communities on a daily basis, especially against black male youth.
The arsonists may not have been specifically trying to kill anyone, but are nonetheless culpable for
burning peoples homes down, whether by intention or omission. The violence was not all aimed at police,
and anyone who was present during the riots could see that. The looting was sometimes expropriating the
expropriators, sometimes gang-capitalism, and sometimes petty destruction of the very smallest of petit
bourgeois livelihoods. The SP and AWL seem not to admit that it had any positive character at all but
this seems wrong. Looting from big chain stores, from a class point of view, is fundamentally legitimate.
We dont fetishise the law: we support unlawful strikes for example, blocking roads, and so on. One way
to supplement ones income whilst causing economic damage to capitalists is to strike for higher wages:
another way is to loot. So theres no need to condemn looting in the abstract, any more than smashing
windows or fighting the police.[2]

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Conclusions
I lived on the Pembury Estate, the epicentre of the most destructive rioting in Hackney, for six months in
2009. In that time, at least five people died violent deaths within 200 metres of my door, including
Christelle Pardo, and Jahmal Mason-Blair, who was 17. Hackney in general, and the Pembury in
particular, is plagued by high unemployment, poor housing, falling incomes, and resentment against the
boroughs ostentatiously wealthy newcomers. For every available job there are 24 job seekers. The total
impact of proposed spending and benefits changes on the poorest 10% in society is equivalent to 38% of
net personal income. Nationally, half of young black men are unemployed, and the figure is probably
higher in Hackney where total unemployment runs at around 20%. Cuts to youth clubs in Haringey and
Hackney led one youth worker to predict in late July that there will be riots.
An ongoing analysis of those so far brought to court over involvement in the riots suggests that 73% are
under 25 and only 12% are women. Reporting on court cases suggest that rioters strongly tend to be
unemployed, or working in low-paid jobs. Observers agree that the riots were ethnically mixed, young
men from poor areas. In other words, the rioters correspond to the profile which we would expect, on
the basis of the concerns and demands recorded above. But the same social ground which breeds such
class-resentment also breeds a degree of aggression, callousness, and low political ambition. Across the
country, between Saturday and Tuesday, both exploded simultaneously, in the same neighbourhoods, and
often in the same person.
Any useful political response will take time and enquiry to develop. We can further explore the potential
for organising amongst the unemployed, amongst youth, and in opposition to stop and search.
Revolutionaries are socially and demographically isolated from the elements of the working class which
produced these riots, and doing anything to bridge that gap will be very far from easy. We need to listen
to the rioters, and the community members who chose not to riot, many of whom did so for perfectly good
political reasons and acknowledge that the marches and placards of the traditional left have very little to
offer, day to day, to many inner city youth. They need a different political practice. So, therefore, do we.
The title of the article is taken from a poem by Langston Hughes
A selected online reading list on riots
The unemployed workers movement in the US 1930-1939, Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward
Like a summer with a thousand Julys an account of the 1981-82 inner city riots by BM Blob
Hot time: Summer on the estates: Riots in the UK 1991-2
The university, the car factory and the working class specifically on the 1991 Oxford riots
LA 92: The Context of a Proletarian Uprising Aufheben
The Summer of 1981: a post-riot analysis Chris Harman (Socialist Workers Party)
Brixton 1981: Workers Power ; Daily Mail
Toxteth 1981: BBC; Liverpool Daily Post
The recent violence in the French suburbs is difficult to integrate into the general class combat, 2005 and
What happened after the Paris suburb riots? Mouvement Communiste
Rioting in Nottingham: a different pattern? AWL report on the 2011 disturbances in Nottingham
Austerity and anarchy: budget cuts and social unrest in Europe, 1919 2009 - Jacopo Ponticelli and
Hans-Joachim Voth

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[1] Poor Peoples Movements (1977:25)

[2] The fact is that for many people it will not prove worthwhile. They will go to prison. But to critique
the tactic on that ground is very different from making disproving noises about looting in the abstract. It is
also the case that destroying small shops in many areas is not only attacking people who are very little
distant from the proletariat, but likely to inflame ethnic tension.
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Date : August 13, 2011
Tags: austerity, hackney, london, riots
Categories : london riots, riots

One response
13 08 2011

Daniel Harvey (11:44:28) :

My comment will have to be quick, and it will make me late today, but I dont quite understand why
your treatment of my article is so dismissive in this case. Despite it being produced quickly and
being far shorter than yours, and with less time for consideration that you have taken, I did manage
to make most of the points you allude to in other articles. I do put across the Hegelian distinction
between riots objectively being about an underclass and subjectively a new form of nihilistic
consumerism. I didnt emphasise that the rioters themselves do have more awareness of class than
they are credited with, but I do essentially make the same conclusions, them not being radical
enough is exactly a precis of this point about them not actually being brave enough to deploy their
anger in a political and revolutionary way. I dont understand why you put across my view is naive
and romantic in that case. I do, despite the unfairness and off-hand treatment of my own article,
think your conclusions are right, but you still havent really expunged that paternalism that you and
David seem to exude over these riots, you are still a smart-alec critic outsider in this piece.

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or does it explode?
monday night in hackney
nothing to lose, nothing to win
dont moralise, dont judge, dont take pictures its time for the riot to get some radical politics
london riots quick report from hackney
NHS: privatisation or reform?
management by abandonment

Daniel Harvey on or does it explode?

Boffy on nothing to lose, nothing to win
Daniel Harvey on nothing to lose, nothing to win
David on nothing to lose, nothing to win
Daniel Harvey on nothing to lose, nothing to win

What's that you say? You want a long communist analysis of the #londonriots? Happy to oblige:
http://t.co/MLfQrfH 17 minutes ago
or does it explode?: Joe Thorne looks for the meaning of the recent wave of inner city riots
Eventually, it al... http://t.co/MLfQrfH 28 minutes ago
@mellojonny reports on his experience of the riots in hackney: http://t.co/c64t6vv - well worth a
read 19 hours ago

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