Rage against capitalism: The working class fights back
The riots that broke out in Tottenham, north
London, on the night of Saturday 6 August, and again over subsequent nights, spreading
first to communities across London, and then to cities around the country,
represent the spontaneous anger of broad sections of working people,
particularly the poorest and most oppressed, at police violence, racism and the
increasingly intolerable burden of the capitalist crisis that they are being
forced to carry, not only through cuts but also through high unemployment and
dead-end jobs.
Until now the British working class had been
relatively quiescent in the face of increasing police repression and worsening
living conditions and social provision, but the events of the past few days
have changed all that and shown once more the fighting spirit of the British
proletariat. Young working-class people in particular have shown that they are
not prepared to lie down indefinitely while they are kicked like a dog by the
lickspittles of the British ruling class.
The immediate catalyst for the riots was the police
shooting of Mark Duggan, a 29-year-old father of three, who was killed by
police in the early evening of Thursday 4 August in the Tottenham Hale area as
he was on his way home to the nearby Broadwater Farm estate by minicab.
Mark’s killing was reportedly part of a planned
police operation, forming part of Operation Trident, which is supposedly directed
at ‘gun crime’ in the African Caribbean community, and was carried out by CO19,
a specialist firearms unit.
As is generally the case in instances where a
member of the public is killed by the police, initial reports emanating from
the police are contradictory and untrustworthy. The police will naturally seek
to cover their tracks and, in best mafia style, cover for one another. The
bourgeois press can also be expected to play its part. The ongoing News
International scandal has shone a light on the corrupt relationship between the
police and the media, who are both, at the end of the day, servants of the same
billionaire masters.
We have seen such police lies and cover-ups again
and again, from Blair Peach through to more recent cases, such as those of Jean
Charles de Menezes, Ian Tomlinson, Kingsley Burrel and Smiley Culture. As a
result, families of the bereaved in particular, and working-class communities
in general, know that they cannot rely on the police for truth or for justice.
They are learning that they need to organise and fight back.
In the case of Mark Duggan, the police initially
claimed that one of their officers only escaped serious injury because his
radio got in the way of a bullet. However, on 8 August, the Guardian
reported that initial ballistics tests have shown that this bullet was police
issue. Far from there having been an exchange of fire, latest reports suggest
that the only non-police issue firearm found anywhere near the scene was
concealed in a sock and therefore not in any way ready for use.
Equally importantly, no non-police issue firearm
has as yet actually been produced at all. Independent eyewitness accounts refer
to Mark being pulled from his cab by police, held down and shot in the face
more than once at point-blank range with a Heckler & Koch MP5 sub-machine
gun.
In response, Mark’s family and friends called a
peaceful vigil outside the local police station on Saturday 6 August. Whole
families and young children joined the protest, with homemade placards,
shouting, “No justice, no peace.”
Frustration mounted as police continued to refuse
any dialogue with protestors or to provide Mark’s family with any explanation
as to how he came to be killed. Stafford Scott, a long-time community organiser
in the area, commented:
“If a senior police officer had come to speak to
us, we would have left. We arrived at 5pm; we had planned a one-hour silent
protest. We were there until 9pm. Police were absolutely culpable. Had they
been more responsive when we arrived at the police station, asking for a senior
officer to talk with the family, we would have left the vicinity before the
unrest started. It is unforgivable [that] police refused dialogue.”
It further appears that the first night of rioting
was sparked by the brutal police beating, with shields and batons, of a
16-year-old girl taking part in the protest. The Guardian reported:
“‘They beat her with a baton, and then the crowd
started shouting “run, run”, and there was a hail of missiles,’ said Anthony
Johnson, 39. ‘She had been saying: “We want answers, come and speak to us.”’
“Laurence Bailey, who was in a nearby church,
described seeing the girl throw a leaflet and what may have been a stone at
police.
“Bailey said the girl was then ‘pounded by 15
riot shields’. ‘She went down on the floor but once she managed to get up she
was hit again before being half-dragged away by her friend,’ he said.”
It was following this vicious assault on a teenage
girl that groups of young men reportedly started to attack police cars.
The Guardian described the composition of
the rioters on the first night in Tottenham as follows:
“The make-up of the rioters was racially mixed.
Most were men or boys, some apparently as young as 10.
“But families and other local residents,
including some from Tottenham’s hasidic jewish community, also gathered to
watch and jeer at police.”
A teenage woman who had been a friend of Mark
Duggan’s told a reporter from Socialist Worker:
“When I saw jewish people out tonight too I was
happy. I thought, ‘It’s not just us’. They gave bread out to us. It isn’t just
kids out tonight. It’s everyone.”
Whilst the shooting of Mark Duggan provoked the
initial protests in Tottenham, the subsequent riots reflect the hatred felt
towards the police in black, working-class and poor communities throughout London and up and down the country, as well as the anger and despair engendered by grinding
poverty.
They are a spontaneous protest against deaths at
the hands of the police, stop and search, which is running at record levels,
poor educational and health provision, poor and overcrowded housing, lack of
amenities (in the borough of Haringey where Tottenham is located, eight out of
a total of 13 youth clubs were closed just last week) and unemployment
(Haringey has one vacancy for every 54 jobseekers).
Predictably, much is made of the acts of looting
that are an inevitable feature of such spontaneous outbursts. However, they
should not be allowed to detract from the main character of the events, namely
a justified revolt against police killings and repression, racism and poverty.
Moreover, it is capitalist society itself that
flaunts its luxury goods at the poor, sending out a message that you are
scarcely human if you don’t possess a flatscreen plasma TV and the latest
designer labels, while at the same time depriving masses of people of jobs, or
paying wages too miserly to enable these goods to be bought.
Meanwhile, some ‘looters’ have been reported as
making off with such essentials as toilet rolls and disposable nappies. Others
have kept their focus clearly on symbols of state repression. The Guardian
reported:
“A group of young men emerged from Haringey and Enfield magistrates court wielding hammers.
“They had shunned the temptation of the looted
stores to break seven windows in the courthouse. It is a place some rioters
presumably visited in the past; others are likely to be summoned in the near
future.”
Of course, politicians from all the bourgeois
parties have rushed to condemn the protestors as criminals and have promised
nothing but increased and more brutal repression. Hundreds have already been
arrested. Yet it is the worthies of the Conservative, Liberal Democrat and
Labour parties who, in the service of the British capitalist class, are the
real criminals, presiding over class war at home and imperialist war abroad.
It is important to note that the black Labour MPs
have been no less vociferous than any others in branding their constituents as
criminals and calling for increased police repression, including not only
Tottenham MP David Lammy but also Hackney’s Diane Abbott, darling of much of
the ‘left’ and erstwhile heroine of the opportunist ‘Black Section’ movement in
the Labour party.
These parasitic scoundrels owe their petty
positions and place precisely to the earlier struggles of the black communities
they now openly despise. This is a salient reminder that what is at issue is
not a race-based struggle that can in the end only benefit a thin layer of
opportunists who seek to jump aboard the bandwagon, but a struggle against racism
and capitalism in which all working people, whatever their skin colour, have a
stake and should play their part.
Another darling of the left, Ken Livingstone, has
made much of his own record of increasing police numbers while he was in
office as Mayor of London, and has no doubt endeared himself greatly to senior
Met officers by using the unrest in London as an excuse to demand that the
government ditch its planned cuts to the police force.
Events of recent days have shown once again that
poor working-class communities know fully well that the police are not a
neutral or benign body dedicated to serving the community and helping old
ladies across the street, but a ruthless gang of thugs dedicated to violently
upholding the rule of the rich. To put it in Marxist terms, they are a special
body of (increasingly) armed men, whose job is to enforce the dictatorship of
the bourgeoisie.
The young people on the streets are also learning a
lesson that the capitalist class would very much rather they quickly forget.
Namely, that if enough people rise up simultaneously and in enough places,
there is not much the ruling class can do to stop them, since the police and
others who make up the forces of the state are actually very few in numbers
compared to the masses of the working class.
The crucial lesson that the working class urgently
needs to learn is that the real source of their misery and frustration is the
capitalist system of production. This system is kept in place by the hirelings
of a handful of billionaires, who grow richer by the hour while pressing down
hard on those who work to create those riches. As economic crisis threatens the
billionaires’ profits, they are pressing even harder, reducing to a minimum and
below not only workers’ wages, but also the social benefits they need, while
being quite unable to provide work for millions more people who need a decent
job.
Communists support and defend the oppressed when
they rise up, but we have seen massive uprisings before, generally in the same
communities as current events, for example in 1981 and 1985. But so long as
capitalism remains in place, it continues inexorably to impoverish the working
class; and overthrowing capitalism is impossible without conscious organisation
for that purpose, for which trustworthy proletarian leadership is required. So
long as capitalism remains in place, the real gains of workers’ struggles,
however magnificent, are transient and reversible – precisely why the events of
previous years are being repeated today.
Communities certainly need to form themselves into
self-defensive bodies to resist the police and other agents of bourgeois
repression. But above all the working class needs its own general staff, which
can lead not only in defensive struggles but also in the struggle to overthrow
the increasingly criminal rule of the bourgeois class of heartless billionaires
whose system treats the millions of working-class people as vermin.
This general staff can only be a communist party,
guided by the science of Marxism Leninism: the accumulated wisdom of more than
a century and a half of struggle by the working people of the whole world.
The CPGB-ML is fighting to build such a party and
welcomes class-conscious people to join its ranks. With your help, we can
organise to enable the working class to seize power and build a new society
where it is the interests of working-class people that will determine what we
build and how we live, rather than the requirements of the rich to make
profits.