Some truths about last August’s uprisings
When young
working-class people rose up in anger last August, the representatives and
spokespersons of the ruling class did their best to misrepresent the whole
affair. It was, they claimed, the activity of criminal gangs, which took
advantage of a ‘misunderstanding’ over police action in Tottenham, north London
to launch a criminal looting spree in various parts of London and other towns
and cities.
The conclusion drawn by the
mouthpieces of imperialism was that the only suitable response was to crack
down hard. We have subsequently witnessed draconian custodial sentences being
meted out. And most of those sentenced seem to have little to do with gangs.
There has, of course, been a notable lack of action against police officers who
dragged a young black man from a taxi in Tottenham and shot him point blank in
the head, or against those who give the orders.
Those who speak for our monopoly
capitalist ruling class knew full well the inaccuracy (to put it kindly) of their
pronouncements. To call it spin is an understatement. They were using the
tactic of Goebbels – to deliberately and cold-bloodedly tell and repeat lies,
lies, and more lies to try to make them stick.
This version of events was refuted at
the time by the Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist) in
leaflets, and a special supplement was added in early August to the
August/September issue of its journal, Proletarian. The opening article
of the supplement began:
“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.”
It went on:
“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 article added that it was the
shooting of Mark Duggan by the police in the early hours of 4 August,
surrounded as it was by the usual police lies and attempts to cover-up and
spread confusion about what really happened, that was the immediate catalyst
for the uprising. Empathy with the murdered man was deeper than sympathy, it
evoked all the stops and searches, all the harassment, all the insults and
put-downs, all the physical battering and beating that are the regular
experience of so many working-class young people, proportionally more of whom
are black but also many of whom are white. This, linked up with chronic and
ever harsher economic deprivation, generated an anger that erupted onto the
streets.
The Guardian and LSE report initial findings of
joint research
During the week beginning 4 December
the Guardian carried a series of page spreads, under the strap-line Reading
the Riots, giving some of the early results of research carried out in
collaboration by the Guardian newspaper and the London School of
Economics,
The study “interviewed 270 people
who rioted in London, Birmingham, Liverpool, Nottingham, Manchester and Salford”, collecting “1.3m words of first person accounts from rioters”. There
was a separate but connected analysis at Manchester University of “2.5m
riot-related tweets.”
The study repudiates the ranting of
the mouthpieces of imperialism and corroborates the above quotations from Proletarian.
The first Guardian article on
5 December began:
“Widespread anger and frustration
at the way police engage with communities was a significant factor behind the
summer riots in every major city where disorder took place.” The article goes on: “Rioters revealed that a complex mix of
grievances brought them to the streets, but analysts appointed by the LSE
identified distrust and antipathy towards the police as a key driving force.”
(Blame the police: Why the rioters say they took part – Guardian, front
page, 5 December 2011. All the quotations below come from the Guardian
of that week, unless otherwise stated.)
It further reported that 85%
of those interviewed said policing was an important or very important factor in
causing the riots. 73% had been stopped and searched in the last 12 months.
David Cameron had been quick to
dismiss the idea that poverty was a factor in the disorder. “These riots
were not about poverty” he said, “That insults the millions of people
who, whatever the hardship, would never dream of making others suffer like
this.”
This was blatantly wrong. The
independent panel Cameron himself set up has now concluded that poverty was an
important factor – more than half of those who had appeared in court had come
from the most deprived 20% of areas in Britain.
86% of those interviewed by the Guardian/LSE
study said poverty was an important or very important factor in causing the
riots (and 68% of the population at large gave a similar response), 59% were
from the most deprived 20% of areas of England, and 59% of those not in
education were unemployed.
Cameron cares not a jot about
millions of people suffering hardship. He is concerned about the large
businesses; he is concerned about the interests of the ruling class. Those who
went on the streets in August did not set out to make other ordinary people
suffer. Whenever the working class fights back some of its numbers get hurt.
But the Guardian reports recurring statements of morality from those
interviewed. It refers to many instances of people saying that looting was
restricted to large enterprises. One said that JD Sports sold Nike which
“blatantly commits world crimes in factories and sweatshops, so they’re getting
their comeuppance now.” Another told how local participants in the uprising
directed looting away from their small local shops.
The Guardian reports one young
man in Tottenham as saying: “I still to this day don’t class it as a riot, I
think it was a protest”. And the Guardian adds: “He was not
alone. A constant theme emerging from interviews with the rioters across
England was that they harboured a range of grievances and it was anger and
frustration that was being expressed on the streets in early August…..They
expressed it in different ways, but at heart what the rioters talked about was
a pervasive sense of injustice. For some this was economic: the lack of money,
jobs or opportunity. For others it was more broadly social, not just the
absence of material things, but how they felt they were treated compared with
others.”
The Guardian stated:
“Despite David Cameron saying gangs were “at the heart” of the disturbances,
evidence shows they temporarily suspended hostilities. The effective four-day
truce – which many said was unprecedented – applied to towns and cities across England. On the whole, the research found that gang members played only a marginal part in
the riots.”
On the other hand, the Guardian
reported: “Again and again, rioters from different parts of the country
described the police as a gang.” For example, a 21 year old student in
central London said “Police are a gang…they can pull out shanks [knives]
or guns and start shooting…They shot Mark Duggan; they’re the gang. Look what
they done and they think it’s OK. That’s what a gang is.”
Experiences
of police brutality
This chimed in with the experiences
of many participants. A 17 year -old Muslim man recounted how at 13 he had been
arrested and a policeman had joked about asking him where Saddam (Hussein) was.
He said “I hate the police on the street, I hate them from the bottom of my
heart.”
A 34 year-old from north London
described being thrown into a police van at the age of twelve “handcuffed,
beaten, kicked, spat on and called ‘nigger’ and ‘black bastard’” He said
that he had never got over his anger with the police and spoke further of three
occasions when charges were fabricated against him, one involving a knife. He
said, “These are the types of things that if you ask some people on the
other side of the fence or from a posher community or people that have never
been in trouble, if you said to them: ‘Oh, I got stitched up by the police with
a knife,’ they are saying: ‘No, police don’t do things like that.’ Well,
believe me, that is what happened.”
But there was general agreement among
the interviewees that they had not taken part in race riots. Indeed there was a
unity among all those taking part, a recognition of a common enemy.
One 33 year-old man from Liverpool,
who described how he had taken part in smashing up a police station said: “I’ve
got friends that have been abused in police custody before….I can’t relate
being a black killed, because I’m a white man still alive, but I could relate
to injustice within the police force”. In fact this man is saying that his
experience does mean that he related to the killing of Mark Duggan, that
all the divisive propaganda which prompts him to state that he cannot relate
was in fact not successful in preventing his sense of empathy and unity.
Young
people recognised their power
One 20 year-old in London is quoted
as saying: “We had [the police] under control. We had them on lock.
On smash. Running away from us. We weren’t running away from the police. They
was the criminals today. We was enforcing the law. Getting them out of our town
because they ain’t doing nothing good for no one.” It is remarkable that
this statement carries the aspiration that the proletariat is the ruling class
in waiting! It is an aspiration that needs to spread throughout the working
class.
This was further exemplified by a
college student aged 20 who wants to be a primary school teacher. She walked
with friends in Peckham on the Monday 8 August with her face covered. It was
quiet and they found a police car, smashed the windows and stole the radio and
set the car on fire. She said: “It felt good, that police car, it felt
really good. Especially when my friend took the radio and started saying all
this hullabaloo over the radio and confusing them and all that. It was fair for
us to do that.”
She went on to explain this fairness,
saying that the police had recently broken her little brother’s nose, adding “My
little brother, he’s always in trouble with the police. They have no respect,
especially for my mum who’s just a little old woman. She’s always polite and
stuff as well and they’re always rude to my mum – had no respect for any of us.
You get to the police station and they think they can sit there and take the
piss out of you so, obviously, in my eyes, I don’t see them as good people.”
A 19 year old student from Hackney said,
“I think the looting came about because it was linked to
police. We’re showing them that yeah, we’re bigger than the police, we are
actually bigger than the police. Fair enough we are breaking the law and
everything, but there’s more of us than there are of you. So if we want to do
this we can do this. And you won’t do anything to stop us.”
Economics
and politics
There was further emphasis of the
influence of economic conditions. A 16 year-old schoolboy in
Hackney said “Police don’t think we are rioting for a reason. They believe
we are rioting because Mark Dugan died and we have no other reason. Like we’re
rioting cos they’re not giving us nothing to do, they’re taking away EMA [educational
maintenance allowance], taking away free travel, taking away certain
allowances that teenagers have and they’re not replacing it with anything
good.”
It was also clear that the uprising
sidelined bourgeois party politics. Noting that “Politicians in general came
in for much criticism”, the Guardian quoted a 23 year-old from Liverpool who said: “It doesn’t really matter if it is Labour or Conservative because
the people behind the scenes are always the same.” His perception should be
an example to those who call themselves communist, yet have not grasped this
elementary fact.
ACPO
response
The Guardian gave a quotation
from the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) in response to the report
on its study. The quotations above, however ungrammatical, are to the point,
concise and crystal clear compared with the following ACPO statement:
“Of course the way in which events
took place and were seen by others through the media had an impact on
confidence in the police, and it is important that lessons are learned from all
the different processes and reports investigating what happened. In a survey of
270 rioters, it would be quite odd if a high proportion did not cite the police
as a factor in their behaviour. But August showed the ability of our police to
restore order using robust, common sense policing in the British way.”
This is full of mainly meaningless
clichés. Presumably it is the “robust, common sense policing in the British
way” which, having lost control on the streets, being outnumbered and out
manoeuvred, then proceeded to arrested so many people in an arbitrary way in
preparation for draconian sentencing by the courts. Indeed it was this “robust,
common sense policing in the British way” which generated the resentment
and anger that brought the young people onto the streets in the first place. It
has indeed been getting tougher and tougher (more robust?) as conditions of
working-class people have got worse and worse. It targets the poorest to keep
them from protesting against the intolerable economic burdens heaped on them,
and at the same time does so in a racist way in an attempt to divide
resistance. It is notable that those on the streets reported that they were not
race riots. The uprising was against the police and racist policing, and the
unbearable economic conditions. This generated a unity which overcame
divisions.
It must be mentioned that “robust
common sense policing in a British way” has a notorious tradition of
draconian brutality practised in this country in past years, even more draconian
and savage when practised abroad. Now it is reported by Tom Whitehead, Home
Affairs Editor of the Telegraph, on its website on 20 December, that Her
Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary has said that plastic bullets and water
cannon could be used by officers in future disturbances under proposed new “rules
of engagement” for the police. It also stated that the use of firearms
would be justified if the risk to public safety was sufficient.
But the irony is that the more
draconian the police and other arms of the state become in order to oppress
those bearing the ever harsher economic burden, the more does it breed
resistance.
More
Government platitudes
The Guardian of 10 December
reports on an interview that day with Iain Duncan Smith, the work and pensions
secretary, “surveying Britain after the summer riots.” It reports him as
saying that a “get rich quick” celebrity culture exemplified by The X
Factor and the dysfunctional lives of footballers has created a society “out
of balance”.
It says he warned that there was “every
chance” riots would recur unless structural reforms were made to repair “communities
in which so many families are broken.” He also said “Luck is great, but
most of life is hard work.”
For the majority of those interviewed
by the Guardian, and many, many more, the opportunity for hard work just
is not there. There are no jobs because capitalism in crisis cannot provide
them. Where is Duncan Smith going to find the “structural reforms” when
the government of which he is part is hell bent on destroying the health
service, education, social services and benefits, not to mention pensions, in
an attempt to shove the burden of the crisis onto the working class? It will
only add to the anger that brought people onto the streets, and indeed will add
to their number.
It is not broken families but a
broken system that is the cause of the ills against which the young rose up. It
was indeed a rage against capitalism – capitalism in its decadent, moribund,
decaying phase – imperialism. The “celebrity culture” is a symptom, not
the cause of a society “out of balance”. What is out of balance is that
what is produced by capitalism is out of reach of the masses of the people who
need it. Cameron bangs on about the “broken society”; it is imperialism
itself which is broken, which cannot deliver a decent life to the working
class, bringing deeper and deeper crises and more and more wars.
The cure is
to get rid of imperialism
The Guardian/LSE research, no doubt
intended to enlighten those who want to perpetuate the present system, has
given some valuable voice to the participants themselves. They show anger,
determination, ingenuity, the ability to work in organised unity, and some
remarkable understanding. This last has to be built upon. What is needed is that
this determination and ability to organise and build unity in action is given a
direction that will precisely target imperialism. That direction can only come
from a Marxist-Leninist understanding that has to be linked up with the
struggle of the working class for freedom from exploitation and oppression.