Richard Pithouse
The riot has been a feature of English life for a lot longer than William Shakespeare, village cricket matches or, for that matter, The Clash.
The English have rioted against the enclosure of common land, fences, press gangs, factories, prisons, bread prices, tolls and banks. Arson, tearing down fences, smashing machines, looting and throwing prisons open are all time-honoured tactics.
The historians of the English riot stress that elites have, usually in hysterical panic, portrayed rioters as the rabble, and the riot as consequent to conspiracy, criminality, collective madness and inexplicable evil. But riots have their own organisation, discipline and purpose and this needs to be recognised.
The riots that have torn through England in recently are not a new phenomenon. But they are the most intense social disorder since 1981 when the Brixton Riots, largely a rebellion against racist policing, ripped into Margaret Thatcher’s third year in power.
But Thatcher, who would famously go on to deny that there was any such thing as society, didn’t learn her lesson the first time around.
The Poll Tax riot in central London in 1990 was a key factor in her downfall. She learnt the hard way that society does exist and that, from time to time, it can assert itself outside the official channels of engagement and against the law.
Here in South Africa, the SABC screened the footage of the Brixton Riots over and over again. The implicit message, supported by a similarly relentless attempt to reduce the South African drama to the Cold War and to link the ANC to the IRA and the PLO, was that our problems were not unique and were a matter of generic black criminality, international communist conspiracy and terrorism rather than injustice. The apartheid state wanted to claim that, like other states, it was dealing with mass perversity rather than politics.
Thirty years later, London has been convulsed by rioting on a massive scale. endlessly repeating the same four or five cliches, journalists, senior police officers, politicians and experts have lined up to declare this insurrection of the children of the urban poor as criminal, mad, evil and not, not in any way, political.
The spectacle of the same elites that bombed, occupied and looted Iraq and demanded that ordinary people pay for the financial crisis condemning the rioters for their “mindless violence” and “sickening greed” is distinctly cartoonish.
David Cameron appears as more of a baby-faced Mr Burns from The Simpsons than a Winston Churchill at war with the enemy within.
These riots did not come out of nowhere. They were triggered by the killing of a young man by the police. In a country where young black men are much more likely to be stopped and searched by the police than young white men, this is certainly not irrelevant.
These have not been political riots in the sense that recent riots in, say, Athens, have had an explicit political content. But these riots certainly do have a political context.
It’s estimated that last Monday night more than 30 000 young people seized control of parts of the city from the police.
Social abandonment of poor young people in England has been accompanied by their increasing social stigmatisation and a serious attempt to contain them with aggressive surveillance and policing.
The equally rapid privatisation and commodification of public spaces in English cities has further locked people out of a life in common.
All of this has been massively exacerbated by Cameron’s cuts to social spending that mean that crèches, youth clubs, sports facilities and libraries are being closed and opportunities for education withdrawn.
Evictions and spatial exclusion are becoming rampant. Cameron is ruthlessly exploiting the financial crisis to escalate the long attack, begun by Thatcher, on the class compromise forged after World War II.
The young people contained in decaying council estates are bombarded by relentless corporate propaganda conflating access to consumer goods with meaning, beauty and dignity.
Cameron likes to say that there are communities in England that are broken. But it is a society that tells young people that they have to consume to live with dignity but denies them work or the money to consume that is broken.
In the age of enclosure, rioters tore down fences. In the age of mechanisation, rioters smashed machines. It’s hardly surprising that in the age of consumerism, some people should leave their grim council estates for a night or two, occupy, smash and loot the temples of consumerism.
A moment of revolt is not necessarily revolutionary. It can be disastrous.
But the militant collective assertion of presence that has characterised these riots is unmistakable.
Young people, women and men, white and black, have refused to be invisible. They have seized public space and affirmed their existence in a society that holds them in contempt.
There has, to be sure, been vile and tragic behaviour amid the upheaval. And while vile acts must always be opposed, we should recall that in a riot every perverse act is hyper visible and will be exploited to stand in for and to condemn the whole. In the everyday passing of time the structural vileness of society, some of which, like the occupation of Iraq or the hundreds of deaths in policy custody in the UK, is murderous, is masked as normal and remains largely invisible.
Contempt
The time when poverty in England was a matter of scarcity has long passed. It’s also not consequent to the mysteries of a market requiring ever more arcane methods of divination by economists. It’s a matter of contempt.
The structural underpinning of that contempt, of the absence of any political will to deal with the situation, is that, unlike in the days when the working class could be represented by trade unions and the Labour Party, these young people have no institutionalised forms of representation. They are largely unorganised.
The English Left, often holding on to failed dogmas rather than immersing themselves in the living realities of the now, has largely been irrelevant to this insurrection.
Condemning the riotous youth of England and proposing more effective policing as the solution will only entrench their alienation and result in a greater risk of anti-social behaviour in the future. The only reasonable way forward is for England is to acknowledge the depth of alienation on the part of poor young people and to engage with these people to build a future in which they can see a viable and decent future for themselves.
After almost 20 years under the ANC, we have a state that responds to popular protest, even entirely peaceful protest, with vastly more brutality than the Tories are willing to grant their police in England.
In England plenty of people are baying, rabidly, for rubber bullets and water cannon to be brought home from Ulster and Basra, but so far, that line has not been crossed.
Here in South Africa, an old woman can be shot in the back, at point-blank range, with a fusillade of rubber bullets at an entirely peaceful protest without it even making the news.
And here in South Africa many of us remain invested in the fantasy that we are slowly building an inclusive nation and that the ANC will, in time, recognise and act on the suffering of so many people. We don’t have anything like the depth of alienation that is so palpable in the housing estates.
But if the ANC continues to play the game of pretending that popular protest is always a result of criminality and sinister machinations of various sorts, we will end up amid our own version of the smouldering ruins that are the underside of what the all too cosy nexus between big money, big media and the political elite has done to England over the past 30 years.
l Pithouse teaches politics at Rhodes University. This article appeared on The South African Civil Society Information Service website.