The violent response against OWS is an act of class war

84-year-old woman pepper sprayed by police in Seattle.

As David Harvey persuasively argues in his 2005 A Brief History of Neoliberalism, the primary consequence of neoliberalisation in practice has not been – as has been the main theoretical justification for neoliberalisation – to foster and strengthen growth in the neoliberalised economies, but rather the consolidation of class power in the hands of elites.  While neoliberalism has created opportunities for massive accumulation of capital, this capital has been in the hands of an increasingly small minority, and this accumulation has been been bought at the cost of destroying the social infrastructure which would permit, or better force, ‘wealth-creation’ to yield a general increase in the standard of living and prevent widening inequality.  Ultimately, neoliberalism isn’t, Harvey argues, so much concerned with growth – although of course it is part of the neoliberal formula that economic growth becomes of absolutely paramount important in our economic considerations, trumping concern for maintaining livable conditions for the general populace – as with the redistibution of power upwards, compromising both real conditions of life and the democratic structures put in place to keep the people in control of those conditions.

The Occupy movement’s stand against this attempt by elites to consolidate their economic and political power has been met with brutal censure (see, e.g., here, here and here).  In light of a proper understanding of the class dynamics of neoliberalism, we must understand the significance of this violence – namely, that it is an act of class war, a violent assault by the disciplinary apparatuses of the ruling classes against the people.

OWS – with its ‘We are the 99%!’ slogan – is reminding us of the importance of learning again how to use this vocabulary.  Class needs to be on the agenda, because economically ingendered inequality is rotting the heart of human civilisation.

Occupied Europe

One surprisingly useful and mature reaction to the riots – and one thoroughly repugnant reaction

I was surprised (I know it’s patronising to say, but I’m sure, given his extremely self-aware and self-critical comments in this piece, that he would acknowledge that his public persona justifies this surprise) at Russell Brand’s response in The Guardian to the riots.  While I don’t agree with everything Brand says (obviously, but since this is the internet I feel the need to state it), he is absolutely right in his driving sentiment:

These young people have no sense of community because they haven’t been given one. They have no stake in society because Cameron’s mentor Margaret Thatcher told us there’s no such thing.

If we don’t want our young people to tear apart our communities then don’t let people in power tear apart the values that hold our communities together.

Some comments on Brand’s piece by The Young Turks, here.

On the other hand, we have historian and ‘public intellectual’ David Starkey coming out with some thoroughly pernicious and reactionary remarks about the dangerous pervasiveness of ‘black culture’ among Britain’s youth:

That a highly educated person such as Starkey – and educated in the humanities, with all their supposedly ‘critical’ and ‘democratising’ potential* – can come out with there sorts of remarks is a testament to their expressly ideological character, but also to the incommensurability of the social experience of people like Starkey and our prime minister and the disenfranchised poor who took to the streets.  The ruling classes simply have very little understanding of the lives of many they claim to represent – and, given their ideological commitments, they’ll have a hard time obtaining such understanding.

Our rulers have no interest in helping us build community and unity in our nation, because these things are built on a basis of real equality and a sense of togetherness wholly alien to the majority of our insular political class.  We need cool heads and compassion if we’re to understand how to move forward.  (Never thought I’d write this sentence, but) we need more Russel Brands and fewer David Starkeys.

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* A caveat: An education in the humanities and social sciences can be an essential tool in gaining a critical consciousness of one’s social, economic, cultural and political environment.  There are no guarantees, however, and the humanities have a long history of involvement with a liberal ideology of ‘humanising’ moral self-cultivation which has nothing to do with anything critical or radical, not to mention the social sciences’ potential complicity with regimes of disciplinarity and control – as many working in the social sciences came themselves to realise in the late ’60s and early ’70s.  I talked a little about the critical potential of the humanities in this post on New College from back in June.

WE NEED clear heads, solidarity and community action to reclaim our streets – DON’T give a free reign to demonisation and police and state control!

There’s an e-petition circulating calling on the government to deny welfare support to those found to have been involved in the riots.  This is 100% the wrong reaction.

These riots are taking place against the political background of the neoliberal assault on community, unity and solidarity in British society.  Whether the rioters are engaging in an ill targeted protest against this assault or merely reflecting its erosion of mutual respect and solidarity within our communities, further such assaults on what remains of our already embattled welfare state will only further undermine the fabric of our society and ultimately lead to more events of this sort.

A positive approach is the only approach worth taking.  Don’t demonise the youth.  Don’t call for a strengthening of the state disciplinary apparatus.  Don’t let the riots be an apology for the ideology of the ruling elite.

This is the sort of response we need: a peaceful march through north London, organised by local community activists, ending in an assembly where people can express their views on recent events.

The organisers’ statement is as follows:

Statement 10/8/2011

A North London Unity Demonstration
Saturday 13th August
Assemble Gillet Square, Dalston, N16 at 1pm. March to Tottenham Green, N15

Our communities need a united response to both the riots and the causes of despair and frustration that can result in riots.

We demand:
• A CULTURE OF VALUING, NOT DEMONISING YOUTH AND UNEMPLOYED PEOPLE.
• SUPPORT FOR THOSE AFFECTED BY THE RIOTING, INCLUDING THE IMMEDIATE RE-HOUSING OF PEOPLE MADE HOMELESS AS WELL AS GRANTS FOR AFFECTED
SMALL BUSINESSES.
- COMMUNITY LED REGENERATION AND RESTORATION OF DAMAGED AREAS.
• REVERSAL OF ALL CUTS TO YOUTH SERVICES IN OUR BOROUGHS
• NO CUTS TO PUBLIC SERVICES! INSTEAD, INVESTMENT INTO AND REGENERATION OF OUR COMMUNITIES, INCLUDING HOUSING, JOBS, EDUCATION AND SPORTS
FACILITIES.
• AN INDEPENDENT COMMUNITY INQUIRY INTO POLICING METHODS IN OUR BOROUGHS. AND AN END TO STOP AND SEARCH.
• AVAILABILITY OF LEGAL SUPPORT FOR ALL THOSE PEOPLE ARRESTED BY POLICE – YOUNG PEOPLE FACE POTENTIAL SENTENCES THAT WILL AFFECT THEM, THEIR FAMILIES AND THEIR WIDER COMMUNITIES FOR YEARS TO COME.

We are responding to the events of the last few days, in particular the Tottenham protest over the killing of Mark Duggan and the riots that followed in Tottenham and Hackney.

By coming together and calling for unity we want to encourage all sections of our local communities, young and old,
black and white, residents and workers, to work together to find solutions to some of our long-standing problems.

We know there are all kinds of strong feelings and differing views. We do not claim to represent the whole community, but merely seek to promote unity in the communities in which we live.

Simply labelling rioters as opportunistic criminals does little to relieve tensions and provides a poor explanation for the worst riots in decades. While the shooting of Mark Duggan provided the trigger, against a background of oppressive policing, especially towards ethnic minorities, the root causes are deeper.

Our communities have been blighted by high levels of deprivation, poverty and lack of opportunity for decades. Inequality is growing and recent funding cuts to local services, particularly youth facilities, along with rising unemployment, and cuts to EMA and benefits have exacerbated the conditions in which sections of frustrated young people turned to rioting, which unfortunately has resulted in people losing their homes and small/family businesses losing their livelihoods.

Britain is a wealthy country, but the economic crisis created by greedy bankers and financial speculators is further impoverishing already poor areas like Tottenham and Hackney. The £390 billion of combined wealth of the richest 1,000 people in Britain should be redirected to fund the services we all need.

In the last few months we have seen mass local protests against cuts, student occupations to defend free education, half-a-million strong demonstration on March 26, and 800,000 public service workers out on strike on June 30th.

We need to build on these and other inspiring local and national struggles. Let’s work together for a decent society, based not on greed, inequality and poor conditions, but on justice, freedom, sharing and co-operation.

North London Unity Demonstration supported by the Haringey Alliance for Public Services, Hackney Alliance for Defending Public Serices, Day-Mer (Turkish and Kurdish Community Centre), NLCH (North London Community Centre), Day-Mer Youth, Alevi Cultural Centre, Fed-Bir, Kurdish Community Centre: Roj Women, Halkevi, Gik-Der (Refugee Workers Cultural Association). Britania Peace Council: Hundred Flowers Cultural Centre. TOHUM. Socialist Party, Youth Fight For Jobs, Right To Work, Red Pepper.

This is good stuff.  More of this, please, and less shooting ourselves in the foot with angry, revenge orientated, short termist thinking.

Darcus Howe on the riots

Writer and broadcaster Darcus Howe with incisive comments on the riots:

The BBC interviewer tries to plug the party line (so much for the BBC’s ‘neutrality’) and paint him as confused, but Howe’s having none of it.

Nina Power on the Tottenham riots

Nina Power (who blogs at Infinite ThØught) has written a good piece for The Guardian encouraging us to understand the riots in London in their proper context rather than simply to engage in self-righteous and ultimately pointless moralising.

Many of the online comments on the piece talk about ‘left wing apologists’, the ‘pointless’, ‘mindless’ and ’causeless’ nature of the rioting, and the fact that the riots of the ’80s to which many have likened them achieved very little.  But this misses the point!  This rioting is not political protest; it’s largely not politically motivated so far as I know.  This isn’t ‘the revolution’.  The point is that these riots are happening in areas where the economic conditions are dire and where young people have no good reason to expect to be able to lift themselves out of poverty, nor to expect the state to assist them in doing so, nor to trust the disciplinary tools of the state to work in their interests.  You can only expect people to take so much – and then there are consequences.  If you attack the economic and ideological preconditions for social cohesion and community, then don’t be surprised when the bonds that maintain social ‘order’ break.

The riots aren’t a solution to anything, but nor are they the root problem.  They are a symptom of repeated assaults on the fabric of British society by its ‘leaders’.  They are signs pointing us towards the root problems and we’ll ultimately resolve nothing unless we follow them to their source.  To ‘deal with’ the riots at a superficial level will only suppress these root tensions – until we encounter them again further down the line…

There is further commentary on the riots and the press’s coverage of them over at Richard Seymour’s blog, Lenin’s Tomb.

Tory ideology renders modern Britain a mystery

David Cameron must feel like he’s living in a J.G. Ballard novel, violence and chaos irrupting in the streets in an utterly mysterious degeneration of all ‘good sense’ and ‘moral decency’ on the part of a large section (or perhaps just an ‘irresponsible minority’) of the electorate.

In the face of the riots in Tottenham, the government’s reaction is one of denunciation and moral approbation.  The official statement from Downing Street, as reported on The Guardian‘s website:

The rioting in Tottenham last night was utterly unacceptable.

There is no justification for the aggression the police and the public faced, or the damage to property.

There is now a police investigation into the rioting and we should let that process happen.

In the face of this irruption of anger, frustration and civil unrest, the government’s reaction is one of outrage, but also of incomprehension.  While Downing Street is keen to emphasise its inability to see any justification for these actions, its attempt to solve the problem through policing is, as ever, a sign that equally lacking is any sight of an explanation.

And, as ever, the problem – the obstacle to the government’s comprehension of the tensions manifesting among the populace – is a crude individualism, for which a society is nothing but an aggregate of autonomous, freely acting individuals.  From such a perspective, this rioting loses its significance as a symptom.  The social field is rendered devoid of structure and depth.

This lack of understanding of the multi-layered, emergent constitution of the social is accompanied by a widening gulf between the government and the people, where the decisions made by the former are ever more insulated from their effects on the people and from the people’s reaction to these decisions.  Only a governing body that has lost all pretence of the proper fear of those it claims to represent could so readily condemn its own people.  Such condemnation represents an attempt to exercise an entirely inappropriate kind of authority.

As the police are deployed with ever greater force and desperation, the government more and more exhibits its feelings of hostility towards the British people.  This is a hostility born of fear of the unknown – the same hostility which has led David Cameron to denounce ethno-cultural diversity in Britain as a failed experiment – for the tensions irrupting on the streets of north London are foreign to the sheltered, privileged worlds of our Old Etonian plutocrats.

So, all the signs point to this: that Britain is a social world in schism.  Not between declining ‘western values’ and the spectre of ‘Islamic fundamentalism’, as right-wing ideologues would have us believe, but between the people and those tasked with executing its will.  How are we supposed to regard British democracy as anything but a sham if all ‘our’ government deigns to visit upon us are cuts to our services, ‘security’ crackdowns and judgements as to our moral degradation?

community through exclusion

I’ve just read Owen Hatherley’s excellent piece on ‘austerity nostalgia and ironic authoritarianism in recession Britain’ in the latest Radical Philosophy (which I thoroughly recommend reading; if anyone wants to borrow my copy, please let me know, as the University of York library doesn’t stock it….grumble grumble…..), and it’s brought to my attention the phenomenon of ‘Community Payback’.

Community Payback is an idea struck upon by London Probation, part of the National Probation Service (NPS) (which, along with the Prison Service, is part of the delightfully New Labour-sounding National Offender Management Service).  Offenders serving community service for petty crimes can be ordered to perform their service as part of a police-escorted gang, all adorned in fetching orange hi-vis jackets emblazoned with ‘COMMUNITY PAYBACK’, paraded in front of the community against whom they have offended.  This community is encouraged to come and peruse this spectacle of hi-vis humiliation, and also to have a say in what tasks the offenders should undergo (the options presented are generally tasks that would have gone undone had the government actually had to pay for the required labour).

This scheme raises various concerns.  First of all, there’s the obvious attempt to rouse and appeal to the base reactionary sentiments of those growing sections of the electorate who feel themselves to be living in a time of social collapse and wish to lash out against ‘unruly’ elements in society, in the hopes that a bit of good old fashioned clip-round-the-ear discipline will set ‘em straight. The presence of the term ‘payback’ in the vicinity of the term ‘community’ is sufficient to indicate that the latter’s polymorphous web of implications is firmly orientated in the direction of a reactionary in-group paranoia of the outsider.

This immediate reactionism is just the surface manifestation, however, of a deeper ideological effect.  The role of community input in the Community Payback scheme is an interesting example of the liberal pseudo-democracy of the reality TV poll applied to the issue of criminal punishment.  Clearly the intent is to give the sense that crimes committed against the community are dealt with by the community, a reality which the presence of an inegalitarian policing institution speaks strongly against.  This is of course a classic example of the sort of hands-off democracy that permeates our society: the people’s input consists only in influencing the whims of specialised institutions that have already decided to a great extent the coordinates within which these decisions can be made.

Another substantive ideological implication of the scheme – which I have already touched on at the level of its blatant reactionary branding – is the way in which it tries to establish a sense of community on the basis of a ‘normal’ in-group (‘good, honest, hard-working folk who pay their council tax and keep themselves to themselves’ etc.) against a criminalised underclass of ‘troublemakers’.  Hence, crimes are not committed within the community but against it.  We should even go so far as to say that the exclusion of its criminal elements is supposed to be constitutive of a community; Community Payback builds a sense of community by turning the in-group against a fantasised criminal out-group, a fantasy made flesh under the gaudy mark of an orange hi-vis jacket.  (The works of Alain Badiou, Slavoj Žižek and Giorgio Agamben are invaluable in the theorising of this sort of manoeuvre.)

This logic of criminality as constitutively excluded from community also helps to prop up an understanding of criminality which emphasises individual decision and underplays systemic factors.  Criminality is not seen as a product of a system in which we are all situated – ‘normal’ and criminal alike – as a pathological consequence of the failings of our own society, but as the product of the decisions of individuals parasitic on the community.

One last ideological consequence is the role of the spectacle in Community Payback and its relation to Britain’s culture of surveillance.  Besides the viciousness of the public humiliation of prisoners, the Community Payback scheme is an example of the present regimes commitment to a conjunction of surface spectacle with a more deeply ingrained opacity of process.  This invitation to gawp at the punishment of those who breach the rule of law – dressed up as a breaching of the sanctity of the community’s peace – forms both a stark contrast to the lack of transparency enforced by anti-terror legislation, such as the infamous law against photographing the police, and a strange mimesis of the government’s own neurotic desire for total surveillance.

The one positive point of the Community Payback scheme is that its rhetoric of the self-policing community, although it twists this image into something wholly pernicious, exposes a potential for self-organisation which belies the reality and the real intent of the scheme.  Criminality needs to be understood in the context of the internal dynamics of a community, not as its constitutive exclusion; further, a genuinely self-organised community would have to deal with this criminality through a logic of care and self-correction of systemic mistakes, not through a logic of spectacular exclusion managed by specialised institutions.

This is obviously too big a topic to get into the details of here, but I hope to post some more ideas of an egalitarian treatment of criminality in the future.

Egalitarian order, egalitarian police

The video posted on the Guardian website today showing the treatment by police of two members of Fit Watch who were documenting police activity at the Kingsnorth climate camp last year has made clear once again the need for a redefinition of the role of the police.

The police are agents of order.  What should we make of such an agency?  Increasingly, the police act in the name of an ideal of order which is counterposed to the freedom of the people; the people come to be seen as a threat to order, and thus as the enemy of the police.  This is an untenable situation – if the police are to be a tolerable presence in the world of a free people then order must be understood to play the role of a condition of the possibility of a social space in which freedom can exist.

Order clearly plays a role in any conception of a social space in which freedom is seen as the freedom to be left alone by other individuals and by the state.  But does order have a place in the dialectic of the richer freedom of an egalitarian social situation?  If there is egalitarian order, it must take the form not of authority but of organisation.  That is, an egalitarian order must be the self-imposed order of a self-organising collective, not the top-down order imposed on the people by the authority of a transcendent state.  Hence, order – in the sense of organisation – is inherent to the dialectic of an egalitarian collective: without order-as-organisation, a generic, non-hierarchical collective will lack the structural integrity required to avoid the need for order-as-authority.

What does this redemption of order imply for the police as agents of order?  Can there be an egalitarian police?  Such an idea is certainly problematic, insofar as the police – as a specific subset of the social situation tasked with the upkeep of order – seem to be bound to the imposition of order on the people by a group which is external to the people – conceived as the generic part of the situation.  The order that comes not from the generic situation but from a specific subset of the situation is order-as-authority; order-as-organisation must come from the generic as such.

If the police are to be egalitarian, then, the order of which they are agents must also be an order to which they are subject – the order-as-organisation of the generic.  If the order which the police promulgate comes from them and is imposed by them on the people, then it cannot be egalitarian.  An egalitarian police is a police that promulgates the order that the people themselves have wrought.  An egalitarian police must be wholly accountable to the people, and must seek to perpetuate an order that pre-exists them, an order born of the organisation of the people.  Complete subordination is the only appropriate relation that a specific subset tasked with the maintenance of order can have to the generic people in an egalitarian situation.

In a genuinely egalitarian space, of course, the notion of police – as the subset, ‘agents of order’ – becomes meaningless.  Every subject of the space is an agent of order, in the sense that they subjectivate the order-as-organisation of the egalitarian situation.  However, within the existing social space of the UK, where the people are not generally organised as a generic multitude, an initial egalitarianisation of order and of the police can take the form of maximal accountability of the police to the populace, and of a revision of police attitudes.  The police cannot see themselves as agents of state-order against the people; they must be agents – first and foremost – of the people.  And agents not of our interests, as these are dictated to us by the demographic calculations of the state, but of our will.