"I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore."

More ChunkyMark

Tottenham: "A riot is the language of the unheard."

"The proletariat, the lowest stratum of our present society, cannot stir, cannot raise itself up, without the whole superincumbent strata of official society being sprung into the air."

- Karl Marx & Freidrich Engels
The Communist Manifesto

It's the day after the night before in Tottenham and the process of analysing and understanding recent events begins, even though the full extent of what happened is as yet unknown. But, if any analysis of the events in Tottenham loots what happened of its political, historical and economic context then there is no way to make sense of any of it.

The process of getting to the essence of what lies beneath has to be done in an environment of doublethink and doublespeak in which politicians and the media champion the apparent popular uprisings against oppressive regimes in the Middle East -- the 'Arab Spring' -- yet simultaneously condemn and seek to suppress similar protests and uprisings against the illegitimate institutions of authority that they themselves represent. Remember too that condemnations of the violence in Tottenham that emanate from the political class come from the same people, organisations and entities who are responsible for commissioning and unleashing a decade of untold violence and barbarism on the peoples of Afghanistan, Iraq and more recently Pakistan (by drone) and Libya, the latter of which it is claimed is in support of a popular uprising but which is in fact no more than a reactionary CIA and NATO supported resource-plundering coup attempt against Gaddafi.

As is usual with any protest that flares up in some way, much of the analysis proffered comes from a place outside of any sort of wider context. In fact, the context of the analysis doing the rounds on the Idiot Lantern and radio networks only ventures as far back as two days in the whole of human history. So, if the media is to be believed, the history of Tottenham is just three days old and commences at the point at which 29 year old Mark Duggan was executed by police.

The events in Tottenham last night did not occur in a vacuum, nor are they an isolated example of the dire state and straits of peoples the world over.

A 16 year old girl meets 'community policing' in Tottenham

The Murder of Mark Duggan

Discussion of the shooting at point-blank range of Mark Duggan on Thursday night is, like the 'riots', totally devoid of any wider context. As is usual with police executions of members of the public, irrespective of who the victims are or what the underlying truth might be, details about the manner in which Duggan was killed are notably thin on the ground.

Eye-witnesses report that Duggan was lying prostrate on the ground when he was shot, that any weapon which may or may not have been in the cab was inside a sock rather than cocked, loaded and ready to fire upon teams of armed police officers, and the actual truth of the matter will inevitably be far more convoluted and 'nuanced' than that. Oh, and the bullet lodged in a police officer's radio which was apparently evidence of a shoot-out? Well, "Initial ballistics tests on the bullet... show it was a police issue bullet." Quelle surprise!

Those few details that are available are either sketchy, unverified and, without access to any of the evidence, completely unverifiable. This means that information available about the killing of Mark Duggan has either to be discounted entirely, or be taken on trust from a police, State and media that is still glimmering in the glowing embers of the News of the World / News International / Trinity Mirror Group / Police / Cabinet Office scandal that exposed the entire chain of governance and propaganda as thoroughly corrupt and rotten to the core. Fear not though because the entirely trustworthy Independent Police Complaints Commission is investigating.

Yet the context of recent events in Tottenham is still not wide enough to extract much in the way of meaning for we have yet to factor in the historical undercurrent of tensions between economically and opportunistically marginalised and excluded communities and the 'institutionally racist' police, or the specific history of police harassment and chastisement of Tottenham's ethnically diverse communities.

The history of police killings, and the extent of the lies propagated by the police as they collude to cover-up their crimes is long, detailed, bloody and shameful. Those days when anything announced by the police or the corrupt State in whose service the police operate is taken by anyone at face value are long gone, if indeed they ever existed among the working class and those members of society who have been all but written-off as the 'underclass'.

A Voice of Reason in the Chaos

"A riot is the language of the unheard."

- Dr. Martin Luther King

Haringey Youth Worker Symeon Brown interviewed by BBC News

Tottenham Youth Worker Symeon Brown, interviewed by BBC News, spoke of the "collective memory" of the people of Tottenham and how the events of 25 years ago on the Broadwater Farm Estate in Tottenham are ingrained in the DNA of the community, irrespective if they themselves were present at those events. The stories of police brutality and oppression, particuarly directed towards ethnic communities, have been passed down through the generations and serve as a cautionary tale of the nature of the oppression which they face by accident of birth and by dint of the same economic inequalities that see the State give handouts of over £1 trillion to banks that should by rights be bankrupt and confined to the graveyard of economic oppression, while seeing any forum of subsistence support for ordinary people and communities slashed and burned with equal speed in the name of faux austerity that does not apply if you happen to be an international banking corporation.

Brown continued, “There's a sense in the community that the police are 'not for us' and as we've seen with events this year like the student protest, there's a hostility between young people and police - and that has manifested even more so in 2011. The trigger for this was a young man being killed – this is the context that must not be forgotten."

Symeon Brown is correct in his analysis. The police are not for the people of Tottenham but rather against them in just the same way that the police are not for the majority of the people generally. That the police are against the majority of people has been repeatedly and amply demonstrated at various protests in recent years through the use of the illegal detention-without-charge tactics known as 'kettling', horse-mounted baton-charges and other violence meted out towards ordinary people peacefully protesting against a State entity that is equally acting and operating in a manner that is "not for us". The police are merely a sub-section of the bodies of armed men that form the barrier and buffer between the State, the ruling class of the 'haves' and the 'have-mores' and those who are ConDem'd to poverty, deprivation and squalor by the deliberate choices and actions of the State that clearly now only serves its own naked self-interest.

It is this collective memory of the people of Tottenham and people in the wider community that has resulted in what Symeon Brown termed the "removal of consent". The people of Tottenham, of all races, colours and creeds, and the students, workers and activists whose consciences and desire for greater social and economic equality inspires them to take to the streets in protest against the actions of the State have all collectively removed their consent, further adding to the illegitimacy of archaic and anachronistic institutions of authority that continue to believe it is their divine right to do whatever they like, whenever they like, without any equal and opposing reaction.

Whatever political capital any authority seeks to make from what happened in Tottenham on Saturday night, using emotive phrases such as "having the heart ripped out of the community", it is quite clear that far from there being any connection to that supposed heart of the community, what exists in actuality is an alienation from all that capitalism has lain before it and all that capitalism has subjected it to.

Opportunists, Provacateurs and Propaganda

The science of social deprivation

While the initial unrest and uprising may have occurred as a direct response to the murder of Mark Duggan and the lack of police response over the course of days to demands for answers from Duggan's family, friends and community, a degree of caution needs to be exercised with regard to what transpired when darkness fell. One needn't look too far nor listen too hard to discover information and accounts that suggest that at the very least the seemingly wanton destruction of property occurred as legions of police looked on without taking any action to prevent these events from occurring.

Worse yet, there are reports of 'outsiders' -- people otherwise unfamiliar to the Tottenham community -- appearing on the scene and exacerbating an already tense, precarious and highly-flammable situation.

For a State that is fully aware of its actions, the consequence of its actions, and the reactions likely to be provoked, in tandem with a State that is intent on seeking new methods and weaponry to add to its already wide arsenal to be used against the general public in the service of the unquestioning subservience it describes as 'public order', the escalation of events on Saturday night are a gift.

What happens next remains to be seen but we need only look as far as Northern Ireland to determine the State's preferred methods for suppressing popular opposition to its actions. And, as already outlined elsewhere on this blog, the prime movers in the establishment of the policing methodology and tactics used to suppress dissent in Northern Ireland are all now conveniently placed in the positions of authority to impose similar regimes on the people of the mainland.

If we are to learn anything from what has transpired it should perhaps be that the anger and energy that lay behind the unrest in Tottenham last night needs to be organised and directed into building the unity and solidarity of ordinary people to create that which the Ministry of Defence outlined as one of the greatest threats to the corrupt State; to build the very same thing that will help us all, collectively, find the way out of the mess to which we the people have been condemned by the ruling, property-owning and finance-capital classes:

The Middle Class Proletariat

The middle classes could become a revolutionary class, taking the role envisaged for the proletariat by Marx. The globalization of labour markets and reducing levels of national welfare provision and employment could reduce peoples’ attachment to particular states. The growing gap between themselves and a small number of highly visible super-rich individuals might fuel disillusion with meritocracy, while the growing urban under-classes are likely to pose an increasing threat to social order and stability, as the burden of acquired debt and the failure of pension provision begins to bite. Faced by these twin challenges, the world’s middle-classes might unite, using access to knowledge, resources and skills to shape transnational processes in their own class interest.

Don't worry about the economy, we don't need it

"The writer, when he is also an artist, is someone who admits what others don't dare reveal."

-- Elia Kazan

Don't worry about the economy, we don't need it. A statement that is at once bold, brave and easily dismissed as foolish, but it's a sentence that encapsulates as succinctly as possible something that desperately needs saying.

"Give me control of a nation's money and I care not who makes her laws."

-- Mayer Amschel Rothschild (1744 -1812)
Godfather of the Rothschild Banking Cartel
in 'The Creature from Jekyll Island', p. 218

Most of us, most of the time, have no need or want whatsoever for the financial economy that exists today; that is - a systemic legacy of historical ownership, control and operation. In fact, if anything, the financial economy is a shackle and a hindrance to more people, more of the time, than it is of any tangible benefit. Which is just as it has been intended by that class of people who champion their private property, profit and capital over the interests of the very people that wittingly or unwittingly facilitate their privilege. But still, don't worry about the economy, we don't need it.

What we do need however is a coherent way of understanding the essential nature of the permanent crisis of Capitalism and its economy, complete with an understanding of how the murderous U-SUK alliance Imperialism we see in the Middle-East and elsewhere is Capitalism in its most barbarous form. We need a correct understanding to ensure that this is the last ever crisis of Capitalism that anyone has to endure and, equally as crucially, to collectively plan, organise and establish new ways for how 6 billion-and-counting human beings go about co-existing with each other on the blue-green planet that hosts us.

An accurate and insightful understanding of what the system of Capitalism under which we live is, how it operates, and what the function of the State is inside the system of Capitalist operation, would include an understanding of how the State has established and maintained for itself a monopoly on the 'legitimate' use of violence against everything, which it deploys via bodies of armed men in defence of the minority interests of private property, capital, capitalists and capitalism. Private property is theft from and an affront to the rest of humanity and the capital is a historical, fictional legacy controlled by a handful people who manage the fiction to best suit the needs of themselves and their class; it is these things that the State, for all its pretence otherwise, exists to protect. Which, in the 21st century information age, is a somewhat backward and regressive basis for anything and this is the crux of the issue: the State's role as actor and enforcer in defence of private property and private capital, while keeping empty a million houses from those with no homes or health, and families unable to feed, clothe and educate their children, because 4 million people live under institutionalised and enforced poverty.

"The state, then, has not existed from all eternity. There have been societies that did without it, that had no idea of the state and state power. At a certain stage of economic development, which was necessarily bound up with the split of society into classes, the state became a necessity owing to this split. We are now rapidly approaching a stage in the development of production at which the existence of these classes not only will have ceased to be a necessity, but will become a positive hindrance to production. They will fall as inevitably as they arose at an earlier stage. Along with them the state will inevitably fall. Society, which will reorganise production on the basis of a free and equal association of the producers, will put the whole machinery of state where it will then belong: into the museum of antiquities, by the side of the spinning wheel and the bronze axe."

-- Friedrich Engels
from "The Origin of Family, Private Property and State" (1884)

Thankfully, outside the bounds of the public school theatrics of parliamentary politics and debate and mostly also outside of the bounds of mainstream media debate (with one or two notable exceptions like the discussion on Newsnight by middle-class pundits of impending "class warfare") people are beginning to explore what lies at the core of the system that enforces certain material conditions of existence. Better yet, they are beginning to explore solutions.

Todd Chretien on Lenin's "State and Revolution"

The State and Revolution, by Vladimir Il'ich Lenin

Since the snappily titled credit-crunch and the despotic actions of States around the world to sustain at any cost to workers the banking infrastructure and the workings of the financial markets of Capitalism the statement, "Don't worry about the economy, we don't need it" rings more true now than at any time before in history. And, while it is possible that some might label the statement "Don't worry about the economy, we don't need it" as the wild imaginings and inventions of an idiot, a 'conspiracy theorist', an Anarchist or a Marxist, or any other ad hominem 'insult' du jour -- as undoubtedly some will loudly decry it, and good luck to them all for their time is nearly up - the closing words of this article are given to a man of mental faculty, standing and repute beyond reproach:

Private capital tends to become concentrated in few hands, partly because of competition among the capitalists, and partly because technological development and the increasing division of labor encourage the formation of larger units of production at the expense of smaller ones. The result of these developments is an oligarchy of private capital the enormous power of which cannot be effectively checked even by a democratically organized political society. This is true since the members of legislative bodies are selected by political parties, largely financed or otherwise influenced by private capitalists who, for all practical purposes, separate the electorate from the legislature. The consequence is that the representatives of the people do not in fact sufficiently protect the interests of the underprivileged sections of the population. Moreover, under existing conditions, private capitalists inevitably control, directly or indirectly, the main sources of information (press, radio, education). It is thus extremely difficult, and indeed in most cases quite impossible, for the individual citizen to come to objective conclusions and to make intelligent use of his political rights.

-- Albert Einstein

A picture is worth a thousand words

Via jtf and Dr Sito.

Edit: Thanks to S in the comments for the link to additional inspirational, revolutionary art from the class antagonism archives of agitprop.
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Crisis and Resistance in the Neoliberal City

A short talk by Professor David Harvey, given in Baltimore on 18th April 2009.

Harvey's opening words include the following quote to indicate the significance of where everything is at, how it relates to where we go next, and the potential implications for the future of any actions that are taken now:

"How we come out of this crisis is almost certainly going to define the nature of the next crisis down the road, unless we decide to say, 'To hell with capitalist crises, to hell with capitalism.' This seems to me to be something we should really be thinking about."

[applause]

From then on in Harvey endeavours to provide information about recent history that seems to have been collectively forgotten, or deliberately ignored, in case anyone might learn anything from the timeless lessons of that which has gone before us.

Crisis and Resistance in the Neoliberal City

Video from the City from Below Conference of Professor Harvey’s remarks at the opening plenary. Baltimore, April 18, 2009. Read the transcript. Watch the rest of the plenary.