The Articulation of the Riots

This article highlights the flash points and current affairs which have taken place in recent times here in the UK. It represents a perspective not likely to be articulated by popular media outlets. It is important to understand where we are today, in British society, as the combination of social action and rhetoric being enacted all over the UK will have severe ramifications on future events. To ignore the scenarios presented in this article will result in placid acceptance of the domination of a form of capitalism that will drive Europe further towards the right, and authoritarian domination, and leave the coming capitalist catastrophe on the tracks of a collision course with the future. A scenario which can be salvaged but as your cynicism suggests, may not be realised.

Under the guise of the UK riots, the scenario of a catastrophic failure of all the vestiges of western society is imminent. Seen in, the reduction of welfare, health care, any sort of equal schooling and in recent times, calls for oppressive measures to deal with a very troubled part of the population, the unemployed and the working class, these sectors of society particularly in London live side by side with a class which earns 300% more than their neighbours. Such a circumstance will and has caused great resentment and class antagonism of irreprehensible proportions.

The measures being taken to punish those involved in the riots have been disproportionate and quite frankly, a shambles, and has made clear who the law is here to serve. To make single mothers homeless as a result of their son being caught up in the fear, anxiety, and in-articulation of the riots is madness, do you expect them to re-enter society better people once they have been left to rot on the streets of London? They will in all likely hood resort to drugs and further crime as a result of this type of fascist policy. A mother who does not live in a council house will not be evicted and thus the law is not one for all and all for one, but a favouring of one class in society against another.      

It must be highlighted here that it is capitalism and class which is at the heart of the riots we have seen across the UK, not this moral degeneration that the government media and ill informed sects of society seem to espouse. For all those whose life is anything close to a class struggle recognises that the riots although spontaneous and home wrecking, miss directed, but they were very very political! Only a fool would fail to see that.

British society has tried to fob the causation of the riots on to some sort of moral degeneracy. In the most minimalistic sense this reigns true, but more poignantly it MUST be recognised that the causation of the riots has been caused by a socio-economic system which caters for the suppression of all those who rioted, and in doing so, further suppressed themselves, by way of ratcheting up the devices the government uses to suppress this section of society.    

If ever there was a better example of capitalist ideology it’s the way the government and the public have reacted to the riots... “it’s a sickness and a behavioural problem from the ‘lowest of the low’ in British society”. This is a stark example of the neo-liberal capitalist agenda – devolve all responsibility and push the blame onto everyone but those who have been endemically responsible for the riots, the ruling class, those who have exacerbated the class divide and are now suppressing all those who acted out in bouts of rage. The rioters acted out in large part due to their in-articulation to oppose the squalor the state has catered for them to live under and an inability to challenge the ever increasing authoritarian state that we are currently living under the transition of.

It is a daily occurrence of mine and those like me to feel alienated and suppressed by the current ruling system and to be unable to speak out and be listened to, our worst nightmare is coming true. That is to sit in a room full of people and when it is your turn to talk nothing comes out, you are unable to say anything, and your words fall on deaf ears. The frustration and sometime anger that this causes is difficult to put into words but it would be something similar to suffocating, or being claustrophobic and put into a clay mine. A surge of chemicals rush through your body leaving a weakness followed by emptiness, a space where life becomes truly pointless. The thoughts which embody your being are ignored and you become an empty vessel amongst a crowd of people baying for the blood of anyone who does not conform to a general consensus, devised to cause the very feeling that an eloquent speaker would deject until they can speak no longer.

To take the opportunity away from those who need to be heard the most is to trap a human animal in a cave and to let them starve. If that human animal has any passion and gustier then they will become distraught, scared, and angry, if the opportunity was to arise, a window to react to the suffocation expressed by those around them then it becomes your duty to respond. As was the case when the upholders of the law expressed in no uncertain terms that they were above the law when the police and the investigators of the police, the IPCC decided to lie to the community who had suffered the loss of a fellow, whom, it would seem, played too closely to the precipice of citizen and criminal. When that community responded in protest their actions fell on deaf ears. The dance on the periphery of such boundaries would seem to be an intrinsic part of the capitalist culture we live under.

We see this dance across all sects of society but the ones who’s dancing is cringe-worthy and pitiful are, yes it will be re-iterated here, the bankers who duped the world into believing they were full of cum and tenacity, whereas in reality they were limp and infertile. And the politicians who were seen to be the representatives of society as their position suggests, were diabolical examples of those who represent our society, dipping into the tax payers pockets in order to maintain, which has now become apparent, unsustainable lifestyles, greedy, corrupt, and, although the word is debatable ‘immoral lives’. Its rich coming from Cameron and Clegg that the destruction of property is a sick and ‘immoral’ act and something which should be punished with the full force of the law, in a manner which would seem fetishistic when Cameron speaks of such ‘righteous’ punishment. They both have track records of destroying property. Cameron as a member of a class elitist, bourgeois, club which spits in the face of every decent working human being, the bullingdon club and its ideology is a culture which needs to be abolished above all else, and Clegg who has a criminal record of setting fire to green houses when he was 16. Most people know what it’s like to dance along the precipice of legality and illegality with little exceptions, as law is a murky realm of rule, divide, and conquer.

When politicians speak to the communities affected by the riots, the residents of those communities have been alienated and disconnected with the rhetoric and actions taken and spoken by such politicians. And now when politicians show an interest it is too late, the vestiges of salvaging those who see the riots as a political act are too far removed from the double speak and ineffectuality of a political system which claims no ideology, a system which claims to deal mainly with economic fulfilment. Yet this very system seeps with a goal to keep all those who have not been fortunate to reap the dirty money flowing through the hands of all the ruling elite, the bourgeois. The workers and the unemployed are alienated from any meaningful political process.

The working class may only be subjects of the state and not citizens. The rights afforded to the wealthy, from quality health care to quality education, to privileged internships are worlds away from the lives of the people. This is for one reason only, due to the fact that the politicians are not in power to represent them; they are there to represent their own class and economic strata. The riots do nothing to legitimise the way the government structures society but the exact opposite. The riots were a capitalist failure and quite frankly a shambles. There is no alternative and it’s the fault of all those on the left for this! 

To have looted Tesco’s, Sainsbury’s, and mass refusal to pay extortionate gas bills, boycotted elections and to storm parliament, laid siege to public schools and private health care, occupied banks and to reign the powers of a society which does not represent the mood and thoughts of the workers and unemployed sectors of society, the majority, although it wouldn’t seem that way, would have been more legitimate than burning down neighbours family homes.

But here the true catastrophe lies. Those who are being suppressed by the abhorrent system which rules over the UK are not just unaware that the rioters expressed a human-animalistic instinct that represents us, the workers and the unemployed, but that the inability of society to organise against the oppressive dynamic we feel is the failure of the left. Our failure is seen in the public’s response being directly in line with the government, the media and the ruling class. As the people do not see the alternative in a fragmented and disorganised left section of British society, it is our task to reclaim the void and to think again about how we need to organise the workers and unemployed, so if this anger and anxiety resurfaces again the goals of the left will be the dominant features of debate. For now sections of the Guardian and Owen Jones will remain our only voice in popular UK affairs. This must be changed so that next time the left is ready and capable of changing our propagandised, suppressed and alienated Britain. I remain pessimistic.      

Communism for the 21st century

To understand what it means to be a communist is of great importance today. We do not have a proper understanding; the view widely accepted is highly controversial. It is seen as a destructive force which, once challenged this global capitalist world and shook it to its core. Stalin was and will remain a catastrophe of the past. He lived as a corrupt gangster and brute during his youth and was a brutally ruthless mercenary dictator till his death and beyond 

The contours of the question what does it mean to be a communist today is interesting... three hypothesis lie within: 

1. That Communism was an intrinsic result of the type of Marxian political economy that emerged under Stalin and any movement trying to implement such theories into reality will result in a Stalin figure, or rather even if Lenin had survived or Trotsky had managed to come to power, similar results would have occurred. 
2. That Stalin distorted the political economic maxims of Marxism and thus what occurred under the rule of Stalin was a horrific distortion and resulted in the worst human catastrophe of the 20^th century. 
3. Or  That the type of socialism created was doomed from the start. The wrong questions were being asked which resulted in total catastrophe.

The message that the third hypothesis teaches us is that, the left that existed at that time were fighting for the same things we fight for today, to end the class struggle, a struggle which necessitates a redefinition of the spheres of politics and economics, which ultimately means a new socio-structural engagement which deals with the current global structuring of the world. From the UN, IMF, EU, ASEAN, to state to state relations, and fundamentally, the way person to person social environments are constructed.

Today across much of the world gated communities exist, separating bourgeois affluence from proletarian slums. The construct of Western states is such that its citizens are not capable of engaging with the ways their state functions, as seen from the limited capabilities of the state to enact upon bankers or the Murdock Mafia .The true sentiment of the people, is not transferred from common sentiment into reality for one fundamental reason. The British establishment is structured in such a way as to literally cater for bourgeois capitalists in a brutally efficient manner, from upper-class schooling segregation to internships and beyond, it’s a section of society where social relations can only function through an incestuous nature and in particular the ways in which our conceptions of what is best in the world have been distorted to such an extent that there is a hegemonic hold over what our world is, and should be.

Our contours have been manipulated to sustain the global social domination of those who do not represent the majority. Is not this the task and the purpose of living to live in a world which, exists for and of itself, to not subscribe to any big other? Should not this be what we as a species strive for? There is only one majority and that is - all those who subscribe to class struggle.

Capitalist neo-liberalism is a perverse distortion of human relations and should be opposed if humans really wish to achieve a society which exists for the whole and to strive for a society in which society intuitively enacts a higher civilisation than the West inhabits today. Surely this is not radically different vision from the mission capitalism embodies. The false purpose of capitalism is to have a higher society for the rich; as such to completely dismember and rebuild human social productive capacities, to completely re-imagine the ways in which a political economy can be re-structured in such a way as to truly cater for the mass of society thus reaching a high civilisation, this is the pure and ultimate transition for capitalism, it is the next step.

Problems within capitalism are endemic and although capitalism is resilient and able to transform itself, to engulf what it needs and when, suggesting its power to be a true force - this is where the danger lies. What we have learnt over the past decade is that capitalism becomes ever more restricted in times of ‘terror’ and ever more limited in times of financial crisis. The end result is an ever-increasing authoritarian character which would seem to be, at this epoch in history, the only way to sustain growth, and maintain the current status quo for the megalomaniac bourgeois. It must not be under stated that the West has learnt this lesson from East and South East Asia; China, Singapore, Indonesia and so on. China is a supposedly crude Communist state but they have shown the world how to be ruthlessly efficient Capitalists. The cut back of the welfare state and social institutions here in Britain are the emerging signals of this new type of economy. The futures not bright and it is China. China are currently colonising Africa. I would rather the West take the recourses of Africa than the Chinese government, or rather Africa would actually what to sell its resources to the West rather than to China.

But here ends the of story capitalism. It is all too predictable, how capitalism has engulfed its worshipers to believe that to hold an indifference stance to political economy then they are somehow devoid of responsibility, in other words it is a fallacy to think that being non-ideological implies no ideological stance! On the contrary it is exactly the opposite. To dismiss ideology is acceptance of the dominating ideology, neo liberal capitalism. Now comes a huge dose of the fetishist disavowal, I know very well BUT.

This is the embodiment of the limits of the true lack in western civilisation; it’s complete inability to recognise its revolutionary potential. The system is running on default, the current structures of western economies have failed and are beginning to de-scale all the real vestiges of western civilisation, the arts. The transformation of universities should be the clearest sign that what policies are being enacted upon the population are destructive and violent, all in the name of making money, what will a philosopher earn? a novelist? a Sociologist? If one cannot see beyond this form of perverse wealth then one is truly lacking. Subjects are now all about specialising for specific ways to fix a specific problem. You do this one intricate niesh degree so that you can stop a gap leaking in the matrix. This is not what we should be doing when our civilisation is continuously driving strait past turn offs to a world where communism is the establishment of a new idea, to strive for a radical new re-evaluation of humanity, whilst always bearing the scar of Stalin and that this mission has the potential to go disastrously wrong, it is for this reason that the name communism should be attached to the radical left. 

The acceptance of our current circumstances and inability to imagine a world far better than the reality humanity inhibits is to be no member of the class struggle, and as such a regressive actor in the progression of civilisation.

The contours of History Re-appropriated

The world is in chaos. What was once a guaranteed global social order, global capitalism, is now laying bare, shattered and facing turmoil. As Mao once said “there is great chaos under heaven – never has the time been more prefect”.  

Form the early 90s to 2001 we lived in an era of truly ‘Fukuyamaist’ western parameters, where there was no longer a need for political opposition to the ‘democratic’ capitalist system. Communism had fallen and capitalism had won. Enter the, devastating, conquest of Thatcher to Blair to Cameron. The ‘middle class’ was expanding, by middle class what is meant is those who have an expendable income, free to purchase beyond our means through the invention of credit, a further expanse toward a disassociation between cause and effect. The cause being purchasing beyond your means the effect of which resulted in boom and bust, a dynamic that Engels was writing about in his Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy of 1844!  

“No worker can hold his own against his competitors if he does not devote all his powers to labour. No one at all who becomes involved in the struggle of competition can stand the strain without the utmost exertion of his powers, without renouncing every truly human purpose. The consequences of this over-exertion on the side is, inevitably, collapse on the other. When the fluctuation of competition is small, when demand and supply, consumption and production, are almost equal, a stage must be reached in the development of production where there is so much superfluous productive power that the great mass of the nation has nothing to live on, that the people starve from sheer abundance. For some considerable time England has found herself in this crazy position, in this living absurdity. When as a necessary consequence of such a situation, production is subject to greater fluctuations, then the alteration of boom and slump (bust), overproduction and slump, (bust) sets in”

Currently there is numerous accounts of the contradictions and fallings of the capitalist system, such critiques will continue to be presented for as long as capitalism, in its current form, continues to function, but what would be a true act would be for the left to move away from such a dynamic, and purely formulate a way to live outside the contours of a critique of capitalism. The most prominent critique of this era would seem to be Naomi Klein Shock’s Doctrine, where she systematically attributes all the horrendous contradictions, decisions and consequences of the catastrophe of Capitalism. What would be ideal in situations of global fragility would be to re-appropriate the way we engage with capitalist proponents and the system itself, this is the area where we need to be preparing the battle ground. A revolution may be caused through great unrest, caused from an expansive disenchantment with the ruling order, but what truly matters is the events after the revolution. To make an event after the revolution, ‘the true event’, the left needs more than just a critique of where capitalism went wrong but a new agenda of how we can move forward in such a way that would engineer a functioning emacipatory global civility. It must be recognised here that revolution cannot happen in isolation, for the Arab springs to be successful they all need to combine their new orders in co-operative with other Arab uprising and combine their efforts to construct new societies. And if those in Greece end up causing the biggest upset in European history and stage a full scale revolution then this will only work if Spain and other European states follow.        

Owen Jones and his contemporary analysis critiquing the way the phrase ‘Chavs’ has been appropriated by ruling elitist discourse, has laid bare the way class functions in British society. What is more pertinent than the fact that ‘Chavs’ is derogatory terminology which, in the words of Owen’s book Subtitle, “demonises the working class”, this functioning goes further than its immediate cognitive function, it suggests a deeper psychoanalytic consequence: on the surface those who are working class are made to believe that they are of lesser worth than a bourgeoisie, and so do not want to be deemed ‘Chavs’, or more precisely worker! What, in effect, this means is that there is disillusionment amongst the workers of Britain of the potential they hold to escape this demonization and embrace their true reality, which would surely lead to a new class consciousness and class appropriation, or rather class re-appropriating its position.

That fact that they are not an equal in the domineering cultural agenda, where it is believed that those with wealth and possessions are worthy of their circumstance and that those without are ‘lesser’ people of not having. Incidentally and crucially the wealthy have attained such wealth in the past couple of decades through the invention of credit given to the workers, which turned out to be a false economy as we saw in the credit collapse in 2008. This has caused a double blow to the workers. Not only have they been coerced into accumulating large debts as a result of bankers deceiving its customers into believing that the credit was entirely legitimate and stable, but also their mantra that wealth trickles down was for a time deceiving many workers to believe, that capitalism is a system that works, creating a scenario where no longer would a working class exist, we can all be wealthy now, a dream the working classes clearly bought. But which has only truly been a mechanism for the rich to smother their wealth and power in their envious capacities of nothingness.

Never before has there been a more justified time for the rise of an authentic left. A left which would recognise now is the time to re-appropriate the contours of history! Owen Jones and his latest book goes some way towards a step in the direction of a left wing re-appropriation not only of history but of the reins of the future. We need to direct our lives against the contours of capitalist appropriation of the way things seem and the way they are and fight the system not within the liberal framework laid down by capitalism, but by undermining its functioning, whilst continuing to mobilise for strike action an integral part of the left, a dynamic which needs no re-appropriation!