Dealing With the Renegades - Revisited

[love detective]

Boys who used to go around with their shirts open to the waist, and who’d have cut you to pieces in half a second, showed up here every morning at seven o’clock to organize the distribution of food.

I think this may need tweaked a bit as well articul8

 

[articul8]

there are differences in contexts - of course. And I wouldn't say that the SI piece is sufficient as an analysis of the UK riots. But it does strike me as an aspect of what was going on - which wasn't entirely indiscriminate eg. how many Primarks were looted?

 

[love detective]

the differences are not just in context, but in substance

this wasn't so much a riot against the commodity but a riot for the commodity - it wasn't undermining the commodity but reaffirming it - it wasn't lifting the veil and removing the admirable fetish of the commodity as the SI piece suggests, if anything it was the opposite - it wasn't rejecting the needs that are determined and produced by the system but embracing them

 

[articul8]

the differences are not just in context, but in substance

this wasn't so much a riot against the commodity but a riot for the commodity - it wasn't undermining the commodity but reaffirming it - it wasn't lifting the veil and removing the admirable fetish of the commodity as the SI piece suggests, if anything it was the opposite

it was a celebration of the suspension of the law (that protects existing class relations and its phantasmagoria of commodity images).

 

[love detective]

erm right you are....your looking for something that isn't there in attempting to shoe horn in the riots this month to the framework of the rather idealistically pure SI piece

Never been a fan of zizek but I think he sums up the nature & substance of what happened far better than the SI piece

If the commonplace that we live in a post-ideological era is true in any sense, it can be seen in this recent outburst of violence. This was zero-degree protest, a violent action demanding nothing. In their desperate attempt to find meaning in the riots, the sociologists and editorial-writers obfuscated the enigma the riots presented.

The fact that the rioters have no programme is therefore itself a fact to be interpreted: it tells us a great deal about our ideological-political predicament and about the kind of society we inhabit, a society which celebrates choice but in which the only available alternative to enforced democratic consensus is a blind acting out. Opposition to the system can no longer articulate itself in the form of a realistic alternative, or even as a utopian project, but can only take the shape of a meaningless outburst. What is the point of our celebrated freedom of choice when the only choice is between playing by the rules and (self-)destructive violence?

 

[articul8]

I don't think it was purely meaningless - the fact that no-one loots Primark is not accidental. Which isn't to say that it can the riots this time can be simply celebrated as incipient progressive rebellion - I don't think that.

There is a clear link between the temporary suspension of law/policing and the opportunity to cross the space between the commodity-sphere and the reality of material impoverishment. The problem is that this space is traversed by atomised individuals - asocially - without any real sense of collective empowerment.

 

[The39thStep]

it was a celebration of the suspension of the law (that protects existing class relations and its phantasmagoria of commodity images).

Thank heavens you aren't defending any of the looters.

 

[articul8]

? Something can be contradictory without being meaningless

 

[smokedout]

Thank heavens you aren't defending any of the looters.

its only ok to riot when we do it

 

[Pickman's model]

the differences are not just in context, but in substance

this wasn't so much a riot against the commodity but a riot for the commodity - it wasn't undermining the commodity but reaffirming it - it wasn't lifting the veil and removing the admirable fetish of the commodity as the SI piece suggests, if anything it was the opposite - it wasn't rejecting the needs that are determined and produced by the system but embracing them

i wonder if you'd say the same thing if it had been a food riot.

 

[love detective]

your're wondering if I would describe a completely different type of riot, differently

absolutely yes

 

[Pickman's model]

your're wondering if I would describe a completely different type of riot, differently

absolutely yes

no, what i was wondering was whether the notion of commodity extended to food or whether you were simply beguiled by the number of trainers and televisions purloined. given that a large number of food stores were broken into, i thought that might have some impact on your analysis.

 

[Brainaddict]

Been away from this thread cos it got circular a bit too quick. But I just read this
http://www.metamute.org/en/news_and..._foundation_and_the_chelsea_ives_youth_centre
And thought of you.

 

[love detective]

no, what i was wondering was whether the notion of commodity extended to food or whether you were simply beguiled by the number of trainers and televisions purloined. given that a large number of food stores were broken into, i thought that might have some impact on your analysis.

it wasn't a food riot though was it (and if it was, as I said previously, my analysis of it would have been different)

the primary motivations behind most involved wasn't driven by a need or desire for food - ergo it wasn't a food riot (just as the primary motivations behind most involved wasn't the burning people out of their homes, the running over & murdering muslims, pulling folk of scooters or rifling the backpacks of injured bystanders - despite these things clearly happening - nonethelss to describe any of these things as a primary motivating factor in what happened would be absurd, as it would be to call it a food riot)

 

[Pickman's model]

it wasn't a food riot though was it (and if it was, as I said previously, my analysis of it would have been different)

the primary motivations behind most involved wasn't driven by a need or desire for food - ergo it wasn't a food riot (just as the primary motivations behind most involved wasn't the burning people out of their homes, the running over & murdering muslims, pulling folk of scooters or rifling the backpacks of injured bystanders - despite these things clearly happening - nonethelss to describe any of these things as a primary motivating factor in what happened would be absurd, as it would be to call it a food riot)

i didn't call it a food riot. i think you're picking one strand of the riots and broadening it more than it will stretch.

 

[smokedout]

it wasn't a food riot though was it (and if it was, as I said previously, my analysis of it would have been different)

the primary motivations behind most involved wasn't driven by a need or desire for food -

pretty daft looting greggs when argos is next door

 

[love detective]

i didn't call it a food riot. i think you're picking one strand of the riots and broadening it more than it will stretch.

you didn't call it a food riot but you wondered out loud if I would analyse it differently if it was a food riot, to which I confirmed that I would

picking one strand of the riot and stretching it beyond what it actually was - would be to say conuterpose the SI piece over it as a reasonable description of what happened

 

[love detective]

pretty daft looting greggs when argos is next door

pretty daft looting a food place when you want a telly

 

[articul8]

pretty daft looting a food place when you want a telly

what's wrong with wanting a telly?

 

[love detective]

where did i say there was?

 

[articul8]

interesting bit doing the rounds about incidents in the Blitz ("our finest hour"):

It didn’t take long for a hardcore of opportunists to realise there were rich pickings available in the immediate aftermath of a raid – and the looting wasn’t limited to civilians.
In October 1940 Winston Churchill ordered the arrest and conviction of six London firemen caught looting from a burned-out shop to be hushed up…
In April 1941 Lambeth juvenile court dealt with 42 children in one day, from teenage girls caught stripping clothes from dead bodies to a seven-year-old boy who had stolen five shillings from the gas meter of a damaged house. In total, juvenile crime accounted for 48 per cent of all arrests in the nine months between September 1940 and May 1941 and there were 4,584 cases of looting…
Perhaps the most shameful episode of the whole Blitz occurred on the evening of March 8 1941 when the Cafe de Paris in Piccadilly was hit by a German bomb…
“Some of the looters in the Cafe de Paris cut off the people’s fingers to get the rings,” recalled Ballard Berkeley, a policeman during the Blitz who later found fame as the ‘Major’ in Fawlty Towers. Even the wounded in the Cafe de Paris were robbed of their jewellery amid the confusion and carnage.​

 

[TopCat]

.

Anyone interested in a response to the "working class morale " sapping "lumpens" rioting in LA 50 years ago, one that has arguably more to say about last weeks events than the OP in this thread ever could , check out Guy Debords at the time unattributed response to the Watts riots here :

http://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/decline.html

This article is a straw man if I ever saw one. What's the relevance to the events of recent times? Their have been loads of articles written about riots in the UK, why bother posting this up except to try and get people to defend it out of nostalgia for the Situationists?

 

[articul8]

It has a relevance (the psychology of commodification and the suspension of reification in rioting etc.) - it isn't a sufficient analysis for understanding what happened here (or in Watts in all likelihood). But it says something important that's missed by the equally one-sided, though not entirely wrong, dismissal of rioters as lumpen detritus.

 

[love detective]

you do know the article under discussion isn't about the riots articul8?

As to categorising those who are in agreement with the IWCA analysis as one sided then you clearly haven't read this thread (although given your recent inability on this and other threads to be able to digest & comprehend simple arguments put across in the simplest of english, perhaps you have. Perhaps we need to use long drawn out wanky phrases like you've taken to recently )

For example my first post on the thread here is nowhere near your description above

 

[articul8]

My post above wasn't specific to the IWCA or this article (which I know was written long before the riots) but to a tendency that exists more generally in those who would simply condemn.

OK your first post was somewhat more balanced but even there you say

the only thing to come from this will be to further bolster the confidence of the lumpen elements that are already making life a misery for a large element of the working class proper.

which begs a number of questions
a) what is the "working class proper" and who is authorised to police its boundaries
b) [an ambiguity in the IWCA piece too] are lumpen elements renegade elements of the w/c, internal 5th columnists - or declassed fragments, detritus of all classes and none (as in Marx) standing outside and potentially in opposition to, the w/c
c) why should it be the "only" thing to come out of it? Lots might come out of it - good, bad and indifferent? Obviously there's things very unlikely to come out of it - like the criminal gangs of Hackney and Haringey all joining up en masse to Workers Power. But there's a danger of reading every symptom as a symptom of collective inadequacy rather than as a spur to rethink and re-organise.

 

[love detective]

a) what is the "working class proper" and who is authorised to police its boundaries

Would you categorise police, baillifs, and serial scabs (who despite being working class in terms of having to sell their labour-power, relationship to means of production blah blah blah zzzz), as those who deserve to be part of any progressive working class project? If not then in principle you have no problem with excluding those whose actions are detrimental to progressive working class organisation. Anything beyond this is just arguing over semantics & labels

b) [an ambiguity in the IWCA piece too] are lumpen elements renegade elements of the w/c, internal 5th columnists - or declassed fragments, detritus of all classes and none (as in Marx) standing outside and potentially in opposition to, the w/c

See answer to (a) above

c) why should it be the "only" thing to come out of it? Lots might come out of it - good, bad and indifferent? Obviously there's things very unlikely to come out of it - like the criminal gangs of Hackney and Haringey all joining up en masse to Workers Power. But there's a danger of reading every symptom as a symptom of collective inadequacy rather than as a spur to rethink and re-organise.

Well you're taking things out of context (and then being pedantic with the english). The point I made immediately prior to the bit you quote was about some of the misguided optimism that was emenating from the left/anarchism in the immediate aftermath of the riots as to what they signified etc.... - to counter that optimism I then made the point about (the only thing to come out of it being the) bolstering of the confidence of certain elements that already make life a misery for working class people & communities

 

[smokedout]

Would you categorise police, baillifs, and serial scabs (who despite being working class in terms of having to sell their labour-power, relationship to means of production blah blah blah zzzz), as those who deserve to be part of any progressive working class project? If not then in principle you have no problem with excluding those whose actions are detrimental to progressive working class organisation. Anything beyond this is just arguing over semantics & labels

are you prepared to address the point about the economic divide between the nouveau lumpen and the working class proper - is there one, how does/should that affect the analysis, does this make them a different category from bailiffs and coppers

few people on very low incomes/benefits can survive without being drawn into some degree of criminality, whether thats not paying for a telly licence, earning a few quid on the side, selling a bit of pot or the odd bit of shoplifting - how does this affect the class consciousness of those (whom by and large) are children?

 

[romeo2001]

One figure mentioned by David Davis on Question Time was about 240 criminal gangs in London, substantially up from the last count in 2006. What I'm 'staggered about' is not just the numbers but their banal visciousness. Another 14 year old stabbed to death today. As the article points out the sociopathic nihilism they display has no parallel in recent history. The studied insouciance of the so-called liberal left at the carnage (with some particularly choice comments on here) is about standard for another set of people without a compass, moral or otherwise. Imagine for a moment the brouhaha if the perpetrators were white? But becuase the perps, as well the victims are overhwhelmingly black, in the absence of any obvious political advantage they cynicaly choose to ignore it entirely. Can there be a better example of unconscious racism? At least the 'institutionally racist' police actually address the problem.

not sure i agree with the race analysis tho - there are numerous white estates that have been abandoned to gangs and criminality for a really long time

 

[articul8]

hmm... I'm not sure that (eg.) a UDM miner in the strike was any less working class for that - he'd just be acting in a way that was contrary to the self interest of his class. Unless he's relationship to the employer materially changed as a result of his membership of a scabby union. He'd be part of the working class (in itself) but not of the political organisation developed by that class to express its political interests (for itself).

Otherwise you go down the road of saying that anyone whose behaviour or ideas you disagree with is somehow objectively less working class than you are - either lumpen or petty-bourgeois. And suggests some kind of hierarchy where one group of workers which you happen to agree with most suddenly becomes more "working class" in its outlook than another.

 

[Random]

hmm... I'm not sure that (eg.) a UDM miner in the strike was any less working class for that - he'd just be acting in a way that was contrary to the self interest of his class. Unless he's relationship to the employer materially changed as a result of his membership of a scabby union. He'd be part of the working class (in itself) but not of the political organisation developed by that class to express its political interests (for itself).

So you're happy describing most of the police as working class, in other words?