Tiny Tips (2011)

The Tiny Tips column from the September 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard 

$8 Million Gold-Plated Rolls Redefines Excess. Nothing says class warfare quite like an armored, gold-plated car that costs $8 million:

[Link.]

Psychologist and social scientist Dacher Keltner says the rich really are different, and not in a good way: Their life experience makes them less empathetic, less altruistic, and generally more selfish “We have now done 12 separate studies measuring empathy in every way imaginable, social behavior in every way, and some work on compassion and it’s the same story,” he said. “Lower class people just show more empathy, more prosocial behavior, more compassion, no matter how you look at it.

[Dead Link.]

On Saturday night, as rioters in Tottenham threw fireworks and bottles at police officers, one man shouted, “This is our battle!” When asked what he meant, the man, Paul Rook, 47, explained that he felt the rioters were taking on “the ruling class.”

[Link.]

“Violence in the streets, aimed at the wealthy. That’s what I worry about.” That was what an unidentified billionaire told Robert Frank of the Wall Street Journal a while back. Rich people are scared of global unrest, Frank reported, citing a survey by Insite Security and IBOPE Zogby International of people with liquid assets of $1 million or more (translation: folks who have or can get their hands on $1 million in cash fairly easily) that says 94 percent of the wealthy are concerned about “global unrest” around the world. He noted: Of course, Insite has an interest in getting the paranoid rich to beef up their security. Still, the numbers are backed up by other trends seen throughout the world of wealth today: the rich keeping a lower profile, hiring $230,000 guard dogs, and arming their yachts, planes and cars with military-style security features:

[Dead Link.]

Starving parents are marrying off girls for food as famine devastates Africa. Nearly half of kids in Kenya and Somalia had not eaten at all for a day this week, research reveals today and desperate mums and dads are selling girls as young as nine for just £100. Under-18s cannot legally marry in Kenya and child brides face terrible abuse, but World Vision UK’s Philippa Lei said: “Girls can traditionally be sold for a bride price, cattle or food. But now girls are being sold off much earlier.

[Link.]

“We are all human. God created us from one dirt. Why can we not marry each other, or love each other?” Halima Mohammedi, an Afghan teenager whose love for another teenager, Rafi Mohammed, set off a riot by flouting their village’s tradition of arranged marriages. “What we would ask is that the government should kill both of them.” Kher Mohammed, her father:

[Link.]

The Evolution of Revolutionary Burns. (1906)

From the April 1906 issue of the Socialist Standard

(Extracts from a speech delivered by John Burns at the Old Bailey when tried for seditious conspiracy on April 9th, 1886).

These extracts from a speech of the Burns of the Eighties have been reproduced so that the working class may have an opportunity of contrasting the present views of this Right Honourable person with the views he then enunciated. It has been, and still is, the fashion to gibe and jeer at the volte face of another Right Honourable turn-coat (Joseph Chamberlain) and no one has delighted in the exercise more than Burns himself. Yet it has recently been held to be an exhibition of bad taste to bring Burns’ own past up in evidence against him—and no one was more righteously indignant than Burns ! The Burns revolution has been far and away more complete than that of Chamberlain and it is the more conspicuous because of the price Burns received for his apostacy—a price the recipient has so often rejoiced in the size of. The hope that Burns expressed in ’86 that the penalty for the betrayal of the working class would be heavy enough to deter anyone from attempting it has not been realized. The penalty has not been enough—for Burns ! We do not, of course, suggest anything so absurd that a man may not change his view, seeing it is upon that change of view in the working class that we rely for the realization of Socialism. But we are concerned to emphasize the point that the Burns of yesterday, who has secured his present position by virtue of his influence with the unthinking working class, is very far from being the Burns of to-day. It is more necessary to emphasize this difference than many think. Undoubtedly Burns secured his following as the Burns of the Eighties—by his association as a member of the working class with working-class movements. And undoubtedly it was because this following held to the idea of a practically unchanged Burns, an idea insinuating itself into an ever wider circle, that Burns’ services as a decoy were purchased by the Liberal Party. These extracts may help to destroy that illusion. Burns is now engaged in administering that capitalist system to which he at one time traced the poverty of the working class. To-day he urges the usual capitalist argument of working-class intemperance as largely the cause of working-class poverty, where previously he designated as liars those who held such views. To-day he is a member of the same sort of government, adopting exactly the same sort of method that he denounced so roundly in ’86. Yet poverty has only intensified in the interregnum. Burns’ attitude to-day is the capitalist attitude; his method the capitalist method. Only the unthinking section of the working class could fail to note the fact that between Burns and his Tory predecessor there is no material difference. Unfortunately the unthinking section of the working class is very large. Hence these extracts.

__________________

My Lord and Gentlemen of the Jury,

… I expected that at some time of my life I should be brought face to face with the authorities for vindicating the class to which I belong. I have, from my earliest infancy, been in contact with poverty of the worst possible description . . I have done everything I could in a peaceful manner to call the attention of the authorities to the frightful amount of poverty and degradation existing among the working class . . . I heard that there was going to be a meeting of the starving unemployed of London in Trafalgar Square on February 8th. . . I reached the place at 1.30. I was recognized . . . I got upon the plinth and spoke to 13,000 or 14,000 men. . . I pointed out that a remedy could only he found by bringing pressure to bear upon Parliament and the local authorities as I had tried to do 12 months before when I had to walk the streets of London for 7 weeks for daring to speak as to the condition of the workers . . . I ask you, can you wonder at a workman’s language being strong ? I am inclined to think that the day is not far distant when stronger language will have to be used. When the Fair Traders came, I climbed up the balustrade and acted as chairman of that second meeting. Why? All know that the Fair Traders Messrs. Peters, Kelley, Kenny, Lemon and others, are regarded as arrant impostors by the workmen of London and I was desirous that there should not be a physical conflict between the unemployed and those honest but misguided men who are the dupes of these bogus representatives . . . The day of these mercenaries I am pleased to say is now over. The penalty for betraying the workers I hope, will be heavy enough to deter any man from selling their cause, as it has many times been sold. . . I found that the crowd were becoming somewhat turbulent . . and I thought it my duty to listen to the suggestion that we should proceed in procession through the West End to Hyde Park. . . No damage was done by the procession … until we reached the Carlton Club. . . There is a class of men who make it a practice on occasions of political demonstrations to laugh and jeer from the Club windows at the poverty or what they term “the great unwashed,” to to jeer at the misery their own greed has created. . . The crowd were not in a temper to respond to contemptuous jeers by a smile. . . Stone throwing commenced. And that was the result of the stupid, ungentlemanly, criminal conduct of Carlton Club members. I did my best to repress the stone throwing . . . believing as I do that window breaking, except, perhaps, as warning, is useless to effect a change in our system of Society, based as it is upon the robbery of Labour. . .

John Burns in the 1880s.

Against this system of Society, I frankly confess I am a rebel, because Society has outlawed me. I have protested against this state of Society by which at present one and a half millions of our fellow countrymen, adult males, are starving—starving because they have no work to do. Talk about strong language ! I contend my language was mild when you consider the usage they have received and that the patience under severe provocation displayed by the workers is almost slavish and cowardly. . . We come before you not as paid agitators . . . but as men anxious to change the existing system of society to one in which men should receive the full value of their labour, in which Society will be regarded as something more than a few titled non-producers who take the whole of the wealth which the useful workers alone produce. . .

If you want to remove the cause of seditious speeches, you must prevent us from having to hear as we hear to-day, of hungry poverty-stricken men, who from no fault of their own, are compelled to be out of work. . . . I have not one single word of regret to utter for the part I have taken in this agitation. . . I say we cannot have in England as we have to-day five millions living on the verge of pauperism without gross discontent. . . . I am sorry to say that it seems to be a characteristic of the Government and the governing classes to be influenced only by fear—at least Mr. Gladstone, Lord Randolph Churchill and Mr. Chamberlain say that their Governments are not susceptible to reason or appeals unless the Hyde Park railings are pulled down and the club windows broken. . . Mr. Chamberlain prior to the riots denied that exceptional distress prevailed; but about a fortnight afterwards he admitted that it was exceptional and severe. . . It (the riot) also made the landlords and capitalists surrender to the Mansion House Fund some of the proceeds of their past robbery in the shape of charity. . . That meeting of Feb. 8th called the attention of the people of Great Britain to this fact that below the upper and middle strata of Society there are millions of people leading hard degraded lives—men who through the unequal distribution of wealth are consigned to the criminal classes and women into the enormous army of prostitutes whom we see in the streets of our great cities. And as an artisan I cannot see poor puny little babes sucking empty breasts and honest men walking the streets for months at a time—I cannot hear of women of the working class being compelled to resort to prostitution to earn a livelihood—I cannot see these things without being moved not only to strong language but to strong action, if necessary. . . And when the Attorney General says we incited to riots, I say that the Social system is to blame. It prompts men to thieve and it prompts women of the working class to resort to dishonest acts by not giving all a fair start in life and not giving them an opportunity to get honest work. Society journals demand our imprisonment. Why ? Because £11,000 worth of windows have been broken. But how about the sacred human lives that have been and are being degraded and blighted by the present system—of capitalism?. .  . . 

I shall serve my cause as well inside a prison as out. The word prison has no particular terror for me. Through the present system of Society life has lost all its charm, and a hungry man said truly (as Isaiah, said in the Holy Book) that there was a time in the history of our lives when it was better to die in prison or better to die fighting than to die starving. . . The wonder is that there was not more destruction, of property and that no life was lost. If we had given the word, not a single inmate of the Carlton Club would have been alive to-day . . .

The commons of South London (2005)

Book Review from the May 2005 issue of the Socialist Standard

Down With The Fences: Battles for the Commons in South London. 36 pages, ú2; Past Tense Publications, c/o 56 Crampton St, London SE14, November 2004.

“The law condemns the man or woman

Who steals the goose from off the common

But lets the greater villain loose

Who steals the common from the goose.”

Most of the text of Down With The Fences was the basis of a talk given to the South London Radical History Group. Many of the open spaces in London – commons, woods, greens and parks – exist because they were preserved from development by collective action: by rioting, tearing down .

According to the pamphlet, between the 16th and 19th centuries, much of the open land, commons or woods south of the River Thames in London was enclosed for development, usually by rich landowners, or sold off for house building. Despite its name, the common land was rarely if ever actually land held in common. It was almost always land owned by the Lord of the Manor, on which over time local people had come to exercise some rights. But these rights often had no legal weight; they were just part of an unwritten social contract.

Of the “commoners”, the pamphlet notes that some of them “could become wealthy individuals themselves. Thus later struggles sometimes developed into struggles between different local rich persons. Gradually as capitalism developed, slowly replacing a society of complex vertical social obligations and customs with one based entirely on profit, the impetus was on for landowners to replace traditional land use with intensive agriculture. This demanded the clearing of woodland and the exclusion of the poor from the commons.”

This process did not take place without massive upheavals. The enclosures increased resistance. The pamphlet describes the wave of rebellion for Sydenham Common, and the conflict on Westward Common in Barnes. Richmond Park, Streatham Common, Woolwich Common and South Lambeth Common are also mentioned. As late as the 1860s, there were struggles over access to Wimbledon Common.

By the l850s, reformers were articulating the need for urban parks, to “relieve the stress and overcrowding of the city for the millions (of workers) packed into built-up areas”. It was also hoped that by converting some open spaces and commons into landscaped parks, they would be made respectable “for the aspiring working classes”. For example, “In South London, Battersea Fields, until the 19th century a place of bawdy working class recreation, including animal fairs, stalls, drinking, etc. became Battersea Park. Local vicar Reverend Fallon proposed building of the modern park to encourage the poor to reform and ‘become orderly’. As part of the process in 1852 all persons ‘trespassing’ on the park with animals or barrows were ordered to be nicked.”

Stockwell Green was used for local recreation, often rowdy, until a local toff bought it and built railings round it. Wandsworth Common, as part of the wastes of the Manor of Battersea and Wandsworth, was largely enclosed and reduced in size, and split in three by the new railway lines the 1840s. The pamphlet mentions numerous other open spaces, commons and parks in southern London, and the various battles and conflicts over their ownership and access. It notes, however, that the struggles described in South London were not unique. Through the 16th to the 19th centuries there were thousands of local battles against the enclosure and development of open spaces. And although not mentioned in the pamphlet, it should be noted here that in a socialist society all the land, and not just commons or parks, would be the common possession of society as a whole.

Peter E. Newell

Letter: Gang culture (2011)

Letter to the Editors from the October 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard

Gang culture

Dear Editors

David Starkey was wrong to suggest skin colour played a part in the riots (by saying Enoch Powell had been proved right), but he had a point about youths having been corrupted by a gangster culture (although the guilty gangsters aren’t the ones he had in mind).

The gang actually responsible for corrupting and inciting youths is the capitalist gang. Tax avoiders, like Sir Philip Green (who sent a £1 billion dividend offshore a few years back) are celebrated, praised and palsy-walsy with our most prominent politicians who reward their selfish immorality with peerages, knighthoods, CBEs and MBEs.

And it is these same prominent politicians who themselves have had their snouts in the expenses trough for years. It is truly galling to hear the likes of Gerald Kaufman MP asking the Prime Minister how rioters can be “reclaimed” by society, after he submitted a claim for three months’ expenses totalling £14,301.60, including £8,865 for a Bang & Olufsen television.

And David Cameron himself, quick to declare, regarding former News of the World editor Andy Coulson, that “everybody deserves a second chance”, shows no interest in giving second chances to those who took a pair of trainers or packet of cigarettes from riot-hit stores.

It is this hypocrisy and double standards, with one set of rules for the rich and powerful, and another set for everyone else, that creates underlying anger, bitterness and hopelessness in society which can then suddenly erupt in violent mayhem.

As long as capitalism continues, there will exist a tiny asset-owning elite pursuing ever greater piles of wealth through immoral exploitation of resources and human beings which they should never have had ownership and control of in the first place.

The most sickening criminality hasn’t been seen during the rioting, it’s been seen from the corrupt capitalist system aided by successive two-faced cheating governments.

Max Hess, 

Folkestone

2011 – A Year of Change (2011)

From the December 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard

As another year in the capitalist madhouse comes to a close it’s time to review the maladies, and some of the medicine its inmates have had to stomach

January marked the beginning of the end for a trio of North African leaders in what has been dubbed the “Arab Spring”. Just a few months earlier these men where embraced and cosseted by Western leaders and their docile media. Transformation can happen quickly inside the madhouse. Our erstwhile friends and allies once considered sane have now been diagnosed as mad dogs, tyrannical torturers, and despotic murderers.

Zine El Abidine Ben Ali of Tunisia was the first on his toes. Once a beloved partner of the EU, now just another fallen idol. The aftermath of the fall of Ben Ali culminated in the Islamist Ennahda party winning 41.47 per cent of votes. Rioting followed in Sidi Bouzid, the site of the uprising that deposed Ben Ali. The Daily Mail (24 October) reported the insights of ‘Belhussein al-Maliki, 27, who said that he’d fought in the January uprising. “We are jobless, we have nothing and we won’t vote.  Everything is the same, the world is the way it is, and the world will stay the way it is.”  

Next it was Egypt’s turn. Egyptians in their tens of thousands took to the streets, perhaps, encouraged by the speed and unambiguous exit of Ben Ali.  What is certain is that they’d had enough of Mubarak and his “Clan”. Like leaders before him Mubarak turned Egypt into his own personal thiefdom.  And it wasn’t just those on the streets that resented this. Obama and his cronies, who dispensed the aid that Mubarak pilfered, dithered, waiting to see which way the wind was blowing. But the hurricane from the street proved too powerful and Mubarak fled to his villa in Sharm el-Sheikh. An inconclusive trial, of sorts, followed. The aftermath once again was violent and began in Tahrir Square: “bloody scenes prompted fears that Egypt is drawing ever closer to a sustained religious conflict that cannot be controlled. There were reports of violence erupting in several Egyptian towns and cities with large Christian populations in the aftermath of the pandemonium in Cairo” (Daily Telegraph, 9 October). Divide and conquer? Election dates are still under discussion. The time-frame to elect a president put forward by the ruling military council remains nebulous: “perhaps the end of 2012, or early 2013”.

Regime-change in Libya came next. The same socio/economic reasons underpinned the uprising by Libyans but in contrast to Tunisia and Egypt the conclusion didn’t look so clear cut to Western leaders. Thus, under the charade of a humanitarian mission Western planes and missiles bombed General Gaddafi’s forces so that the outcome would become predictable. Another example of  how quickly a friend becomes your foe under capitalism—and why—was when the BBC reported (25 March 2004) the amicable meeting between Qaddafi and Tony Blair in 2004, supposedly for Qaddafi to join the West in its fight against terrorism. However, as discussions took place “it was announced Anglo-Dutch oil giant Shell had signed a deal worth up to £550m for gas exploration rights off the Libyan coast.”

On September 8, Naji Barakat, the Health Minister of the National Transitional Council, stated “that about 30,000 people were killed during the war. At least 50,000 war-wounded, about 20,000 with serious injuries . . . but this estimate was expected to rise” (Wikipedia). Six weeks later the New Statesman reported that “running up the Stars and Stripes in “liberated” Tripoli last month, US ambassador Gene Cretz blurted out: “We know that oil is the jewel in the crown of Libyan natural resources!”. Not wanting to miss out on the profits scramble Philip Hammond, British Defence Secretary advised that, “British executives should be “packing their suitcases” and heading to Libya to win contracts” (Daily Telegraph, 4 November). The ongoing conflicts in Syria, Bahrain, and Yemen didn’t warrant humanitarian intervention. However, intervention carries on unabated in Afghanistan. IPS (2 November) reports that: “US Special Operations Forces (SOF) killed well over 1,500 civilians in night raids in less than 10 months in 2010 and early 2011”. That’s just SOF. And at night.

Only an insane profit-driven system would site nuclear plants in an area prone to earthquakes. In March an earthquake and tsunami devastated the north-eastern coast of Honshu, Japan, killing tens of thousands. Six months on and the Mayor of Rikuzentakata, one of the towns to feel the full force of the tsunami could state that, “the government has said it will give us funds for reconstruction, but we haven’t received any money yet” (BBC, 12 September). More inmates reduced to begging from their political masters.

On 1 May the world was notified that it could sleep easily in its bed with the assassination of the world’s number one bogeyman: Bin Laden. America was deliriously happy, Pakistan less so. Throughout the year stories of phone hacking by Murdoch’s hacks continually made the front pages. Newsnight was besotted by it. The broadsheets wrote piously about it. On 11 July that citadel of great British hackery, The News of the World, ceased printing. Then came the pantomime of the big bad wolf, Murdoch himself, and his slavering young cub of a son having to appear in front of a flock of pious MPs. Liars, cheats, fraudsters and hypocrites have been implicated in these revelations – and that’s just the police involvement.  How long before the Sun on Sunday appears?

The police were also involved in August in ‘The Riots’. Yes, surprise, surprise, we had rioting in London. Must have been our turn. LA next? Chicago? Paris?  The media has been hard at work trying to uncover why. Perhaps the risibly named Ministry of Justice figures might help: “90% of those brought before the courts were aged under 21. Only 5% were over the age of 40. Thirty-five percent were claiming out-of-work benefits, which compares to a national average of 12%. Of the young people involved, 42% were in receipt of free school meals compared to an average of 16%. Three-quarters of all those who appeared in court had a previous conviction or caution. For adults the figure was 80% and for juveniles it was 62%. Seventy-five percent of the young people in court were classed as having some form of special educational need, compared to 21% for the national average”. What the capitalist asylum excels at is converting children into criminals.

Famine in Africa was once again worth some newsprint and the usual pleas for money. Absurdly, reformers beg for money to alleviate poverty when its existence is the root cause of poverty. On September 25th the good King Abdullah, of that bastion of freedom and justice, Saudi Arabia, granted women the right to vote. However, they’ll still need to be driven to the polling station as its illegal for them to drive or to be seen in public without a male chaperone watching over them.

Very little ink has been wasted on climate change. But Reuters (23 October) provided this snippet: “global temperature rise could exceed “safe” levels of two degrees Celsius in some parts of the world in many of our lifetimes, if greenhouse gas emissions continue to increase, two research papers published in the journal Nature warned”.   Got kids? Grandkids? Content to sit on your arse?

As a backdrop to the above events we have “The Crisis”, which is gaining momentum, rather than abating as most of capitalism’s gurus envisaged. Bank of England governor Mervyn King said, “this is the most serious financial crisis we’ve seen at least since the 1930s, if not ever” (BBC, 7 October). And nearly “15% of the US population relied on food stamps in August, as the number of recipients hit 45.8 million” (Wall Street Journal, 1 November). People in every country are struggling with the repercussions of “The Crisis”. This has led to class conflict – the dynamic of change. What began in Tunisia in January has evolved in to a different type of struggle – one that is still evolving. It’s a struggle to see through the bourgeois opacity that Anton Pannekoek described as: “the power of the inherited and confused ideas, the formidable spiritual power of the middle-class world, enveloping their minds into a thick cloud of beliefs and ideologies, dividing them, and making them uncertain and confused”.

If a fiction writer had to plot a path to socialism, Chapter One might include: a socio/economic backdrop that exacerbates the gulf between the classes; a growing distrust, dislike and willingness to take on politicians, and those that enforce the states’ laws; an embryonic distrust of academia and the media; a generalised growth of discontent with the status quo; a meeting-up of people with divergent ideas in a central area where discussion could take place; the technology to instantly exchange ideas and arrange meetings locally and globally; an exponential growth of these leaderless movements across continents; the veil of morality that bourgeois ideology hides behind falling ever further to reveal more and more of its contradictions and hypocrisies.  Chapter Two—Reclamation.  Understanding socialism is relatively easy. Understanding capitalism, first, is the hard part. All socialists had to undergo that process.

The New York Times (26 November 2006) reported Warren Buffet as saying, “there’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning”. And he’s right. We are losing. But only a battle, in a war of ideas. 2011 has been memorable. Those actively engaged in the struggle deserve our respect and admiration. Perhaps 2012 could be the year that we can puncture Warren Buffet and his class’s smugness. A year to give our class cause for optimism. There isn’t an infinite amount of time in which to win this war. The madhouse is becoming increasingly mad. Now is the time for those who’ve been content to sit on the sidelines to become active. If not, then the war could be lost. And the mad will have won.

Andy Matthews

Letters: Barmy Lammy (2012)

Letters to the Editors from the May 2012 issue of the Socialist Standard

Barmy Lammy

Dear Editors

In the March Greasy Pole – Baby David Speaks – Ivan wrote a witty and perceptive account about the August Riots and Tottenham’s MP David Lammy.

Lammy is a typical reformist Labour professional politician. It is bewildering that Lammy links the riotous behaviour to legal restraints on parents smacking children. It is quite obvious the anti-social behaviour by young people is caused by poverty and alienation endemic in the capitalist system (1 million 16 to 24 year olds unemployed also 50 percent of young black men are unemployed) and also harassment by the guardians of the state and private property, the police. I would like to add that as a Socialist I do not condemn the young people who ‘looted’ goods like Apple I-Phones and expensive trainers from shops last August. These are the branded goods/commodities that are fetishised in the capitalist consumer society and young people were only desiring the same commodities that the affluent can afford. Young people are surrounded daily by images of get rich quick, cutting corners, quasi- legal means of making money like in the banking sector and their “looting” is chicken feed compared to the financial looting/terrorism of the financial capitalist class.

Steve Clayton,

London SW8.

Sinking wages

Dear Editors

The crew members of the Titanic were employed by the ship and not by White Star Line. This meant their pay stopped when the ship sank. If they died and a next of kin had not been named on the ship’s articles (employment contract) any pay earned would be retained by White Star Line.

Fred Moore, 

Canterbury.

Economic power?

Dear Editors

Thank you for the Lloyd George commentary in the March edition of Socialist Standard. It is certainly important to get our historical lessons straight. I had thought that the upheaval in Russia, and the subsequent rebellious state of the interventionist force of England, France and the United States, would have had some influence on Lloyd George’s attitude when he reputedly referred to the army as “disaffected”. Indeed, I had heard that there was even strong sympathy for the Bolsheviks and that some British troops declared themselves the “Yorkshire Soviet.” If this is true, it tends to demonstrate that at a time of extreme stress of the capitalist system state control of the engines of oppression can falter in their commitment to act as instruments of class rule. Perhaps this is what rattled your “windbag”. But he was as “innocent” of the power of industrial unionism as the union leaders were ignorant.

Aside from that, I found in my collection of dusty pamphlets a small item called Craft Unionism versus Industrial Unionism, by F.S. Budgen and L. Cotton. They wrote for the SLPGB, and in the1934 edition of their pamphlet they had some relevant commentary to offer in a chapter entitled “The Wage War of 1921 and the Triple Alliance Fiasco.” The thrust of their argument was that the reason the “Alliance” folded was precisely because the prevailing structure of unionism at the time was based upon archaic craft divisions that divided workers rather than uniting them. “Intrigue and treachery of the trade union leaders characterize ‘Black Friday’”, they wrote, but did not explain it. “By the masses it wields, and the political atmosphere it can create by setting them in motion, trade unionism is potentially capable of challenging capitalist rule in the workshops and the State, but it is entirely incapable of backing up that challenge with any effective action. All of their class instincts awakened by the approach of such a situation, the capitalists entrench themselves behind their ownership of the tools and their possession of State power; and trade unionism, having totally unfitted the working class to assume control of the productive machinery, and having rendered them morally and physically incapable of facing the power of the State, has only the choice between a forlorn hope or surrender at discretion. In their own interests the trade union leaders capitulated.”

Union-wise, things haven’t changed much but should.

Bernard Bortnick, 

Texas

Reply:

The old pamphlet you dug out exaggerates the power of workers’ unions vis-à-vis the state. In the end, any government can, if it so chooses, see off any challenge to its authority by unions, whether these are organised on a craft or an industry basis. This is because they control the state machine and because workers can’t hold out for more than a few weeks. In this particular case the leaders of the unions in the Triple Alliance backed down because they realised this and because they did not want to overthrow the government. Neither did their members. The lessons to draw from this failure are (1) the imperative need to first gain control of political power before trying to change the basis of society from class to common ownership, and (2) the equally imperative need for the majority of workers to want to do this and to be organised politically as well as industrially – Editors.

Scarman—judicial oversight (1982)

From the January 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

Since, the riot in the St Pauls area of Bristol in April 1980, there have been disorders on a comparable scale in a number of British cities. The most violent took place over three days in April in the Brixton area of London, but there were also large- scale incidents in Southall, Toxteth (Liverpool) and Moss Side (Manchester), as well as smaller disturbance in other towns. The impact of such events is intensified by live television coverage, which reveals their similarity to civil war and apparently shows a near-total breakdown of law and order. The government were worried, both about what was already happening and about what might happen in the future if the causes of such upheavals went unidentified and unremedied. Two days after the Brixton disorders had ended, Home Secretary William Whitelaw appointed Lord Scarman to conduct an inquiry into the riots. His report was published at the end of November (Cmnd. 8427).

Scarman has a reputation, in staid circles, for being something of a “radical” judge, a supporter of a Bill of Rights, and he is well practised at holding inquiries into social disorders of one kind or another. He has clearly learned (though perhaps it came naturally) how to draw conclusions and make recommendations that will offend no one in authority and yet serve as evidence that not quite all is well and that “something” is being done. For example:

  I find that the direction and policies of the Metroplitan Police are not racist. But racial prejudice does manifest itself occasionally in the behaviour of a few officers on the streets (p. 127).
  There is scope for a more coherent and better directed response by the police to the challenge of policing modern, multi-racial society (p. 128).

His strongest criticism is describing as “a serious mistake” the operation known as Swamp 81, which involved flooding selected areas of Brixton with policemen who were expected to make widespread use of their powers to stop and search people in an attempt to detect and arrest robbers. This operation heightened the impression that it was difficult, especially for the young and black, to walk the streets of Brixton without being harassed by the police.

The report begins by considering the social conditions in which the riots took place. A picture of deprivation and discrimination, the fruits of capitalism, is visible even through Scarman’s studied understatement. In the Borough of Lambeth, which includes Brixton, some twelve thousand households live in overcrowded conditions, and one-fifth of all the housing stock is officially substandard. The unemployment rate in Brixton is thirteen per cent, but among young black males it is estimated to be a staggering fifty-five per cent. The other riot areas have similar environments. In Scarman’s words:

  The common strands in many of the major disorders . . .  are to be found in shared social conditions, in economic insecurity and perceived deprivation, in enforced idleness because of unemployment, and in the hostility of at least a section of young people to the police (p.14).

But these are merely “common strands”: 

  None of these features can perhaps usefully be described as a cause of the disorders, either in Brixton or elsewhere. Indeed, there are, undoubtedly, parts of the country which are equally deprived where disorder did not occur. But taken together, they provide a set of social conditions which create a predisposition towards violent protest (p. 16).

This is a comforting (for the ruling class and their government) piece of illogic.

Reaction to the report has been mixed. The Chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality described it as “brilliant”, which is a sad reflection on his aspirations. Ted Knight, lefty leader of Lambeth Council, observed that anyone on the local streets could have said what the report does, and complained that Scarman had not pointed out the new restraints on council spending — as if the past history of Brixton had not included periods of more public spending. The strength of Lambeth Borough Council’s proposals can be seen from their suggestion that the Metropolitan Police would be more answerable for their actions if they were accountable not to the Home Secretary but to a local Police Authority — just as the police in Merseyside are!

Of course, it doesn't matter how the police are controlled. Whatever system is used, they will continue to be the defenders of capitalist order and capitalist property. Imagine that everything the reformers want of the police has been achieved: no racial prejudice among them, black policemen at all levels of the force, local accountability, true consultation, riot equipment surrendered. The essential role of the police will not have been altered. Many of those who see police harassment as the major cause of the disorders are quite content to see the police carry out their duties, so long as they do so in a less objectionable manner. In the words of the leader of one of Brixton’s black organisations: “We do not object to what they the police do so much as to the way they do it.”

What is this essential role of the police? Scarman provides an answer which is eloquent largely for what it leaves unsaid:

   the primary duty of the police is to maintain “the Queen’s Peace”, which has been described as the “normal state of society”, for in a civilised society, normality is a state of public tranquillity. Crime and public disorders are aberrations from “normality” which it is the duty of the police to endeavour first to prevent and then, if need be, to correct (p. 62).

In writing this, Scarman seems to have forgotten that part of his report which describes the “normal state of society" in Brixton, not an area noted for its public tranquillity. Slums, unemployment, insecurity, hopelessness form the Queen’s Peace in nineteen-eighties Britain, which we are supposed to believe is a civilised society! It is a topsy-turvy world in which penury and slums are accepted as normality, but that is the world and the logic of capitalism, and that is the world the police play a part in defending.

And that is the world at whose disposal Scarman has placed his services. The task of his inquiry was to alert the government so that it might tinker with a few things (such as longer training for police) in the hope that these will suffice to prevent such confrontations in the future. Socialists, having held our own inquiry into the nature of capitalist society, recommend that it be not tinkered with but replaced.

Paul Bennett

Race & Violence (1959)

From the July 1959 issue of the Socialist Standard

With the recent murder of a coloured man in Notting Hill, race-prejudice has once more become a subject of public interest. It is not possible to say at this stage whether or not Kelso Cochrane died as a result of racial hatred.

What can be said is that passions, hatred and sympathies have been aroused. A large crowd of mourners, both white and black, followed Cochrane’s coffin through the streets. Many organisations have had their say about Notting-Hill; some of them, such as the Union Movement, propagating racial discrimination. There is no doubt that the Union Movement is anti-coloured, and rabidly so. It considers that this country should be reserved for Englishmen. This is a “one way only” policy however. Not so many years ago a main plank in Mosley’s platform was the intensive economic development of British Africa; for the benefit of the British, of course. “Keep out the coloureds” does not mean keeping the Pinks out of South Africa, Kenya or Nyasaland. The left-wing too, have been having their little stir. They, poor souls, are in a bit of a quandary, for the Labour Government’s record does not look particularly attractive. The imprisonment of Nkrumah and the banishment of Seretse Khama must make the collection of coloured people's votes a rather difficult matter. There are, too, plenty of advocates in the Labour Party for the policy of restricting or excluding immigrants. The supporters of such views, to be logical, should exclude or restrict the movement of anybody going anywhere to look for jobs.

One form of violence has been put down officially, and with an iron hand. There are other forms of highly discriminatory violence that are encouraged, and financed with millions of dollars, pounds and roubles. Young men at Cape Canaveral in Florida, with considerable academic, scientific and technical qualifications, are busy getting ready to be very violent indeed. They are engaged in the assembly and launching of rockets that may one day destroy whole cities. The crimes against humanity planned here (and in every other weapons-development centre in the world) make the coshings and brawlings of the “Teds” look like nursery-play. Evidently people can be as violent and as discriminatory as they please—at the right place and time and against the wrong people.

The evidence shows that there is no basis whatsoever for thinking one racial or national group inferior to another; and in fact scientists even have difficulty in defining what is meant by “race.” We are one species, one people, and there is no reason why all people should not live in harmony. This will take a bit of organising but it is where we take our stand. We must organise together to throw off the shackles of class-domination. We are against racialism, nationalism and any other form of persecution and prejudice whatsoever. We want a world of human beings aware of their humanity, in place of a world of rocket-launchers and bomb-throwers. “Racialism” and “Nationalism” are social products, and will disappear along with the bomb-throwing society which gives rise to them.

The Scapegoats

Life is unsatisfactory, not only for those on the bottom rungs of the social ladder, but for those who have climbed rather higher as well; it is so much more painful if you fall. Many people, looking round for a scapegoat to blame for all their troubles, fix on the West Indian, Jew or other “outsider.” The West Indian, being rather distinctive both in colour and culture, makes a particularly choice victim. But bad housing has always been a feature of capitalism, it existed long before the recent influx of West Indians. The West Indian is in the same rotten boat as ourselves. He came here because poverty in the West Indies is particularly bad. To blame him for coming here looking for a job is like blaming one’s own relatives for moving to new towns and new employments in order to better themselves. There is nothing logical in this matter however, they are blamed because they work; they are also blamed because they don’t. They can never do anything right. They are blamed for taking houses, they are also blamed for living in overcrowded conditions. They are blamed for “lowering the tone” of the districts in which they live. There wasn’t much tone to be lowered in Brixton or Hackney, the places have been gradually falling apart for years. It is capitalism, a society that produces satellites and rockets as easy as winking that is at fault. The workers never have had enough.

Prosperous Misery

Capitalism isn’t very successful at making people happy; it is not organised for that purpose, it is organised for the making of profits. Tensions and resentments are easily made, and capitalism is glad of it, particularly in time of war.

Even the “successful.” the “man who is getting on,” has little cause for real satisfaction. Society hasn’t got much to offer except the rat-race scramble for good jobs, suburban brick boxes, bigger and better television sets, and all the thousand and one gadgets that capitalism provides as a substitute for human co-operative happiness. The “go-ahead” man usually gets there by stepping on his fellows; the “crawler” is common everywhere, despised yet surreptitiously admired. Somewhere in the struggle humanity has been forgotten; somewhere part of our sympathies and emotions has been destroyed. In such a world as this, full of tensions and resentments, race-prejudice can explode as suddenly as a bomb, erupting into shrieking mob-violence. There is always the quieter, more civilised way; the finding of mock-rational, pseudo-scientific reasons for hating other human beings. Sale and Profit have deadened our humanity, dulled our sensibilities, thwarted our progress, soured our relations with our fellows, made us into hostile, suspicious “insiders” looking out of our brick-box house or tin car at a hostile world, continuously on our guard against the menace outside.

It is not the Black Man, Pink Man or Yellow Man who is the root cause of our problems, it is our arid society; never more financially solvent, yet never more emotionally bankrupt. Wage-slavery has cut-off the world from humanity, the world is the property of someone else. Socialists want the world returned to humanity, of whatever race or colour. What is even more important, we want humans to return to humanity.

F. R. Ivimey

Rioting for reforms (1990)

From the September 1990 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Socialist Party has long been aware that there are organisations. both in Britain and other parts of the world, that share our view that capitalism is the cause of the major social problems confronting the working class and needs to be replaced by a world-wide socialist system based on common ownership, production for use and free access to wealth. However, organisations which hold this perspective with us are, unfortunately, often found to be deficient when it comes to having a credible strategy for the revolutionary transformation of capitalism into socialism. One group, Wildcat have tried to argue that rioting helps raise class consciousness In their coverage of the Poll Tax riots earlier this year, Wildcat and a similar group of "council communists" in Manchester going under the name of Subversion have displayed a contempt for sections of the working class quite inconsistent with their professed aim of a harmonious society based on co-operation and mutual solidarity

Wildcat No.15. subtitled "Long Hot Summer 1990". stated:

Trafalgar Square will go down in history It was the most politically conscious and effective riot of modern times . . .  the rioters were not mindless hooligans They were mainly very clear about why and who they were fighting. They were disciplined. responsible and class conscious (Our emphasis)

Also:

The police were the main target. They were attacked with impressive courage and brutality . . .  the impunity with which most of the rioters were able to loot, burn, smash and occasion actual bodily harm has given a great boost of confidence to the undemocratic hooligan minority.

This is rubbish. An "undemocratic hooligan minority” beating up the other members of the working class which police are has nothing whatsoever to do with class consciousness—just the reverse.

Wildcat also proudly reproduced from a. newspaper:

A poll tax assistant hanged himself rather than face one more day of abuse from an irate public. He had only one more day of house calls to go. But instead he went home and hanged himself from a beam.

But Wildcat's wrath is not reserved merely for policemen, shopworkers or local government employees. Menacingly, they warn that:

The willing assistance of the media in providing the police with films and photos (of the riot) means that cameramen will always be among the first targets of future violent protests.

Very class conscious! But who will be the next victims of this peculiar "class justice"? Ambulance crews who go to help the injured?

Judging by some of the leaflets it has issued recently, Subversion is little better. Although one of their leaflets carries the interesting headline "Down With Poll Tax— Down With All Taxes", they seem just as obsessed with rioting and other violent behaviour as do their friends from Wildcat. In their issue dealing with the 31 March Trafalgar Square riot, they declared we support the riot 100 percent"

Their view of how riots and anti-Poll Tax demonstrations can bring about socialist consciousness is confused in the extreme. One of their leaflets reproduces two articles side by side. In talking of the Trafalgar Square riot the first one states "we regard such rioting as a positive sign" but is flatly contradicted by the second article which tells us that their group opposes all movements which are based on the acceptance of capitalism and which just want to ‘modify’ it in some way". The only way to resolve this contradiction would be to argue that the rioters were not interested in the Poll Tax but were rioting against the existence of the wages system, commodity production and other features of capitalism However, we doubt whether even Subversion could seriously argue that this was the case (and even if it was it would still be futile).

What is most striking about both Subversion and Wildcat is that they seem to be looking for “short cuts" to socialism by tagging on to the most extreme examples of working class discontent with particular products of the system. Although they seem reluctant to get involved in such campaigns run by trade unions or left-wing organisations, they are nonetheless in danger of treading the well-worn path towards reformism and single-issue campaigning that the Left have been involved in for decades.

Strategies based on riot and insurrection can play no constructive part in the development of a strong socialist movement. There can be no place for such romanticising of violence when the reality is that the coercive apparatus of the state machine is used to protect the interests of the ruling class. The first act of a socialist majority must be to take this apparatus so that the capitalist class can be dispossessed as peacefully as possible—and the socialist majority will include all sections of the working class—including the police, tax collectors, cameramen, ambulance crews and anybody else who might get in the way of the immature utopian fantasies of groups like Wildcat and Subversion.

Dave Perrin

Greasy Pole: Throwaway Minister (2016)

The Greasy Pole column from the February 2016 issue of the Socialist Standard

'Where’s fookin’ Menzies?... Come on, where is he?... just to let you know, I’m not fookin’ having’ it…’ was how Labour Deputy Leader John Prescott warned Tony Blair about the rumours that the Lib Dem Leader was to be included in the government. And some years after that… ‘the meeting was friendly enough. He ended up offering me just about every job that was going – including the Foreign Office – except the one that I held. I said no’ – which was not John Prescott but Chancellor of the Exchequer Alistair Darling discussing with Gordon Brown the Labour Leader’s plan to replace him with his favourite Ed Balls.

Eton And Cambridge

It is habitual for political leaders when they are imposing the disciplines of exploitation upon the rest of society to resort to an individual style of expressing themselves, in words as well as actions.  An example  is Oliver Letwin,  who is now the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster with a history of episodes as Shadow Secretary of State for the Environment, Home Secretary, Chief Secretary to the Treasury and Chancellor of the Exchequer. Politics has always been part of the Letwin family’s expectations; his father became Emeritus Professor at the London School of Economics and his mother has been described by a close friend as ‘humourless and energetic, argumentative and exceedingly right wing’. It was a family unlikely to place their child at a local state school so little Oliver had to learn about life and impoverishment at Eton. He then went to Cambridge where he joined both the Liberal Club and the Fabian Society – a conflict not made any more digestible by his apology: ‘I am sorry to have to tell you that this was because I was interested in the thoughts of Liberals and Fabians (and still am) rather than because I was ever a Liberal Democrat or a Fabian’.

Broadwater Farm 

Letwin’s first attempt to get into Parliament was at the essentially London Hackney North and Stoke Newington, against  Diane Abbott who was even then a rebel notorious enough for him to protect his ambitions by moving  in 1992 to Hampstead and Highgate, although that was where  another charismatic woman – Glenda Jackson – was entrenched. After all that effort he was probably due for a better prospect and he was given the chance at Dorset West but by the time of his first contest there, in 1997, he had a reputation for serial blundering so that his first majority was down to 1840. Among the earliest of his gaffes in 1985, when he was in Thatcher’s Policy Unit, was to support the vote-haemorrhaging Poll Tax. Although he was liable to be on the receiving end of a barrage of eggs if he spoke up for it in public, Letwin recommended that Scotland should be a ‘trail-blazer’ so that the tax could be used throughout the country if ‘the exemplifications prove… it is feasible’. Another disastrous piece of his work at that time was his part in commenting on the Broadwater Farm riots of 1985, when PC Keith Blakelock was killed. The riots were sparked off by the death of Cynthia Jarrett while the police were searching her home in Tottenham and were a predictable outcome of the particular poverty and despair of that area of London. But Letwin was joint author of an assessment that the cause was ‘solely by individual character and attitudes… new entrepreneurs will set up in the disco and drug trade… refurbished council  blocks will decay through vandalism  combined with neglect…’ This report was at first restricted as private; when it was released in December 2015 Letwin admitted  that ‘some parts’ were ‘badly worded and wrong’ and he apologised for ‘any offence these comments have caused’– the impact of which must have been diminished by the thirty year gap since the riots .

Hapless

Another of his efforts at joint authorship was in 1988, with John Redwood, of a pamphlet which justified the subsequent privatisation of the NHS, by both Tory and Labour governments and preceded his proclaiming that ‘The NHS will not exist under the Tories’. But the results of his efforts as one of the key advisers to Tory governments have not always been as he wished. During the 2001 general election he advocated a £20 billion reduction of the proposed Labour government’s spending. This was regarded as regressive and socially harmful, to the extent that Letwin feared his standing was under threat. He went into a period which Alistair Darling recounts as ‘A hapless Tory shadow minister, subsequently a member of the Tory cabinet, had played into our hands in 2001 by suggesting that the Tories really wanted to cut £20 billion from public spending. He went into hiding. The whole election campaign was dominated by the media search for this man. Oliver Letwin was finally tracked down at a garden party dressed in a Roman toga. We could not have paid for such a boost to our campaign’. The incident was reflected during the election when Letwin’s majority was reduced to 1414, classifying  the seat as marginal to a threat from the Lib Dems. In April 2011 he blurted to Boris Johnson that ‘We don’t want people from Sheffield having cheap holidays’- which may, or may not, have referred to Sheffield MP Nick Clegg.

Sensible

Among  his posturing and threats about the behaviour of others (provided they are not from the ruling elite) in October 2011 Letwin dumped a batch of papers,  including personal and other security matters, in a waste bin in a public place, as exposed when he was photographed in a park close to Downing Street. This was at first excused on the grounds that he was in the habit of rising early, going to the park and dealing with some of his paperwork there. It did not take long for this defence to be shredded, when details of the contents of the documents, some of which were seriously sensitive, were revealed. A spokeswoman for David Cameron had to concede that ‘Clearly it’s not a sensible way to dispose of documents’. Except that it has not been just documents which Letwin has disposed of during his career in power.

Ivan

Greasy Pole: Baby David Speaks (2012)

The Greasy Pole Column from the March 2012 issue of the Socialist Standard

Among the more memorable examples of urban unrest dredged up by the analysts after last August's riots was Tottenham, that place in North London with the Seven Sisters Road and White Hart Lane, Jimmy Greaves and, less happily, the tragedies of Baby P and Victoria Climbie. And the Broadwater Farm Estate where in 1985 there was a riot on a scale to ensure its place in the record books.  The riot was notable, too, for the killing of P C Blakelock, an event which led to Winston Silcott being sent to prison for life only to be released in 1991 when his conviction was found to be based on fabricated evidence.

Bernie Grant

It took a long time for Tottenham to adjust to the memories of those events and to the fragile tension which followed. This was not helped when the Leader of Haringey Council, Bernie Grant, shrugged off the killing of the policeman in the memorable description that “...what (the police) got was a bloody good hiding”. It says enough about those times that Grant went on to be elected when the Parliamentary seat at Tottenham became vacant in 1987 and later stood for the leadership of the Labour Party. He died of a heart attack in 2000; his wife was on the candidates’ short list but the party, perhaps hoping for a less combustible representative, preferred one David Lammy who, when he was elected in June 2000, may have warmed many a Tottenham heart by becoming the Baby of the House – not expected to turn out to be like one of those gurgling, screeching, defecating infants who keep you awake at night.

Thatcher vs Beveridge

And so it has turned out as Lammy, with his scholarships and Masters Degree and being called to the bar, is one of what some electors are comforted to call “middle class”. And perhaps to foster this he was quickly assumed to be well suited to a smooth, unhindered rise up the Greasy Pole with a succession of ministerial posts eventually reaching the heights of Minister of State and Privy Councillor. All this came to an abrupt end with the 2010 election. As the Labour Party subsequently struggled to unravel the chaos of Gordon Brown's leadership, Lammy's contribution to their leadership election did not seem to be entirely free of confusion.  He nominated Diane Abbott while declaring his support for Ed Miliband, then refused Miliband's obliging offer of a place in the Shadow Cabinet on the grounds that he wished to be free to speak on a wide range of issues. Labour members may have seen this as something of a continuous process when he bewildered them by writing that he saw common ground between two people who they had always regarded as at opposite ends of the political spectrum: “ . . . to knit society back together again . . . means a working class with a stake in capitalism and a middle class with faith once again in the welfare state. It requires fulfilling the goals expressed by both Mrs. Thatcher and Beveridge, not one or the other” (Out of the Ashes – Britain After the Riots).

Smacking Children

There was more to come on the same theme. At a meeting in September 2011 of the “think tank” Policy Exchange he warned, “We can't have another generation that are routinely unemployed for longer than a year. We have to guarantee these people work otherwise we will pay the price dearly”. But in January he was advising a markedly different explanation for the riots, declaring that they were due to “. . . an explosion of hedonism and nihilism,” rather than government cuts or unemployment. He expanded on this analysis by linking the riotous behaviour to legal restraints on parents smacking children: “Many of my constituents came up to me after the riots and blamed the Labour Government, saying, 'You guys stopped us being able to smack our children”. He then displayed more confusion by outlining the problems of all those frustrated unsmacking parents who “. . . raise children on the 15th floor of a tower block with knives, gangs and the dangers of violent crime outside the window”, contrasting them with those he can classify as “middle class” who can afford to place their children in private schools where they are taught “discipline” and have tennis lessons.

Branding

Contradicting Lammy's ravings, there is a mass of established evidence that anti-social behaviour is deep-rooted in poverty and alienation, aggravated by the police assertion as the guardians of property society and its system of class privilege. A study by the London School of Economics and the Guardian – one of many – which interviewed 270 of the rioters last December said that 86 percent of those interviewed gave poverty as the main cause; 85 per cent said the police were “important”; and 79 percent said unemployment. There is no record of anyone mentioning restraints on parental smacking of children. If, as Lammy blusters, “hedonism” and “nihilism” were contributory factors, that is likely to be, as an observer of a typical Saturday afternoon in any shopping centre will notice, the effects of the “branding” of goods which is designed to be a powerful aid in a profitable sales method. The problems displayed in the riots and beyond are severe and toxic. The events at Broadwater Farm took place 26 years ago. Has nothing been learned since then, as the politicians promised?  Has nothing of any consequence changed? As long as the matter is left to the likes of David Lammy, that is all there is to look forward to.

Ivan

Brixton explodes (1981)

From the June 1981 issue of the Socialist Standard

After the riots, the deluge. As the fires died in Brixton, the smouldering passions there were doused in words hosed out from all kinds of social and political analysts. Most of them claimed dolefully that they had been expecting just such a thing to happen for a long time; all of them were alert with theories about the causes, and thereby with suggestions to stop it happening again.

One who did not offer any analysis was the very man in the whole of Britain who might be expected to know more about civil disorder than anyone else—Home Secretary William Whitelaw. But apparently he had so little idea about what happened and why that he had to set up an enquiry to tell him. In charge of the enquiry is Lord Justice Scarman, who did similar jobs on the Red Lion Square confrontation in 1974 and Grunwick in 1977 and who, if he doesn't get a rest from it soon, may come to think that open air life in London is about as peaceful as the North Bank at Highbury when Spurs are playing there.

The analysis of the Brixton riots covered a pretty wide field. On the one hand there was the Labour leader of Lambeth Council, Ted Knight, whose role in the affairs of London becomes daily more obscure as people begin to wonder whether he is a councillor or a comedian. Knight declared (Guardian, 16/4/81):

We went to see the commander of the police tonight to demand that he withdraw his men. He won't do it.

And he then went on to advise:

... a future Labour government must dismantle the Metropolitan Police and replace it with a new force "responsible and answerable to the working class people".

Knight is one of those "practical socialists" who, while not actually being delirious, suffer from these dreams in which the police don't have to be a coercive, property protective force but can assert the minority privileges of capitalism in the interests of the unprivileged majority , This is a common sort of delusion among "practical socialists", who deceive themselves that capitalism doesn't have to be capitalism—and Knight's problem is that when he talks like this he is not joking.

On the other hand there was the reaction of Margaret Thatcher—and nobody is in any doubt by now about her role in capitalism's affairs. There was no surprise when Thatcher resisted the invitation to agree that pressures like racial discrimination and unemployment could have influenced the riots. And in between Knight and Thatcher there were the senseless trendies and liberals, like the teachers who tried to get the NUT Annual Conference to debate an emergency motion which called for the restoration of government grants for housing, education and social services.

One thing all these analyses hold in common is the notion that basically there is nothing wrong with capitalism. They all agree that the priority is not to abolish the system but to patch it up; any conflict between them is over how much patching up is needed, and where, and whether it can be afforded right now. The most visionary among them misconstrue Brixton as the result of malignant government policies and harsh police methods; the least visionary misinterpret the riots as .the malignant response to a benevolent, natural order of things.

From this it is clear that capitalism is OK; Whitelaw would hardly have chosen anyone who was likely to say differently. The Home Secretary is a tirelessly courteous man who resembles a friendly sea lion but that should deceive nobody. His plump, fatherly demeanour hides an iron determination to do as capitalism requires, at whatever cost to an undoubtedly kindly disposition.

How then should an enquiry into Brixton proceed? Well first there is the character of the place and the question of whether this is unique or even unusual. Brixton is not one of the world's beauty spots. Arterial roads suck in heavy traffic; there is the prison of grim infamy and, near the Town Hall, there is Rushcroft Road, where the fascists once jammed the streets with their malignant prejudices. The area was largely an Edwardian development and it has streets of substantial villas of that period, now run down and multi-occupied by the more depressed strata of workers. A study of the southern part of Lambeth in 1976 found 18 per cent of the housing in poor condition and 42 per cent of the people there in shared accommodation. These statistics represent workers whose deprivation is such that they must concentrate where the rents are lowest, even if that also means where the walls are damp, where the rats run and the floors are rotten. For these workers, survival takes a desperate toll; they are capitalism's social misfits or its unemployable—single parent families, weary pensioners and, inevitably, immigrants.

Like many parts of London, Brixton has immigration written into its history and by no means all the immigrants have come from what is evasively called the New Commonwealth. But it did receive the first imported workers from the West Indies in the early fifties, and they have stayed, raised families and are easily identified by other, similarly desperate workers venting their frustrations on the most accessible scapegoat. 

So, Brixton has become famous for tension as well as for its seedy buildings and its street crime. The Metropolitan Police say that Lambeth ranks second in their entire area for violent crime: in 1980 they recorded 2859 cases. In 1975 a police report stated that 80 percent of muggings—quick, violent, usually small scale street robberies—were committed by young blacks and that 85 per of the victims were whites. These figures were triumphantly used by racist organisations like the National Front, would not be anxious to emphasise inherently subjective element involved in any criminal statistics. Workers who were already in a panic at the decline in the fabric of the area might have concluded that they were surrounded by black thugs, that 80 per cent of the black youngsters were muggers. But the same report said that only 4 per cent of youngsters were involved in street crime, suggesting that the overwhelming majority of them keep to the law. 

Brixton's street crime gave it a deserved reputation for being about the most intensively policed part of London. It regularly returned the highest figures, outside the West End; for arrests for Sus, the offence which ropes people in not for actually committing a crime but for a couple of policemen think that they are contemplating one. Brixton has also had unusually frequent attention from the Special Patrol Group, which stopped thousands of people in the streets for spot checks and arrested hundreds of them. The police justified these tactics by a sharp fall in reported street but in the process, to some extent, they replaced the muggers' violence with their own. Contact with the SPG is not a tranquilising experience. Brixton bubbled like a volcano; the police tried even harder to hold the top down but in the end it had to blow up.

The riots were seen by many workers as authentication of the doom laden prophecies which have emanated from Enoch Powell, beginning with his infamous 1968 Birmingham speech in which he foresaw "the River Tiber foaming with much blood". Perhaps Powell feels that his reputation for rigourously logical thinking has been sustained. But there were others who also foretold the trouble which can be expected from crowding a specially depressed population into a decayed area and subjecting it to pressures such as racial discrimination, chronic poverty and state violence. Powell's contribution—if it can be described as such—is to blame the riots, and indeed much of the conditions in which the riots happened, onto the skin colour of the rioters. The famous logician Powell is here indulging in the fallacy of a self-fulfilling prophecy, which may be comfortable for him and which may appeal to the more ignorant and prejudiced among the working class but which is not logical or reasonable .

Even Scarman will probably be aware that Brixton is not unique, either now or in the past. In 19th century Britain, for example, the appetite for labour stimulated by the Industrial Revolution drew masses of Irish workers to this country. They came mainly to escape from the appalling famines in Ireland; with only their working abilities to sell for their living they came looking for employment, cramming into towns like Liverpool, Manchester and Glasgow. By 1851 they made up nearly 3 per cent of the population and, doing mainly unskilled work in textiles and building, they were in competition with equally desperate English workers for jobs and housing.

These were the roots of the discrimination which was practised against the immigrants, with "No Irish" signs up at .the windows and 'employers keeping English and Irish workers apart to avoid trouble at work. Even so there were riots and battles over many years, as one group of degraded workers fought with another over who should be exploited and repressed at one particular place and time. By the end of the century the Irish had become largely absorbed but they had been replaced as the butt of popular prejudice by the Jews, with an Enoch Powell—Tory MP Major Evans-Gordon—rousing mob ignorance for his own political advantage.

Then, as now, deluded workers were avoiding the reality that problems like slums, unemployment, poverty and competition for jobs cannot be laid at the door of an immigrant work force. Capitalism both creates the demand for that work force to be mobile and the urban concentrations in which it must try to survive. For capitalism works by the production of profit, which means by the exploitation of the majority of its people. For capitalism, profitable is beautiful: cheap is beautiful; so often slums are beautiful; conflict is beautiful; ugliness is beautiful. Brixton is beautiful.

And all of this, in 1981, can come into focus on the streets of some urban desert, when a black youngster is stopped by a policeman whose uniform gleams with the authority of one whose job is to protect the minority rights and privileges of the capitalist class which is responsible for the desert. If that same policeman also represents working class prejudices he may treat the youngster to some racist insults. If the focus becomes sharper, like the rays of the sun, there can be a conflagration in which those youngsters might feel that in some undefined way they are getting some of their own back as they riot and burn and loot.

And in that too there was an irony, in Brixton, because as a working class area, the shops specialise in the tawdry rubbish which is all that impoverished workers can afford. The looters were not getting their own back; in what they thought of as their freedom to take what they liked they were in fact affirming their own degradation. .

The conclusion of this enquiry then is that Brixton is not unique in either time or place. There have been many other, similar, riots in many parts of the world and there will be many more for as long as capitalism continues to exploit and repress the majority in the sordid interests of the minority. Here are the roots of Brixton's agony; they will not be approached by any official enquiry no matter how rigorous. The workers of Lambeth, of London and of the world are in a crisis which it is in their own power to end and they should need no judge to tell them what is wrong with society.

Ivan

Riot! (2011)

From the November 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard

We take another look at the August riots.

Moral outrage ran riot across the pages of the tabloid press for six days in August this year while looting, arson and battles with the police spilled across the streets of London and other English cities. Angry condemnation of the rioters and promises of legal revenge emerged from the mouths of Westminster politicians, while the nightly television newscasts drip-fed the nation with a steady message of shocked disapproval.

‘These are sickening scenes. This is criminality pure and simple, and it has to be confronted and defeated’ said an apparently affronted David Cameron (PM and former member of the Bullingdon Club).

In the first days and nights of rioting, David Lammy, Labour MP for Tottenham, put the establishment case. The riots were: ‘an attack on Tottenham, on people, ordinary people, shopkeepers, women, children , who are now standing on the street homeless as a consequence’. It was a politician’s oily speech, carefully tailored to achieve maximum media effect, but it expressed a view which many of Lammy’s constituents might well have shared: the main damage inflicted by the rioters was on their own communities. The looting and arson attacks had been indiscriminate, directed at small local shops as well as banks, larger businesses and chain stores; people’s homes had been destroyed and members of the community were left traumatised and angry. Eventually, the rioting would also lead to the deaths of five innocent people. What Lammy’s comment also implied, though, was that the rioters were somehow not ‘ordinary people.’ By marginalising them in this way he was showing a desire to sidestep any need to understand what was happening.   

Revolution?

Unreported by the corporate media, another very different political commentary was also taking place. Its tone was not condemnatory but enthusiastic: ‘We are in a revolutionary moment’, proclaimed one blogger, ‘Prepare yourself…’ Several of the more excitable anarchist and leftist groups were in animated discussion about whether the long awaited ‘revolutionary moment’ had arrived; or, if it hadn’t, whether the rioting was, at least, an important step towards it; or, if it wasn’t, whether this was, anyhow, how revolution might begin?  Of the more ponderous political groups out on capitalism’s left-wing, the Trotskyist ‘Socialist’ Party of England and Wales (SPEW) preferred to censor the disorderly way young workers on the streets were expressing their frustration at the system. In its view, this was clearly incorrect. (The rioters, evidently, had not asked SPEW to stage manage the week’s events.)

Capitalism and the limits of tolerance

So, what did actually happen during those six August days and nights? Was it simply a sudden and inexplicable upsurge in criminality and ‘disgusting behaviour’ by urban youth? Or was it an inarticulate cry of the working-class stumbling blindly towards a revolutionary overthrow of the established order? Perhaps, of course, it was neither of these things.  Perhaps it was something else entirely.

It’s worth reminding ourselves that the rioting, wherever it occurred, had several obvious and consistent features: it took place almost exclusively in the poorer districts of cities; it had no obvious racial basis; the participants were young, sometimes very young; and where their voices were recorded in the dozens of published web videos, they delivered the same angry and unambiguous message: “it’s payback time.”

Payback

But payback for what? The answer which the rioters gave most frequently themselves was payback for years of indignity suffered at the hands of the police. And it was apparent that at the Pembury Estate in Hackney and at various other locations, many of those out on the streets were spoiling for a fight. ‘Kill the police’, they shouted. One man summed up the general mood this way: ‘[The police] are not all bad but most of them are; no-one around here has got any liking for the police’.   I’ve been wanting to do this to the Fedz for years, said another. Although the killing of Mark Duggan by police officers on 4 August and the insulting treatment meted out to his family was a powerful trigger for the riots, it was the longer-standing resentment felt towards the police in London and elsewhere that lit the powder keg.

For unemployed teenagers and young people in urban areas, regular harassment by police and the use of stop-and-search tactics has long been the source of that resentment. For black communities who feel themselves singled out for this kind of treatment, it is a double insult. But, black or white, the rioters universally expressed the view that the police “took the piss” on the streets.

There was, though, another aspect to ‘payback.’ It was about claiming what many felt society had denied them: the right to be treated equally and the right to a decent standard of living. They were not shy about it: it was about ‘the money’. Stafford Scott, in a Guardian comment piece made this connection: “looting comes from the belief that if you cannot get equality and cannot expect justice, then you better make sure that you get paid.” Though he was speaking of attitudes within the black community, his remarks chimed very closely with what all the rioters were saying.  For some, the collective nature of ‘riot’ was enough to legitimise the looting of shops and businesses. It was a moment of ‘freedom’ one teenager claimed.  And though not all spoke openly in these terms, the attitude is nevertheless implicit in the widespread notion of payback.  

Class war

So, were the rioters simply criminals, as Cameron, and others claimed? Certainly they were criminals. The law defines all attacks upon capitalism’s system of property relationships as criminal, whoever carries them out.  But the question that Cameron, as a defender of capitalist property could not raise, however, let alone answer, was what kind of challenge the rioters were making.

The significance of the August riots becomes clear only when they are set against the background of the conflicts of interest that are built into the social relationships of capitalism. Those conflicts are never far from the surface and are liable to break out at any time, visibly and destructively. That’s especially the case when the capitalist system, which is always unstable and unpredictable, puts large groups of people or even whole classes under pressure. And the rioters who came from Hackney, Tottenham and Peckham, and from dozens of other socially deprived urban areas around the country were certainly feeling the pressure. Many of these areas have for a long time been dependent on services funded by government and, as a result, are now being disproportionately hit by cuts in public spending. As the UK Coalition government continues its policy of making the working-class pay for the chaos and shrinkage in the economy, many families on low incomes now face not just the prospect of increasing unemployment but benefit cuts, higher prices, and the withdrawal of public services. All this is happening - and seen to be happening – in a society where the gap between the rich and the poor continues to widen, and conspicuous consumption by the rich continues unabated.  It is hardly to be wondered at, under these circumstances, that frustration is going to spill over into action on the streets.

The rioting was not an example of class conflict. There was no direct confrontation between workers and their employers, for example.  The indiscriminate acts of violence, and arson seen on the streets last August were purely destructive.  The looting was for individual gratification or to meet individual need.   And there was certainly no sign that any of this would lead to a revolutionary overthrow of the capitalist order.  But as damaging to their own working-class communities as the riots showed themselves to be, they were a response to the specific class conditions that the rioters fond themselves facing under capitalism.  The targets they chose to loot were the everyday embodiments of capitalist property relations, high-street shops and businesses that hand over their consumer goods only to those with the money to pay for them. Also targeted were the defenders of those property relations, the police. Looting in these circumstances is a way of breaking through the barriers that capitalism imposes. It’s a way of challenging capitalism’s institutionalised entitlement system (money) and asserting your own sense of entitlement to a share of what society has produced.  To that extent, rioting is a political statement.

What is striking, though, is how little sense of identification the rioters had with their own communities or with other members of their own class.  From a socialist perspective, they betrayed no real understanding of why they lacked jobs and had little prospect of getting them – or why they needed jobs at all.  They showed no understanding of why they led impoverished, disempowered lives in a world full of rich folk, expenses-grabbing politicians, greedy bankers and glitzy consumer goods. They were seeking payback and a means, individually, to survive.  They were not fomenting revolution.  But at the same time, they understood enough to know that their interests were not being served by the world in which they lived, and felt strongly that they were entitled to something more.

HUD.