Though Cowards Flinch

The violence on the streets of London, Birmingham and elsewhere appears to the over-active imagination as a Rorschach test; as the machinations of whatever prejudice we have at the time, be that the failures of capitalism or the implosion of the European project of multiculturalism.

On one extreme, this destruction is the last ditch attempt by a forgotten section of society, whose only bargaining chip is achieved through removing the last layer of skin that holds their communities to the mainstream, while for another extreme these actions represent the suture promoted by cultural Marxism in single-parent families and what Richard Littlejohn has called “I-want-it-and-I-want-it-now consumerist society“.

Though the statistics look grim, are they directly responsible for recent events? In Tottenham, as Mary Riddell noted in her widely read Telegraph article, there are 54 applicants for every job, while 10,000 are benefit claimants. Britain is less equal in wages, wealth and life chances than any time since the 1920s – that the majority of people were expected to just sit on their hands is unreasonable, but this bout of street violence hardly appeared like a political protest of the sort these figures might evoke.

However appearance is precisely the problem. When the students took to the streets last year for the cut to EMA and the rise in tuition fees, placards and banners, planning and spokespeople were the images that distinguished “mindless violence” from political action. Even when fire extinguishers were being lobbed from great heights, and windows smashed, nobody doubted the political message, even if the ethics of proper protest were being debated, both in the press and by activists themselves.

Not every set of actions, no matter how unpalatable, or unclear their causes, will have such easily identifiable symbols and signs to recognise. Likewise, not every action that has in some way been perpetuated by the political landscape will be accompanied by a series of Situationist inspired political banners.

As Tony Parsons said last night: “You can never tell who is fighting for justice and who is just fighting for a wide-screen, hi-def plasma telly”.

Undoubtedly looting, the destruction of communities, and the ruining of people’s small businesses and livelihoods is wrong, and should be punished rather strongly, but it is as naive to suggest there is no politicisation here, as to suggest that these events are the thoughtless culmination of greed and moral decay.

As sure as I am that crowds scattered across the streets of London, and further afield, are mixed in their motives, I am sure that a lot of the reaction towards these events are imparted without experience of protest (unlike with the students) lacking in any notion of bourgeois parody.

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Businesses go under every day, possessions are lost on a regular basis – this, as some will agree, is business as usual. And it is wrong, but it is under-reported. What happened over previous nights are destructive – no doubt about it – and it is right for us to be outraged, but it will also help to restore some perspective. If we directed as much energy towards condemning these seemingly random attacks as we did business as usual, then we’d see less communities go under at the hands of social and geographical exclusion.

As Richard Murphy said, on the riots and the erratic behaviour of the stock market, “I [do not] condone violence … [b]ut then I don’t condone the behaviour of markets”. This is interesting, because thugs on the street smashing windows is just one type of violence – another type is the ill-considered changes to the way in which business rates are distributed to areas, which will see already poor communities get poorer.

One, more physical example of violence, can often obfuscate the extent to which the latter example can be considered violent, unjust and the culmination of greed. While rioters were condemned last night for their greed, it must not be forgotten what greed is, and other examples of it (for naysayers answer this – why should we not raise the issue of banker greed, fraud and tax evasion here, just why not?) for perspective. One example, displayed last night, is rare, while the other example is business as usual.

If, apropos Marx and Engels, the lowest common denominator of a State is a body of armed men, then full-fledged opposition to the State not only warrants violence, it requires it.

A truism this may be, though it seems to have escaped the voluminous ramblings of politicians and pundits after last week’s incident at Conservative Party HQ. Truisms cannot be the end of the story however.

This “body of armed men” do not simply represent naked force, they represent compulsion of all forms. If you disobey the law, the end result is forcible incarceration.

Resistance to this compulsion is a challenge to the legitimacy of the State. This is a violence equal and opposite to the compulsion of the State. Whether actual fisticuffs or property destruction takes place is frankly irrelevant.

To me this makes all the supportive noises around “civil disobedience” seem so disingenuous. If pursued to their logical conclusion, violence is inevitable; the ruling class will not relinquish power willingly. Human history threatens to bear me out on this point.

In critiquing the move towards violence, we must thus be more politically sophisticated than simply stating that violence is wrong, or recycling the truism that it is ‘counterproductive’, as though that answers anything. What the leaders of the NUS and other organisations usually mean by ‘counterproductive’ is that it upsets their pleasant media strategy, so they have to go on breakfast shows and apologise like naughty schoolchildren rather than pontificate.

This wouldn’t mean anything if the campaigns of ‘civil disobedience’ were concerted, sustained efforts dedicated to bringing about a democratic, accountable, mass movement that could override the authority of the State in the matter of education provision.

Attacking Conservative Party HQ was a tactical mistake, and a presumption by a minority of hotheads that they had the right to assume control of the whole march. It was anti-democratic, it served no purpose – but it was not wrong merely because it was violent.

Contra spokespersons for the Green Party (and inevitably the pro-capitalist parties), I believe that the announced plans of the Conservative/Lapdog coalition do justify violence. The question is what sort of violence. If they feel they can strip bare the lives of the least vocal, the least politic, the least able of this country, then they justify our pulling down the government and dancing in its ashes.

This is not a terroristic demand, nor does it take place separate from the political consciousness of the people of this country. It is a goal we realise through agitation along class lines; if workers are to be exploited by the cronies of those who run the State (cronies who at whiles populate the arms of the State), then workers have the right to resist.

As that resistance is a challenge to the legitimacy of government and State, it will ultimately be violent if we are to carry it through to its end – the reversal of these policies and the destruction of the class system which produced them.

Today’s continuing anti-fee protests and occupations might perhaps be a tentative first step along that road, beset as it will inevitably be by wrong turns, misjudgments and the fork-tongued.