The End of the World As We Know It? by Deric Shannon

Author:Deric Shannon [Shannon, Deric]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: AK Press
Published: 2014-04-04T07:00:00+00:00

Circumscribed by Conditions They Did Not Create[1]

The English Riots of August 2011

Christian Garland

Burning and Looting Tonight…

The events of August 6–10, 2011 appeared—as rebellions frequently do—“from out of nowhere,” although the original spark in Tottenham, London on that Saturday night was itself beyond question: the death of another black man at the hands of police. As wide-scale rioting and looting subsequently spread in a matter of hours across the capital, and then to almost every major city across the country, as well as outside of urban centers—literally like wildfire—events seemingly overtook analysis, with a few notable exceptions. At the time, much was made of the extent of “criminality” and “lawlessness”: besides direct engagement with the police, mass looting—alternatively understood as the direct and immediate appropriation of commodities—became a recurrent feature of the disturbances.

Such outbreaks of “disorder” in a society such as the UK can be seen as indicative of a situation in which an increasingly significant section of the population is materially excluded, meaning that its labor is not required because it cannot be usefully exploited, and so the means for reproducing the material conditions of existence themselves are put out of reach. However, the products of consumerism remain mockingly ever-present to all, even as the bad conscience of actual material poverty and social deprivation reminds late capitalist society that they never went away.

This chapter will seek to contribute to a better critical understanding of the disturbances of Summer 2011 in England, with the clarity of two years passed and greater empirical evidence confirming that they were indeed an explosion of accumulated social misery and not the “opportunist” activities of a “criminal underclass.” Indeed, the recognition that the trinkets and baubles of consumer capitalism are put beyond the reach of the majority, and that section of people who day-to-day are effectively rendered invisible, returned as the repressed for four nights in England at the beginning of August 2011. The use here of the phrase the “return of the repressed” is meant in the same way Marx and Engels referred to the “specter haunting Europe,” that being communism, always present as the communist tension, forever threatening capital with its own historical becoming.[2] That such a tension is so explicitly and visibly made manifest in such imperfect and uneven events as these can be seen as the imperfect and uneven nature of class struggle; and, in this specific instance, where labor is dispersed, atomized, and rendered surplus by capital, one such manifestation of the apparently hamstrung agency of the revolutionary social subject is urban rebellions such as the English riots of August 2011.

How Many More Bridges Must We Cross…Before We Get to Meet the Boss?

As has been noted elsewhere, the events of August 2011 were, in many ways, unlike previous disturbances in the UK, some of which had a more clearly defined “social” character, in that they were, however haphazardly, an attempt at materially articulating rebellion against unbearable conditions. It has been contended from many different “critical” standpoints (in addition to the requisite

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