London was burning

In August a serious of violent riots shook Britain. In several cities young people from the poorest areas of the country took their anger to the street. The reason for the riots can clearly be found in the deprivation, complete lack of perspective and exclusion from the benefits of civilization these young people experienced. Unlike the bourgeois media who weren’t short of condemning the rioters in the severest way possible we think these riots are a mere reflection of the current system and the real criminal is the capitalist system that put’s people into such circumstances like the ones that produced the riots.

The riots were initially sparked after the police murdered father of four Mark Duggan in the London Borough of Tottenham. The London Metropolitan Police that executed Duggan has a long standing history of racism within its ranks. This has to be taken into account when looking how the protest movement afterwards developed.  Allegedly the riots were sparked when on a demonstration against racism and police racism a sixteen year old girl was assaulted by the police.

The riots that followed were clearly ignited over the issue of police brutality and  racism, but they soon took on a dynamic of their own. Fuelled by poverty and the hopelessness so prevalent in deprived urban neighbourhoods many young people, coloured and white, saw their chance for letting off steam.  Over the course of the next four nights young people were fighting the police and raiding shops. Starting in North London the riots quickly spread through the country into many other cities like Birmingham, Bristol, Liverpool and Manchester. This shows that the conditions impoverished young people face are the same around the country and that it is not just a problem of a certain area. Of the targets the rioters have attacked it is remarkable that a lot of them were symbols of the hated order, banks, bookmakers and police cars. The authorities and big corporations have righteously earned the hate and disgust of the people and it is not on us to condemn these acts. Pinching some shoes is nothing compared to the horrific looting of the wealth of society that takes place in the square mile of the city of London every single day by the bankers, stockbrokers and the rest of the gamblers.

But the lack of political consciousness in the riots was apparent. Often the rioters destroyed their own neighbourhoods, looted small corner shops and attacked other working class people. The riots are not a new step in consciousness but an act of desperation. If the struggle against the system isn’t given a real direction and a strategy based on the activity of the working class it can not but fail. Ultimately the rioters could never succeed against the massive repressive force of the state and its police.

It is to be hoped that a new generation of working class youth, and this generation has already shown that it understands that capitalism will not offer them anything, might take up those revolutionary ideas that are able to change society.