As world stock markets tumbled and financial panic threatened the eurozone the British ruling class were congratulating themselves that London is well prepared for next year’s Olympics. Then, with all the unpredictability of a natural disaster Tottenham, Enfield, Brixton, Walthamstow, Croydon, Clapham burned. Since then riots have spread to other cities including Bristol and Birmingham. Now Prime Minister Cameron has been obliged to foresake his Italian villa and return to a city pitted by burnt-out and looted areas with all the visitor attraction of a war zone.

The immediate spark for the riot was the shooting by the Metropolitan police of 29 year old Mark Duggan who was dragged from a minicab and during the struggle with the police was killed, apparently by two shots fired at close range to his head. The police in a statement said that their officers were defending themselves from being shot at by Mark Duggan. This doesn’t tally with reports that the bullet which Duggan was supposed to have fired was a standard police issue. In other words, the usual long, drawn-out obfuscations to protect the police are already under way.

Following Mark Duggan’s death his family organised a protest outside the local police station where they asked to speak to a senior officer regarding the investigation into the shooting. It is reported that their intention was to hold an hour’s silent vigil after which they would then disperse. Far from explaining what had happened, senior officers refused to see them and instead chose to ‘disperse the crowd’, including truncheoning a 16 year old young woman. Protest turned to anger and when two empty police cars were stoned the police launched an outright attack on the gathering.

For now the details of what triggered the riots are not the main issue. The truth is they are an indication of the incipient social collapse that typifies capitalism in its supposedly advanced democratic metropoles today.

Big Society or Little Chance of a Civilised Life?

While it is easy for Labour politicians and their left-wing hangers-on to blame the current round of austerity cuts for the situation everyone (apart from maybe millionaires like Cameron and his crew) knows that anger and frustration have been running high for years as more and more youngsters are excluded from the world of wages and work. Undoubtedly the Con-Dem austerity cuts have only served to intensify and deepen the social chasm which divides the ‘haves’ and ‘have nots’. But that chasm cannot be bridged by a few new pool tables in government funded youth clubs. Nor would Labour offer any more serious solution. Labour’s role in propagating the low-pay, flexible economy which has no place for traditional skill training shouldn’t be forgotten, much less the cuts to services which were also carried out under the 1997-2010 Labour government and accepted by the trade unions. Even so, the situation goes back much further than the last Labour government.

Inevitably the present upheaval is being seen as a re-run of the riots of the 1980’s which focused around issues of race discrimination and associated unemployment, social deprivation and police harassment. All these factors remain (e.g. the metropolitan police, under the cover of tackling gun crime, still systematically harass black youths) but the present turmoil is happening after a period of forty years of capitalist crisis in a social environment which is crumbling. Whole generations of the working class have known nothing outside of low wage and precarious employment. A growing part of the permanently unemployed (the so-called under class) are surviving in an increasingly harsh and violent world however they can. Gun crime and knife crime are only one part of this. Life at the bottom of capitalist society is a mirror image of life at the top: everyone out for himself in a ruthless competition to survive and get their hands on money and material wealth, the only symbols of success in this capitalist world.

After the upheavals on the streets in the 1980s the state promoted ‘multi-culturalism’. State money was diverted to Black and Asian areas to finance sticking plaster solutions such as youth centres, language classes and even (in the case of muslim areas) waving visa restrictions for religious teachers to come from the home country to ‘educate’ young people in mosques here. The idea was to keep the ghettoes separate but quiet. Iraq, Afghanistan and the deepening crisis have put paid to all that. As the capitalist crisis deepens the only response it has left to the growing level of social exclusion is to increase the level of repression by the capitalist state.

Meanwhile anyone who protests — be it against a wrongful arrest, against increases in university fees, against austerity measures and pension cuts or simply against the existence of a parasitic monarchy — are liable to be arrested, beaten up or find themselves the subject of a police raid in the small hours. (Recently the Metropolitan police announced that anyone suspected of being an anarchist should be reported to the police, while on the run up to the royal wedding anti-royals were hunted out and arrested.) Increasingly this is the only response that the bourgeoisie can make, even within their nominal form of democracy.

A Communist Perspective

While the right wing press have been busy condemning the riots as simply ‘yobbery’ Labour and the left of capital are more careful about pinning the blame on the youth. Labour MP David Lammy was one of the first to comment. He condemned the violence as being an act that only targeted their own community, followed with the usual appeal for calm. The response of the British SWP has as usual revealed its role on the coat tails of Labour. For instance, while recognising the social and economic causes of the riots their solution is to call for some form of police accountability. As if reforming the police was a matter for a revolutionary organisation supposedly working for the overthrow of capitalism. The police are an integral part of the capitalist state machine whose core purpose is to defend capitalist legality, which in turn exists to defend the right of capitalists to make profits by extorting surplus value from workers.

It is not for communists to condemn the riots. They are a sign of capitalism’s crisis and decay. Neither do we romanticise the riotous act as an effective form of struggle against capitalist exploitation. In the present case the target of the crowd’s anger often appears to be in the main branches of national chain stores where the participants simply break into the stores and take what they can carry. Far from being a liberating form of activity this sort of ‘expropriation’ is simply a reflection of capitalist ideology which sees the strongest taking and keeping whatever possession it has acquired. So long as capitalism continues on its downward spiral of crisis with the rich getting richer and the poorest more and more excluded there will be more and more explosions like these. The race is on for the revival of a really liberating movement of the working class to present an alternative to capitalist barbarism. That movement will be a collective one where workers understand why they are battling against the forces of repression: for no less than the overthrow of the old world order and a completely new world where distribution is based, not on profits for the few, but on direct production to fulfil the needs of everyone. Instead of capitalist parliaments acting as a smokescreen for the real power of money and profit a revolutionary workers’ movement will form councils of recallable delegates who are accountable to those who elect them and whose sole purpose is to introduce a communist mode of production to ensure that all workers’ interests are addressed. In short, unless and until the working class begins to see there is an alternative to capitalism and begins to struggle politically there will be more outbursts from those who have no stake in this society, who have no serious job prospects, who are not enthralled by East Enders and who have no religion to chain them to this world.