The London Riots and my idea of class

A few nights ago I went to a talk about the London riots by Martin Lux from the Whitechapel anarchist group. His talk was a little like storytelling; the benefits and limits of placing things in an order and making connections. He was clear this was his story; his opinion. It was a good opinion and worth hearing. And it made me make connections to my own story. Let’s start with his...

The connections begun last winter with the student protests against fees and cuts. Dismissing the student movement entirely (as being a lame bunch of twats, mainly from the middle classes that’s never actually mounted any real threatening movement to speak of), he focussed on the acts of school students in some of the London protests; how they were the ones behaving more unpredictably and wildly, sticking it to the cops the hardest and learning from these confrontations. It was through the violent clashes between the cops and the school students that the possibility and the space for the more violent clashes that happened in the spring and later that summer were created.

So with this as the backdrop, we move on the riots of July. Again, there’s been lots written about the events themselves, so here’s a little of his analysis... The riots were spontaneous, numerous and diverse expressions of violent anger. This anger came from the build up of generations of being fucked over, of being lumped together as some kind of deserving poor, and of the numerous individual experiences of being reminded of the fact (shit education; crap jobs with shit wages; a benefits system that expects gratefulness; regular and systematic violence from the cops in a prison system that makes it into all spaces in your life from street searches and tags, to curfews and asbos). As with most explosive public order situations, there were acts of anti-social behaviour and the rioters attacked their own neighbourhoods too. You might wanna do that too when you feel that your neighbourhood is more of a ghetto than a home and society thinks that you’re not even human. The rioters looted a lot of stuff too. Again, you might wanna do that when you live in a society that has index linked human value to your ability to buy stuff as completely as the british one, and you can’t get it. Not everyone can have the stuff. That what makes it socially valuable. So they took it and probably had a pretty good time in the process.

He talked about how the left and the anarchist movement failed to get involved with the riots. In the case of the left they didn’t recognise the rioters as even part of the working class (or the lower class or underclass), defining them as lumpen proletariat and hence devoid of a political dimension and agenda. In the case of the anarchist movement, they failed to see a political message in what was happening too; they didn’t see it as creating space in which they could also express their vision of the world. He criticised the UK anarchist movement for also being mainly middle class, totally alienated from the working classes and totally useless in this situation.

The main messages from of the talk: People. Stop talking your theory and get on the streets! The only way to radical change is through insurrection from the lower class. And, the middle classes suck

As the discussion progressed (and blimey was it a long one), it became clear that the Greek understanding of class is totally different. One thing that he explained was the fact that the british working class is made up of british citizens as well as immigrants and people of colour, and many different people were on the streets during the riots, for different reasons. In Greece, the idea of class ), like a caste, as some kind of birthright (or curse) means that social divisions within native society are less clear. At the same time though, mass immigration is a fairly recent thing, so divisions between natives and non-natives are extremely plain. The contemporary british working class on the other hand exists within this idea of class as birthright or curse. It could be defined as the class denied: in social, cultural and economic terms. It’s also the class that fights back. When defined as such, the british working class can be diverse in terms of race or nationality (perhaps this is also one reason why people quickly come to identify - at least to a certain extent and for some - as British, of any class. I have been in countries when people who have lived in a place for 10 generations still don’t identify as – or are accepted as - the nationality of the place they are living in).

As someone who is middle class, I don’t feel so comfy ‘defining’ the working class. But seeing as he defined me, as coming from the class that should fuck off and die, I wanna say something, cause I don’t think it’s so black and white. It’s not so black and white because class is more blurry than that, even in the UK. What class am I? Both my parents came from working class backgrounds. Inner city London, poor, immigrant heritage (and active involvement in radical politics too. As a 1^st generation eastern European Jewish man, my granddad was there on the streets of the east end fighting Oswald Moseley’s Fascists). But I was brought up with middle class values and aspirations. Social climbing was a big motivation for my dad; desire to do better than the working class roots he didn’t value. After my dad became ill and could no longer work, we didn’t have much money and I grew up on benefits. Financially, we were the underclass, but the rest of the middle-class stuff – the cultural stuff - remained. In fact, perhaps we strived even harder to assert the middle class status when we couldn’t back it up in financial terms. Because we were poor I got a scholarship to attend a posh school (nuns, silly uniforms, the works) and my education reinforced my identity as lower middle class; the class with the slight inferiority complex. So when I act, I come from this background. It makes me think of the definition of activism as ‘doing as much I can from where I’m at’. I can’t do more than that. Don’t define me and don’t write me off.

It’s also not black and white because being middle class and having radical politics is a constant process of struggle too. There’s truth in the fact that radical politics – the theory -  is mainly a privilege of the educated. This education comes to form some kind of protective barrier between words and deeds; the tools to see injustice, but an excuse not to act (these riots don’t express this or that theory, so they can’t be revolutionary, etc, etc). We talk the talk, but rarely really walk the walk. Our politics comes before the practice; of direct experience of repression and the struggle against it. So getting involved means becoming a class traitor; and this is our struggle; overcoming privilege – to live out a comfortable, secure life, being socially positioned to take advantage of the system. The challenge is in overcoming a fear of violence and conflict; rejecting and being rejected by our own class. This is the challenge of making the idea of a radical middle class not a contradiction in terms. This is really scary and difficult, partly because it comes from choice, so I can choose not to. I can choose to keep talking and not act on it and be a hypocrite. My challenge is always to stop using theory as a wall to hide behind.