Where are the Police?

Would you agree with the following statement?

"That's crap, I don't buy that for a minute. Calling a riot an irrational expression of rage is such a cop-out, it's opportunism at it's worst, it's just a bunch of people grabbing any excuse they can find to go out and loot a store. Nothing more. The fact that these people ripped off the stores in their own communities, all that reflects is the degree to which these people have absolutely no respect for the law at all and certainly no concept of like community or civic responsibility."

I hope you don't agree with this line because it is never simply the case that a riot is just the decision of free individuals to go out on a rampage, there is always something bigger going on regardless of what the media will tell you. The quote is lifted from the film American History X and specifically the words of Derek Vinyard, played by Ed Norton, on the LA riots of 1992 which were sparked by the assault on Rodney King by police officers. I refer you to the good words of Bill Hicks on that particular affair. The reactionary birdsong around the riots we are witnessing are not so different from this line, though the racist element is subsumed beneath words such as "scum", "thug" and so on. The Right are going completely bat-shit over the riots, consistently arguing that the riots are completely unrelated to the death of Mark Duggan and simply we're witnessing the rational actions of free individuals. This has been pointed out about Twitter by Richard Seymour and the same is true all over the web. It is being fueled by mainstream rags of the Right.
 

I was in a recent argument on the Facebook group 'R.I.P. Mark Duggan' with a member of the EDL, who has since been banned for racist remarks, and another user who described his political views as "common sense". I initially got involved to shoot down the EDL mouthpiece who claimed that "No Muslim nation would tolerate this?" so I responded "No Muslim nation would tolerate this? I thought you want us to be different from Muslims??" At the same time, the proponent of "common sense" was arguing that the riots began because "an armed criminal called mr duggan did whether he fired his gun or didn't he still had it in him." He then exclaimed that the army should be sent in to "fuck up these idiots". When I gave these guys a prod about Mark Duggan and Charles de Menezes the immediate line was that both of them deserved to die because Duggan was an "armed criminal" and Menezes was an "illegal immigrant". Beware "common sense"!

Of course, when I pointed out the facts that Mark Duggan fired no shots at the officers and the gun he had on him was in his sock when he died the purveyor of "common sense" had another line to spew. The words he had were simple "He had a gun end of legitimate shoot", the logic was clear: a young black man was shot to death by cops, so it must be a good thing! We now know that the weapon Duggan was a replica that had been converted into a working gun, bare in mind that the bullet which was fired into a police radio turned out to be 'police issued'. I pointed out some of these facts in the argument and witnessed an interesting response "if he hadn't been carrying a gun he would be alive he made a choice." I even said I think Mark Duggan should've been arrested for possessing the weapon (though we now know it was hardly a weapon at all) but it was not enough and apparently I just had no problem with men carrying guns on the streets of London. The thought-process was clear "your an idiot if you carry a gun you are making a choice to live outside the law."

My response was "An idiot who thinks a man who has a gun in his shoe should be arrested and not shot repeatedly by officers who then try to make it look like self-defence... Interesting logic there again." Naturally this commonsensical fopdoodle continued to accuse me of condoning the possession of firearms. The Right has no room for the context of the situation that we're in today, for them it is simply a bunch of yobs going on a crime spree and the police or army need to restore order. These riots would have never have happened if Mark Duggan was not killed and there were serious efforts to resolve the grievances of the community. We'll no doubt see more riots before the decade is over. Finally I had him cornered "I don't think it's okay for people to carry guns, I'll repeat to you: Mark Duggan was carrying a gun and should've charged for doing so. What's so difficult to understand about my position? You think he should've been killed and, from what I gather, you'd like to see more people killed in this way." I'm still waiting for that response.

Angry White Men in Riotous Tottenham.

I Predict a Riot!

The riot in Tottenham has been all over the news since last night, though it initially had to compete with the recent polar bear attack in Norway especially at the Mail's website. Perhaps it is because the source of the rage was not adequately covered at all, the death of just another black man at in a city of over 7 million people was insignificant. Even though it was the police who fired four rounds into the mini-cab, the media seemed baffled at first. Of course, The Daily Mail has since jumped at the opportunity to go on about how Mark Duggan fired on a police officer and therefore forfeited his human rights. The killing of a white student by a bear in Scandinavia seemed to deserve a higher level of coverage than the death of a black father at the hands of police officers. Yet it should be noted that the death of a young black man only lit the match, Tottenham already has an unemployment rate of 8.8% and the community is being subjected to a series of huge cutbacks. Keep in mind a history of racism and police brutality that precedes the riot of 1985.

The exact details of the death of Mark Duggan are not clear, the police were from Operation Trident - the unit that deals with gun crime "in the black community" - who stopped the cab and shot him four times in the midst of an arrest. Incidentally, Operation Trident largely goes by the 'stop and search' approach when it comes to young black men and the point of the unit is to police the black community which requires "special policing" of course. The police have since let the media know that the shots were fired in self-defence because Duggan fired on them first. The police officer who was supposedly shot was in hospital over night and then the police claimed that the shot was absorbed by the officer's radio. An eyewitness claimed that the police had restrained Duggan on the ground when the shots were fired. It wouldn't be the first time the police have killed a man in this way, as we have seen with Charles de Menezes who was shot seven times in the head as he was restrained on the tube. Both men were excluded as targets which could be legitimately killed, by the police and chunks of the media.

Update: The bullet lodged in the police radio was a police issue bullet. So much for the claim that he was a 'stone-cold gangster' who shot at a couple of innocent 'bobbies' only to get what was coming to him. Apparently, the gun was still in his sock when he was killed and the weapon is only capable of firing blanks.

The protest outside the police station was a peaceful one at first. It turned violent after the police set upon a 16 year-old girl with batons. Apparently she had come towards the police lines yelling something about "justice", though the The Daily Mail is currently running with the line that she threw a rock at the coppers. Then there is the police claim that the violence started when the protesters began throwing missiles at police cars and vans, which some might say were 'bait' left there to provoke an attack as seen in the student protests. Of course, the Right are running with the line that the looting is not an expression of a 'legitimate grievance' and not only was it right that the police killed Mark Duggan but these people just wanted to go ape. The looting of shops and burning of houses is not an expression of anything, it is just the cheap opportunism of people who have no conception of community or civic duty. It's a line that has a lot in common with what Derek Vinyard said about the LA riots in American History X.

Karl Marx says "Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past." The Right will never understand this quote because they adhere to a conception of free-choice which eliminates all room for even the minimal level of context and determinants. For them these people simply chose to trash their own community, if Mark Duggan was still alive and there was no history of police brutality would this have happened? I think not. The legitimate grievances are socio-economic as well as racial and that is undeniable given the nature of events, unless you subscribe to 'free-choice' in which case it was just coincidental that the riot followed the death of Mark Duggan. This is bigger than Tottenham as poverty is not just ghettoised into a neat section of the City waiting to explode, which is the reason for fears that this could spread to other parts of London.

Interpellate This!

Ideology is not simply in the heads of human beings it is material in nature, in order for a belief to be held the minds of the masses it must first of all shape the lives of the people as a whole. Only in this way will the ideology retain its hegemonic status and continue to function in spite of what thoughts might go through the heads of certain people. It could be argued that the Saudi state preceded capitalism on the Arabian peninsula and so it played a large role in the way it emerged in the Middle East, though it might be more nuanced to say that the state can be deduced from the structural needs of capitalism. The state-repression in Saudi Arabia has guaranteed the free reign of capital. But it takes more than the repressive agencies of the state (e.g. the military and the police) to protect the social order and to reproduce the existing social relations of production. This is where Islam as ideology comes into the picture as embodied in the institutional forms of the state apparatus, which ranges from the family and schools to corporations and the media.

Osama bin Laden was born into the Saudi bourgeoisie, his father was the head of a company which built 80% of roads in Saudi Arabia and has done rather well out of the relationship between the Saudi ruling class and the US government. The life Osama bin Laden led mirrors the contorted relationship between corporate base and Islamic superstructure in Saudi Arabia, the transition from Saudi oligarch to radical Islamist. Initially it might seem as though a thing is defined by its function in the arrangement, while a hammer may be used to knock nails into wood it can also be used to bash someone's head in. But it is not that the hammer has been removed from it's intended usage, rather it is defined as a torture tool when it is used as one. So we might understood bin Laden's place in ideology as defined not as the "leap" from his privileged origins to his life of fanaticism. Rather we should designate him in regards to what exact function his actions played in the world, the impotence of Islamist Terror and the way al-Qaeda contributed to the ideological constellation in the West.

At the end of the Cold War the grand narrative that the US was in a war with the Soviet Union finally drew to a close as "shock therapy" swept Russia clean of really existing socialism. The interests of capital that were invested in that narrative were now deprived of a way to make sense of the world and, in particular, the actions undertaken by Western governments. Eventually a new narrative had to open up and the attacks of September 11th 2001 heralded a new narrative of the "War on Terror". The ideological development served the Bush administration, the liberal commentariat and even al-Qaeda. It gave the government and the media a meaningful way to report on global events for public consumption. It also sells papers, boosts approval ratings for politicians and provides a way for Islamists to recruit young angry men in the Middle East. The materiality of all of this was the invasions of Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003. Osama bin Laden became the face of international terrorism as the constellation shifted from anti-Communism to counter-terrorism.

Louis Althusser developed a fascinating account of the way individuals become the subjects of ideology. It is through interpellation by the state apparatus in the process of socialisation that the individual is hailed. The individual recognises themselves in this call of a grand Subject capable of legitimately holding them accountable. The grand Subject might take a form appropriate to the context, from God and the Nation to the King and the Ulama. The media, as well as educational institutions and corporations are the materiality of ideology and each is a segment of the state apparatus. Ideology is not just belief in the heads of politicians, it is in the fabric of society and the practices of life on a day-to-day basis. It is more like the Freudian unconscious, it is not just a residue but it is central to the way we imagine our relation to specific experiences. This is the way ideology becomes engrained in the minds of citizens. Only through shaping the material can ideology shape people, so that the system and by extension the world can be understood in unquestionable terms as almost a natural phenomenon.

Ideology does not primarily involve theoretical explanations of 'how the world works', so much as provide accounts of who individuals are and where in the political world such individuals fit. In this ideological process, the relation of the subject to the world can become distorted as the subject is ascribed a functional role (as a citizen, a voter etc.) as if it is chosen by them. Thus, we find a man can go from an upstanding member of society from a respected family to a wanted criminal. The places we hold in such structures are politically decisive, whether it be in the pecking order in a corporation or in kinship as a son or a mother. People will perform as if these roles are the free realisation of their subjective potential. It took many years for Osama bin Laden to go beyond just the conservative reading of the Qur'an which he delved into as a student of economics. The notion of the autonomous individual is a product of ideological misrecognition. As Marx wrote in The Brumaire "Men make their own history, but not of their own free will not under circumstances they themselves have chosen but under the given and inherited circumstances with which they are directly confronted."