I wish very much that I could report the riots now tearing across England as the opening gambit of anarchist revolution. Unfortunately, I can’t. The riots appear ideologically inchoate: They are a phenomenon born of rage, and rage is irrational, no matter the reason or unreason of the original spark (the killing, by police, of alleged criminal Mark Duggan).
The ever-opportunistic statist left, of course, would have us treat the riots as a reaction to Conservative/Lib-Dem “austerity” measures, but that explanation doesn’t hold much water. People who like big government tend to have big government, armed and in uniform, do their rioting and looting for them.
The American right doesn’t constrain itself to wishing — its flacks merely make the “anarchy” claim and then move on, feeling they’ve added a new piece of confirmatory evidence to their ongoing argument that anarchy is “that special lawlessness which is the hallmark of poorly socialized young males” (the editors of National Review, “Rioting, Anarchy, and the U.K.,” August 10) or “the logical conclusion to the decades-long disintegration of civilized behavior” (Robert Taylor, “Anarchy in Britain,” The American Spectator, August 11.
Even the paleo-“libertarian” right seems to have gone Buckleyite for the moment, analyzing the riots less from a libertarian perspective than as “conservatives who recognize that the state sometimes is, and is today as never before, the necessary instrument of our proximate deliverance.” Unlike their idol, Murray N. Rothbard, who was able to optimistically muse, as the North Vietnamese Army overran Saigon, that at least he was witnessing the death of a state, LewRockwell.com’s bloggers seem to find cause for joy only in the opportunity to rehabilitate racist hatemonger Enoch Powell and explain the riots as a function of Austrian time preference theory, with a heavy dose of the former’s prejudices informing the latter analysis.
This, unfortunately, is typical of the “paleo” response to any development which seemingly threatens to upset the teacart of “bourgeois virtues” or “middle-class values.” When it becomes apparent that that teacart has long perched precariously atop a house of state-capitalist card tricks, they resort to race-baiting to obscure the issue, as any reader of the infamous Ron Paul newsletters can attest.
If true anarchy is present in the riots, and I believe it is, it’s to be found in ad hoc mutual aid societies springing up in affected neighborhoods. People are coming together to defend each others’ lives and possessions, in the absence of political government’s ability to do so or interest in doing so. Anarchy is not society without rules — it’s society without rulers. And it works, whenever it’s required, or even allowed, to.
As for the riots themselves, no, I cannot commend them. But to the extent that they challenge the power of the state and create not just the possibility, but the necessity, of “temporary autonomous zones” in which people learn through practice that they neither need, nor should abide, the state, I can appreciate them.
Citations to this article:
- E.D. Kain, Are the London Riots Examples of Anarchy?, Forbes, 08/12/11
I wouldn't call Enoch Powell a racist hatemonger. He himself was not racist (something that even left-wing journalist Paul Foot conceded). What he was was opportunistic- as soon as he saw that playing the card card could win him votes he went for it. In short he should have known better.
The best response I’ve seen is from a London group, who have a much more “leftist” position (anarchist leftist position). http://solfed.org.uk/?q=north-london-solfeds-resp…
I have seen many leftists waxing lyrical about the riots. But, I’m not so sure. After all, burning out flats is not a good thing! From the link above:
“But as revolutionaries, we cannot condone attacks on working people, on the innocent. Burning out shops with homes above them, people’s transport to work, muggings and the like are an attack on our own and should be resisted as strongly as any other measure from government “austerity” politics, to price-gouging landlords, to bosses intent on stealing our labour. Tonight and for as long as it takes, people should band together to defend themselves when such violence threatens homes and communities.”
Yet, I can also not condemn the desire for goods that these people may otherwise never have if they don’t steal them. I can’t condemn attacks on big business, or the police. Indeed, I support attacks on big business and the police. The trouble is, people don’t have an ideological backing for their anger, and thus attack targets of opportunity, which include many targets that I do condemn attacking.
Fuck the police, fuck the state, and fuck capitalism.
It takes a government to create the degree of chaos normally thought of as anarchy.
this was poorly written.
Writing from here in the UK, I think your penultimate paragraph has it all. Those self help groups, both for protection and clean up, encompass everything that should be the norm in our society. It is telling I think that the police tried to make some of those standing on guard in a Turkish neighbourhood in London go home. To their credit they refused. Also telling I think was a TV report which highlighted the employment of private security guards by local businesses as a reasonable response, but described the same efforts on a voluntary basis by local residents as 'taking the law into their own hands', as if these resident groups were dishing out vigilante justice and hanging looters from the lamp posts.
(I'm going to be reposting this on my own blog)
I once met him personally, during an address to a small group at which there was an opportunity for direct questions and answers, so I can assure you that he was no such thing. Rather, he had the intellectual vices of his intellectual virtues, which led him to a certain distance and detachment from some aspects of what he was dealing with – with all the consequences.
It's called open source basic training. Take advantage of it.
PM,
There's no getting around the fact that the "Rivers of Blood" speech was a racist, hatemongering speech and that Powell is the one who gave it. To the best of my knowledge, he never disowned or apologized for it.
I once personally met, and talked extensively with, the grand whatsit of the North Carolina Ku Klux Klan. I don't think that his skills as a tattoo artist (I was in the chair getting inked before I knew about his KKK association) or his congeniality with customers in any way proved that he wasn't a racist.
TLK, I wasn’t commenting on Powell’s personal style at all, but his overly academic approach. Quite simply, there was nothing racist as such in either his intentions or the content of his speeches – including the most famous one – but only in the effective tendency they had to “give oxygen” to others like that, that he had overlooked. In his speeches he reported – fairly – the views and reactions he found among his constituents, that he felt duty bound to represent. By doing so, as he should have realised, he tended to promote them; but he supposed he was distancing himself personally through his somewhat academic approach to debate, without realising that the very academic stuff was what people would tune out, putting him in the place of what and who he reported.
But Edward Augustus Freeman put it better, and earlier, in an early study of racism (“Historical Essays”, Third Series, 1879):-
Freeman, too, has been accused of being a racist, and in his case, as a man of his time and place, he probably was; but he knew enough to bring out other arguments that did not rest on that, and no doubt Powell supposed that he was impelled by intellectual honesty and duty to his constituents to bring out the same arguments – with the consequences we know. But there is enough evidence of Powell’s fair mindedness, e.g. in opposing abuse of Kenyan natives when silence was practical, to know that he was not merely hiding behind what he thought would work but was no racist himself.