London (and beyond) riots

armies, armies, armies wherever you look:

my personal fav from the comments:

 

but ze germuns have been burning cars for years...

 

purely out of self-defence, now maybe somethings going on after the brits gave an brave example, hamburg city is in anticipation of tomorrows "Schanzenfest" - the whole Schanzenviertel is already officially declared off limits and 2500 cops and 15 horses on red alert...
right wing media is running high about the riders of apocalypse:
leftwing rioters, terrorists, local hooligans and swiss ultras, aliens from outta space...

official fan-site, sorry german only:
http://www.pi-news.net/2011/08/vorbild- ... ore-206964

 

Its the return of the Barbarian hordes! Oh noes!

 

inregards: viewtopic.php?f=8&t=7419&start=40#p51023
She's been freed on appeal:
Manchester woman jailed for accepting looted shorts freed

yeah, machine translation means i lose all context.
What is the Schanzenfest? And why do ppl think there will be london model riots?
the story on the car burnings looks like the usual, pollies say: 'we dont know who dun it, blame the anarchists', add a healthy dose of paranoia ('if we dont crack some skulls now we could have a london on our hands!!') and hey presto! News.

 

the schanzenfest is justa regulary social event in the schanzenviertel in hamburg, one of the oldest left-alternative gatherings in the country - so the fest is most of the time completely non-violent/peaceful - but in the years since 2003 the after-time of the fest became more and more militant, kinda answer to the increasing police pressure on the people, resulting in attacks against banking and nobel-businesses in the vicinity.
since 2004 the organisatiors refuse to ask the authorities for the official permits because the administrative constraints are intolerable, so the schanzenfest is kinda temporary liberated zone (fuck the state & hakim bey too), defended very successful in july 2009 by more than 1000 activists, the same action was repeated in september 2009, because the july-fest was disturbed - resulting in a daring attack on a police station and serious fighting against a large contingent of uniformed clones.

schanzenviertel in hamburg - http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schanzenviertel (german/french)
collection of pics and vids - http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Categ ... uselang=de

people over here are really pissed about the brit's relapse into open class injustice, especially the weird media-campaign, so the parole of "asymmetrical warfare against the people" is going round and heating the athmosphere up.
cops and officials are nervous too - berlins reports increased id-checks and cop-patrols on the streets, rumors about gagging orders about the car-actions backgrounds are going 'round too.
hamburgs is getting nervous because of the schanzenfest tradition and the increasing numbers and militancy of the activists gathering together and i still have to find some information about vague reports of hooligan-riots after some league-soccer games - sumhow a quite interesting combination of possiblities.

some more about the arson wave in berlin - from the leading libleral news magazine:
http://www.spiegel.de/international/ger ... 23,00.html

 

Sorry, but I think this kind of gallows humor is a bit tooooo much - the site is one of this ultra-right-wing shit head jerk offs, promoting every pop fascist from geert wilders up to thilo sarrazzin and the next crusade against the muslim apocalypse:
Maybe somebody is so kind and removes that link for me???!!!
Nica Michailowna, you loose at least 99 anarchist points, report urgently for punishment!

 

after some discussions with comrade gobbleze i agree, linking up this site wasn't the best idea, t'was simply plain stupid and i hope not too many people took a look and raised this fascist sides' traffick - we shouldn't do their PR for them, i learned a lesson and I'm sorry, sorry, sorry.

 

im sure... i just decided to respond to the original question instead of getting involved in someone elses debate.. and whats with highlighting my metaphore? i was actually pretty proud of that one

 

Is it just me or is Zizek's Party Dictatorship tendencies getting worse?
-
Shoplifters of the World Unite

Nevertheless, he still does pose some interesting questions:

namely, why did these riots appear to have less clearly articulated revolutionary, class-struggle praxis (as distinct from a revolutionary tendency) than previous class riots in the UK? What this has to do with the End of History is beyond me but; although it does point to a weakness in our politics or organisation (or both).

 

guess he refers to francis fukuyamas "The End of History and the Last Man" (1992):

so clever people and crackademics got the idea that the western "liberal" state is kinda eternal elysium now, unassailable after the fall of communism and any other socio-political system competeting with democracy and capitalism.

so seeing just another only(?) "underprivileged and de facto socially excluded" guy shot in the street - in an area known for cop-brutality and open racism - isn't enough reason to run riot and claim back the streets and the area for at least some time? do we really expect a public statement before the battle is brought back to the cops who started it again, some press conferences before the barricades are manned? manned by a disciplined "anarchist army?" (how gruesome...)
something happened in tottenham and elsewhere, it happened for more than one fucking bloody reason - and we are still discussing shoplifted tv's and streetfighters in addidas gear?
oh yess, the marxist's enigma - bit from bakunin anybody:

i still wonder where the "true revolutionaries" and other "conscious" people have gone after the student-riots last year, oh sorry i forgot that Mark Duggan wasn't a student...

 

hamburgs schanzenfest wasn't really following the brit's example, coordination problems, massive check-ups and controls by the cops, lots of orders to leave the scene, many people were refused to enter the area.
the guests of a pub were pushed and pepper-sprayed back from the street into the pub and besieged there for over an hour until they were allowed to leave the building one after the other.
ca. 30 people were arrested and some of them were refused to contact parents or lawyers, 7 people were injured but refused any medical treatment. several lawyers complain about being hindered to do their job by the cops in the police station stresemannstrasse.

a bank branch was attacked with stones, some fires were lit up in the streets - one woman made her 15-minutes fame barebreasted feeding a fire and was celebrated by the tabloid press, a crowd of people refused to enter the field by the uniformed clones started a street soccer game right in front of the cops line.
t'was a try...

 

@nike, better luck next time!

@lil' apple, yeah the whole end of history thing is bizarre, especially consider Fukuyama himself don't even subscribe to it no more. He distances himself from it in his ten year review, albeit thru the bizarre claim that he was wrong because we are now transhumans (!). So, like, cyborgs are destroying neoliberalism and skylab is go.

Yeah, the claim that there was no organisation is weird. If I go and like start breaking windows, will thousands of ppl in various locations stop everything and join in? The State's idea to shut down social medias in future incidents proves this even more. Moreover, the forms of organisation are a cause of jealously for this jaded ozzie. I remember a call out for an organising meeting for some 'direct action' environment convergence stated that it would operate by people turning up as individuals and then were broken up into 'affinity groups' of ten (seriously), suffice to say I stayed well clear, and this ain't an isolated incident neither :/ . Poor yoof looting in groups that go to school/live next to/grew up together is kinda like an anarchists wet dream, proper affinity stylez, no?
moreover, they had a pretty clear political agenda too. Bash the pigs, get some of the good things in life denied them, well good.

( We know what sorta organisation Zizek wants, and it ain't good. )

nevertheless, some shit things happened in the riots, such as setting fire to stores that have people's houses above them, and most things I read seem to suggest with a greater frequency than in previous class riots in them parts (a greater frequency being from fuck all to slightly more than fuck all, i get the impression they are still marginal occurrences). This is a problem. And although its not the lack of us 'conscious' vanguard that is the problem (as we're likely as marginal in these ones as in many previous ones i can think of), it is still worth looking at. That's probably the only thing I took from this dose of Zizek nonsense.

They was making appeals to the looters (from a safe distance): 'come and join us in our campaign for student and trade union rights!'
Talk about relevancy!

 

Well, it isn't kinda competition, isn't it?!

and the car arsons have driven some less flattering butts out of the television chair:

http://www.thelocal.de/national/20110822-37103.html
The Germans' favourite child as the saying goes is their car.

 

“We are not involved in the looting and unlike the knee-jerk right or even the sympathetic-but-condemnatory commentators from the left, we will not condemn or condone those we don’t know for taking back some of the wealth they have been denied all their lives.”

North London Solidarity Federation

“This is counter-productive behaviour whose only results will be division amongst working-class communities and an excuse for the state to step up its use of force.”

Post on the blog of UK libertarian socialist group the Commune

“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.”

Internationalist Communist Tendency

The potential for communism today is not centered in the orderly struggles of well off minorities of the class to defend their privileges against encroaching restructuring. Struggles all too often draped in national flags, defined by whiteness and speaking in the discourse of democracy. The coming social revolution will not be an orderly civil affair resolved upon by a majority vote in Syntagma or any other square peacefully occupied by the indignant and naive.

No on the contrary our hope for the future lies in the real majority of the class which is excluded, unemployed, precarious, malnourished, and “criminal”. Not in the hopeless demands of unionized workers for the restoration of a lost social contract or in populist movements for reform which take the moral high ground on a terrain defined by the mass media and petty bourgeois notions of what is “respectable”.

The systematic looting and destruction which has swept England is of course completely insufficient in and of itself for the development of autonomous proletarian politics. It is however a thousand times preferable to the demands for democracy which buried the Arab Spring in a cosmetic restructuring of the state. The mass appropriation of Nikes and Iphones without explanation or justification is like any struggle for higher wages and fewer hours of work a direct assertion of the material needs of the class-and as such immeasurably closer to the living content of communist politics then any nationalist and reformist movement with a “coherent” message.

Those who identify more with the vigilante gangs of the petty-bourgeois defending their small enterprises (where proletarians are exploited, humiliated and cheated everyday), then with working class youth carrying out the dictatorial expropriation of the social wealth show clearly that they are not revolutionaries but cops in waiting-and should be treated accordingly.

Link: http://signalfire.org/?p=13188

 

very good post seni, Спасибо, хорошо!

a bit too hard judging people still struggling for their living with small enterprises, and there's the other dire problem of destroying someones home and personal property too - but i agree, a militant revolt, not to mention a violent revolution isn't the may-parade on the red place in moscow and there's always the possibility to compensate people in need for their loss out of solidarity.

and for those still proposing vanguards and militant spear-heads, signalfire links to "german guerilla" and the story of the r.a.f. -
that's another sad story of going over the top...

 

Yeah... Agree with about RAF. What is most surprising of course the RAF to formed a cult popularity among left-wing of young people. You can see how much about them make a film and written books.

 

this sad story was more about "rescue the heroes of stammheim", not to mention their final goal... the may parade in berlins.

 

they actually did something while the "intellectual" left vanished from the streets to discuss things privately in circles and sects - and the german state supported the RAF's image as "public enemy no.1" to justify the growing political pressure on the people, so "Baader (& Ensslin) and Meinhof" became superstars, okay, Ulrike Meinhof was kinda left-wing top-writer even before that.
the less terrorist, mainly anarchist "movement 2. june" went never that popular in the culture of resistance and opposed the claim to leadership the RAF made.

 

Fucking pig bastards are at it again: