The paucity of leftist (or even meaningful conservative) critical analysis of the London riots is striking. It seems at first glance that even the left, when faced with a concrete challenge of responding to bodies without limbs, is reluctant to say what it knows to be true. This is not just about the looters: the looters are a symptom. The looters are a socially unacceptable symptom, and it’s just god-damned unfortunate for those who’d like to write a natty speech about jobs and bonuses and the like. This goes beyond that. This isn’t just about dollars, or even “morals” whatever the hell those are supposed to mean for kids who’ve never seen real conditions in which they live.
Of course, it’s about both. It’s about the failure of sovereign power to actually make its own exception in order to protect its population, and its about a rupture in history. This is about the body politik that has no face, no form; this is the body politik that has been rejected by all. Its movements and its meaning are unintelligible and un-absorbable without radical re-definition of what it means to be engaged in any horizontal politics. To make myself clear, I’ll just say this: to reject outright the classic turning-of-the-tables-and-thinking-of-the-rich-folk.
It’s obvious that that rhetoric has not served us well. Maybe you don’t have to be a Marxist to see that the boss sucks. But maybe you have to be something more than a Marxist to see that ugly and vagrant destruction has been the outcome of the Left’s weak-water cries. We’ve moaned and groaned and shuddered in the corner while rifts in the universe have opened up and made underworlds of miserable boors with holes-for-eyes while we were busy arguing over Whodunit.
Worse, were we even really arguing, or were we just spinning verbal filigree at our desks?
The Left has a massive opportunity to reclaim what is ours without relying on static images of State, parliamentary politics, interests, business, and class. No, we can’t support looting or riots without political bite that’s in-and-for-itself. No, we cannot countenance the piss-poor chain of command, and put ourselves off in the margins as we always do.
The looters may very well be poured into a crack that goes down a mountain side, and while they were sliding, we were writing book reviews.
