Hari Kunzru: These riots reveal some unpalatable home truths


Hari Kunzru is the author of the novels Gods without Men and The Impressionist. He lives in Hackney, east London. He has kindly given permission to republish his Guardian article on the recent riots.

Property on fire, London

There’s nothing like fear and hatred to sharpen the senses. The riots have shown Britain some unpalatable truths about itself, making it impossible to hold on to a certain Whiggish story about social progress which, in the teeth of the evidence, we have persisted in telling about ourselves.

As the violence unfolded in Tottenham, it appeared to be following a familiar pattern. A young black man is killed by the police. The ‘community’ protests. Violence ensues. By Monday, that story had definitively broken down. The crowds burning cars and breaking into shops were, as a friend drily put it, ‘a triumph of multiculturalism’. Clearly another explanation had to be sought.

Suddenly we are talking again about class. The fantasy of classless Britain has floated around in our national consciousness at least since the 1980s, when it was supposed to be made flesh by mass home-ownership and the chance to own shares in BT. In recent years that fantasy has been sustained by cheap credit, which has offered the illusion of material prosperity to a nation that privately has long known it was falling behind.

In a society that has abandoned or devalued most forms of mutual assistance in favour of a solipsistic entrepreneurialism, it’s hardly surprising that, faced with the end of the good times, people help themselves. Fear and greed are our ruling passions. That’s true of the kids smashing shop windows to steal trainers. It’s also true of the MPs fiddling their expenses, the police officers taking backhanders, the journalists breaking into phones. Why wouldn’t they? Why wouldn’t any of us? The example has been set by our new masters, the one per cent for whom and by whom we’re governed. The ability of powerful actors in the financial markets to socialise risk while privatising profit appears, to the financial peasantry, indistinguishable from organised crime. No reason for the rest of us to stand on ceremony.

One may object to this rhetoric (bankers = looters) on the grounds that markets have social utility, or that bankers don’t beat up shopkeepers (they don’t have to) and sometimes give to charity. One may also feel that any attempt to understand the rioters’ motivations risks shading into justification. The strongest objection to any argument based on social conditions is the oft-made one about individual responsibility: whatever the prevailing economic or social situation, not everyone chooses to behave in a particular way, whether that’s insider trading or knocking over Evans Cycles. However, it’s hard not to think we’ve made a culture in which the strong and swift are encouraged to feel they bear no responsibility towards the halt and lame. Now, as the wheels fall off the global financial system, fear and greed are free to roam unchecked, without bothering to mask their faces.

The average Briton is a frightened, precarious and lonely little entrepreneur, jealous, not just of the banker living high on the hog, but of the ‘good immigrants’, the Sikhs and Turks and Bengalis standing shoulder to shoulder outside their shops and mosques and gurdwaras, ready to repel attackers. Strapped for cash and stripped of organic community (leaving aside the question of whether that ever existed), we’re left to clothe ourselves in the rags of class identity and class hatred. The poor hate the rich and the ‘feds’ who enforce their laws. The rich hate the poor, who frighten them.

I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised to see a large number of supposed social liberals revealing their true colours on Monday night, tweeting and bleating for curfews and water cannon and rubber bullets. Early in the evening, watching social media, I was seeing variants of the same joke: ‘I’m in Chiswick/Hampstead/Dulwich Waitrose and there’s a RIOT! They’ve run out of POLENTA!’ The smug sense of disconnection (this is nothing to do with me, or my comfortable middle-class life – it is an affair of the poor, in places I choose not to go) was soon replaced by panic. ‘WHERE IS THE ARMY?’ Screw civil liberties, time to declare martial law. How easy it would be to install fascism in this creaky little country! No need to torch the Reichstag – all you’d have to do would be to burn a few more sports shops.

It was galling to watch people who had recently praised the street fighters of the Arab spring finding their inner Mubarak, people who had been shocked (shocked!) that Middle Eastern dictators would switch off the internet, now calling for BlackBerry Messenger (which they’d just found out about) to be shut down. One might applaud the community spirit of the riot cleanup people, but feel uncomfortable about the motivations of the blond broom-carrier pictured wearing a tank-top with the hand-drawn slogan ‘looters are scum’. It’s OK to call people scum this week, particularly while demonstrating one’s own civic virtue. Go on, blond lady, let your hate-flag fly.

Soon enough the gutted buildings will be demolished and the 24-hour courts will wind down, and we will try to pretend we didn’t let our hoods slip, revealing how frightened of each other we are. Once, a powerful woman told us there was no such thing as society and set about engineering our country to fit her theory. Well, she got her way. This is where we live now, and if we don’t like it, we ought to make a change.

Overland is a not-for-profit magazine with a proud history of supporting writers, and publishing ideas and voices often excluded from other places.

If you like this piece, or support Overland’s work in general, please subscribe or donate.


Related articles & Essays


Contribute to the conversation

  1. Nice article, but ‘suddenly we are talking about class’? WTF? It was always about race AND class. Did you see any wealthy blacks rioting? Perhaps people assume there are no wealthy Britons of colour.

  2. “Class would seem to trump race”? A regularly trotted-out, but nevertheless ugly, ugly sentiment from white lefties. Class “trumps race”? I remember this analysis from the “Indian students are victims of opportunistic crime – nothing to see here” debate that we didn’t have about the wave of racial violence directed against Indians in Melbourne 2008-9. The idea that it is only economic conditions that matter, as if race, and one’s relation to borders and citizen privilege have nothing at all to do with one’s economic condition.

    A black man, yet again, was shot by cops, that is where this started. It may not be the reason why every person or even any person was helping themselves to trainers, but sentiments like “its about class, not race” are so very very ugly, though prevalent in some leftie analyis of the riots. Ugly because it is crude, reductionist, ignorant of the way that race shapes class formation (think borders, “illegal workers” who are Korean or Indian instead of Irish or British and their differential treatment by authorities/access to labour markets, just for a few really obvious examples you hopefully won’t struggle with – hey, maybe even the Intervention). That sentiment operates as a silencing mechanism, a call to those who are “raced” (by not being white) to stop whingeing about how tough it is to be black and join in our crude type of class analysis that erases real material divisions within both the international and national proletariat that are certainly about race. That asks us to pretend these divisions don’t exist in the service of a project of class unity, that because of its hostility to the recognition of these real divisions, tends to practically operate as a call for those who are “raced” to be quiet or they might disturb that false unity and for them, those at the bottom of the heap, to make the necessary sacrifices to maintain that unity.

    Please stop. It is ugly, and even worse because it is spoken so so flippantly, as if race is some kind of ideological obsession of black nationalists and not something real, the consequences of which you get to ignore, because the only time you are forced to think about the skin you are in is when some pesky person of colour dares to suggest that it might impact the way the world works.

    The multi-culti character of the riots does not mean race disappears. As a Marxist I am constantly enraged or sometimes just bored out of my mind with so-called lefties claiming that class is some kind of trump card you pull out to win top slot on the hierarchy of oppression, particularly in relation to race. Class analysis to me means trying to get to the bottom of what is now, trying to understand capital as a social relation, the way it determines us and our world, not as the football team you choose and barrack for. That would mean, for example, understanding how race is constitutive of class relations in different ways, in different countries. And now, here is my inevitable plug for Harry Chang, who says all of that stuff better than anyone.
    I recommend reading it.
    http://monthlyreview.org/2007/01/01/harry-chang-a-seminal-theorist-of-racial-justice

  3. Hi Maxine thought you might like this:

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8HFUSPzpi9A&feature=player_embedded#!

    His stuff on job centres is great!

    Unscripted, complex and so much more interesting than many of the hand-wringing commentaries of the left that express anxiety about our nasty youth and how they are just copying their capitalist masters. I don’t find that very convincing.
    I feel that even Jeff’s piece is a little bit too much in that direction:
    http://counterpunch.org/sparrow08122011.html

    This is a cute little piece about some good old fun during the riots:
    http://johnnyvoid.wordpress.com/2011/08/10/rioting-for-fun-and-profit/

    and this one is great in particular for the last bit about a woman looting a chicken from Aldi….
    http://thethirdestate.net/2011/08/tottenham-burning-a-report-of-last-nights-events/

    That is not to say that the deaths of those three men Muslim men weren’t horrible. But as someone somewhere in the blogosphere said, such bastardry occurs every day and does not need the riots to occur, though it probably gave good cover.

    And you might enjoy this little account of what race has to do with it. Oh the hilariousness of the left…!
    http://thethirdestate.net/2011/08/south-london-united-or-divided/

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.