Delightful days spent looting Hackney under the sign of Sacco and Vanzetti

Plagerised Image of Hackney Riots
Plagiarised News Image of the Hackney Riots

Between Saturday 6th and Thursday 11 August 2011, thousands of people rioted in several London boroughs and in cities and towns across England. The resulting chaos generated looting, arson, and mass deployment of police. Despite increasing reinforcements, the forces of order were unable to regain control of the streets. Stores were massively plundered and many were burned. Some of the fiercest rioting was experienced in the London Borough of Hackney. These events have been called the “BlackBerry riots” because of the centrality of mobile devices and social media in there organisation.

“This was not a race riot. It was a class riot.”

The Hackney rebellion was a rebellion against the commodity, against the world of the commodity in which worker-consumers are hierarchically subordinated to commodity standards. Like the young delinquents of all the advanced countries, but more radically because they are part of a class without a future, they take modern capitalist propaganda, its publicity of abundance, literally. They want to possess now all the objects shown and abstractly accessible, because they want to use them. In this way they are challenging their exchange-value, the commodity reality which molds them and marshals them to its own ends, and which has preselected everything. Through theft and gift they rediscover a use that immediately refutes the oppressive rationality of the commodity, revealing its relations and even its production to be arbitrary and unnecessary. The looting of Hackney was the most direct realisation of the distorted principle: “To each according to their false needs” — needs determined and produced by the economic system which the very act of looting rejects. But once the vaunted abundance is taken at face value and directly seized, instead of being eternally pursued in the rat-race of alienated labor and increasing unmet social needs, real desires begin to be expressed in festive celebration, in playful self-assertion, in the potlatch of destruction. People who destroy commodities show their human superiority over commodities. They stop submitting to the arbitrary forms that distortedly reflect their real needs. The flames of Hackney consummated the system of consumption. The theft of large refrigerators by people with no electricity, or with their electricity cut off, is the best image of the lie of affluence transformed into a truth in play. Once it is no longer bought, the commodity lies open to criticism and alteration, whatever particular form it may take. Only when it is paid for with money is it respected as an admirable fetish, as a symbol of status within the world of survival.

Looting is a natural response to the unnatural and inhuman society of commodity abundance. It instantly undermines the commodity as such, and it also exposes what the commodity ultimately implies: the army, the police and the other specialised detachments of the state’s monopoly of armed violence. What is a policeman? He is the active servant of the commodity, the man in complete submission to the commodity, whose job is to ensure that a given product of human labor remains a commodity, with the magical property of having to be paid for, instead of becoming a mere refrigerator or TV — a passive, inanimate object, subject to anyone who comes along to make use of it. In rejecting the humiliation of being subject to police, they are at the same time rejecting the humiliation of being subject to commodities.

A revolt against the spectacle — even if limited to a single district such as Hackney — calls everything into question because it is a human protest against a dehumanised life, a protest of real individuals against their separation from a community that could fulfil their true human and social nature and transcend the spectacle.

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