You might expect me to write about the London Riots this week, as certainly this has preoccupied my and other Londoners’ minds.
It was a very strange week, we had partied hard at my friend’s house party till the sun rose on Sunday morning (7th August). And all the while Tottenham had been burning. But we were oblivious as we danced away in South London, in Stockwell/Brixton. The next day we woke up in East London, late, to a huge police presence. But we didn’t really understand what was happening, yes someone had been killed by the police in Tottenham, but how had this somehow spread all over the city? Why were there police crawling around Islington canal, we mused, in our still rather foggy heads.
There are many better people than I to write about the #London Riots. My two favourites on Twitter are @wildebees (my friend and politico) and @PaulLewis (journo at The Guardian).
For me personally, a couple of things were very interesting:
1. On the 5th August I visited a friend in Regent St/Carnaby St for lunch and was shocked at the way London has become. The height of consumerism in that area made me giddy. I felt for these people who frequent it on a daily basis, how can they not be swayed into that desire demand and craving? Can this be good for their souls? I have been living in India for the last 2 years, yes in the full-on metropolitan city of Mumbai, but there life is not on this polished glitzy scale. I have been traveling in the Himalayas and remote parts of Sri Lanka earlier this year, doing yoga and Vipassana (10 day silent meditation), then on a sailing trip to remote and sometimes uninhabited Croatian islands. Before that I spent a year at business school, which although in Boston, was again quite idyllic. Studying and critiquing the financial crisis with many switched on academics and business people, but not really being part of it. I have been away from this world for a long while. But I have been in London for almost 3 months now, why was it on this specific day, the day before the London riots kicked off, that I was specifically attuned to the high levels consumerism has reached in London? Was there something in the air?
2. On 8th August one of my close friends got beaten up and his bike stolen as he cycled home. By kids. The use of the word lumpen proletariat to describe these kids has been flying around Twitter. From Wikipedia: According to Marx, the lumpenproletariat had no special motive for participating in revolution, and might in fact have an interest in preserving the current class structure, because the members of the lumpenproletariat usually depend on the bourgeoisie and the aristocracy for their day-to-day existence. In that sense, Marx saw the lumpenproletariat as a counter-revolutionary force.
Who are the rioters, Paul Lewis tries to describe them here . One of my friends who lives in Hackney on the street where a car was set alight, heard a mob, as she called it, shouting “Let’s go Carharrt, let’s thief some Carharrt clothes”. Doesn’t this validate Carharrt’s brand strategy, their jeans are so desirable people are willing to go to jail for them. I guess this means these young people are actually trying to be part of the system, a system which excludes them, but they valiantly want to join, this is their means of consumption. (I know that this is only part of the reason for their revolt. The other main one is anti-police sentiments). Is this, then, a British class war, in a time of global economic gloom, should we all be reading Chavs: the Demonisation of the Working Classes to remember what we've done?
(Ironic that my last post is entitled London: It's Back On. Well more like on fire...)
To normalize myself from these complex and depressing thoughts, I went on an art binge. As Joan Miro and other artists in Fascist Spain said, let’s build culture now and politics will come later. Of course contemporary capitalism has also encompassed culture, similarly Franco’s regime exhibited Spanish anti-government artists across the world to show how open-minded they were.
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