DLaurent

Well-known member
Ever been involved in a Riot?

I have only ever witnessed one. Handsworth 2005. I was holed up in my mate Harnaik's (RIP to cancer age mid 30s) house with a big Staffy/Labrador cross dog. Saw a few cars get torched.
 

Leo

Well-known member
been here at a few times of isolated looting (when OJ was convicted, during some power blackouts) but never in the midst of anything big and threatening. but even in those cases, there was a definite edge in the air, a tenseness that feels ultra vivid. things are different when you see people scurrying home and businesses boarding up their windows.

also happened to be in London when some shit went down in 2011, but nowhere near the action. still a tenseness in the air.
 

shakahislop

Well-known member
been here at a few times of isolated looting (when OJ was convicted, during some power blackouts) but never in the midst of anything big and threatening. but even in those cases, there was a definite edge in the air, a tenseness that feels ultra vivid. things are different when you see people scurrying home and businesses boarding up their windows.

also happened to be in London when some shit went down in 2011, but nowhere near the action. still a tenseness in the air.
summer 2020 was exactly like that, cycling back over the williamsburg bridge just before the curfew started, police at the bottom stopping anyone going the other way into manhattan, empty streets, looking out the window in williamsburg to see if anyone was out and about. and then the days after it stopped going downtown to look at everything boarded up, and everything had been covered by graffiti, some of the best stuff, all on BLM-theme and murals rather than tags, on the roof watching helicopters hover over hotspots in the day, listening to them come low overhead again and again in brooklyn
 

shakahislop

Well-known member
it's hard to exactly be pro-riot, at least not equivocly, but there is a certain enjoyment to that feeling as a bystander. the whole city felt different, normal patterns of life and capital disrupted, a wide-scale change in behaviour, the state cracking down, the reality of the usual setup pushing through, that everyday life is contingent on the usual systems working and stuff like that being suppressed
 
Yes, April 1997, the Reclaim the Streets and Liverpool dockers march got a bit tasty (mounted police charge, paint on their visors, bottles lobbed into Downing street, anarchists breaking into the Foreign Office and throwing paperwork out the window) around Whitehall. It was a little less than 2 weeks before the Tories got booted out. It was very energising. Thanks, hadn't thought about that afternoon in years.


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Not my photos, they're from here https://www.hoffmanphotos.com/-/gal...reets-and-liverpool-dockers-march-for-soci/fs
 

DannyL

Wild Horses
No, nearest I've been is big demos or Reclaim the Streets. Demos are life affirming though, that huge gathering of people of like minds, You're not alone all of a sudden. My main memory of Reclaim the Streets was seeing an Italian squat punk bird OD on something and be carried off to an ambulance - sometimes you do need the state.

Actually I remember how quickly it came together now I'm writing. Some bloke led a lot of us into Kings X (I think) and we jumped on a train to Tottenham and it all came together in like 20m - barricades and sound systems. Very impressive.

Big illegal warehouses had that vibe as well I guess, though i was normally too spannered to make much sense of that.
 

version

Well-known member
14649

I watched a couple of Ian Bone clips just the other night after reading a Verso blog on putting the book together.




 

version

Well-known member
I've never been in a political riot, but I was in something close to a riot at a music festival where everything got set on fire and people went completely feral, leaping over bonfires, wandering around naked, ripping down a big flagpole, blowing up aerosol cans. I thought it was great at the time, but I'm sure it wasn't for a lot of people, the stewards in particular.
 

Leo

Well-known member
it's hard to exactly be pro-riot, at least not equivocly, but there is a certain enjoyment to that feeling as a bystander. the whole city felt different, normal patterns of life and capital disrupted, a wide-scale change in behaviour, the state cracking down, the reality of the usual setup pushing through, that everyday life is contingent on the usual systems working and stuff like that being suppressed

it does remind you that we take civil society, general obedience to rules, etc. for granted. it's not that difficult for it to all disappear, where things quickly spiral and it becomes every man for himself. that's essentially what looting is, the breakdown of lawlessness.
 

DannyL

Wild Horses
Ian Bone's biography is an interesting and entertaining read if you're fascinating with riots as he's the nearest thing you can get to rioting as a complete political philosophy. I actually wrote a review of it back when I had a blog and called it out for being absolute balls as a set of ideas but interesting moment in history regardless. He did seem to have thought the government was close to falling, around the time of the Miners Strike.
 

DannyL

Wild Horses
it does remind you that we take civil society, general obedience to rules, etc. for granted. it's not that difficult for it to all disappear, where things quickly spiral and it becomes every man for himself. that's essentially what looting is, the breakdown of lawlessness.
This is very JG Ballard/Empire of the Sun.
 

version

Well-known member
He was actually there on the day, handing out leaflets about levitating the Houses of Parliament.

Ian Bone's biography is an interesting and entertaining read if you're fascinating with riots as he's the nearest thing you can get to rioting as a complete political philosophy. I actually wrote a review of it back when I had a blog and called it out for being absolute balls as a set of ideas but interesting moment in history regardless. He did seem to have thought the government was close to falling, around the time of the Miners Strike.

That Verso blog's a pretty good read.

... at the back of the hall, hard to see because of the lights flooding the stage, I spotted a flailing of arms and a rapid clearing of space amongst the revelers. It was Bone, who was there with his wife. It later emerged that he had unilaterally launched a verbal barrage of such intensity and persistence towards Sheila Rowbotham and her companions that the diminutive and good-natured feminist historian had been driven to respond physically.

It was only then I fully realized that, unlike The Queen Mother, who Class War had once pictured smiling outside Clarence House under the caption “90 Years Old and Still Got Her Own Teeth … At the Moment,” Class War’s teeth had fallen out. The group had become victims of the slide from spontaneous crowd violence to individual acts of terror that so often afflicts anarchism.

In that sense Sinclair’s LRB piece was right. But when, as I occasionally do, I flick back through the pages of the book, reflecting on the awful years of Thatcher’s Britain, it seems to me that Class War’s howls of incandescent rage were, for a period, all there was. It wasn’t much, but it at least kept the idea of some sort of radical hope alive. At the end of the “Decade of Disorder” an economic boom and the focus groups of New Labour changed the tone of politics quite markedly. The poor became poorer still, and the rich much richer, but people weren’t so angry about it anymore. I don’t think Class War can be blamed for that.
 
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