What is ‘Tiqqun’? A journal of abstract philosophy.

If analysis is so unimportant then why bother even go on the internet? Why do we need ‘Tiqqun’? Ah, I see, the proles can’t help behave like this, but you can sit in an academic ivory tower and pontificate about the meaning of the stars and the skies.

Abstractly condemning organisation seems like a pretty good way to guarantee defeat. What, are you in general/on principle opposed to planning ahead? That said the tone of your words implies a fairly brief pause between impulse and action.

If left parties did indeed mislead anti-capitalist struggles, this only poses the question of why masses of people didn’t organise to overcome them, to not be sold-out but make history by and for themselves. And therefore the need for open discussion and debate about what we are collectively doing.

To do so we have to cooperate, as we would in a future communist society. Hence the need for ideas, perspective we can stick to, and means of organisation.

In terms of Organizing:
I would say as soon as possible start having daily evening popular assemblies in riotous areas on a main street corner. Everyone is out, checking things out, feeling the break with daily life, talking with people about it anyway. Bring them together to discuss as a larger group.

Often the discussions can be really productive and perhaps be a way to steer the situation into more of a popularly supported insurrection rather than just rioting/looting.

Especially if radicals help make sure the assembly gets going, we’ll be able to intervene in any cases where some folks are making reactionary or anti-rioter statements and steer the direction back to WHY it’s happening and what could be different about life in our society…

I think this is a tactic all anarchists could agree on, even, from SolFed/IWW people who sold out rioters with their statements, to the most pro-rioter people like myself.

In terms of On-the-ground revolutionary action (I know, I know, you’re writing a master’s thesis and don’t have any time…):
-use the disorder as a chance to occupy buildings, say, your schools, or your workplace, etc… and ignite actions that could provide a more politicized struggle for people to engage in that **compliments** the rioting and turns the larger situation into something that seems to come from more discontent with this system, which it would look like if there were simultaneous occupations of stuff going on. go occupy a fucking banking building! don’t sit at home criticizing poor kids like fucking cops!

More immediate and unequivocal support would look like:
-Start fires. expecially in chain stores.
-try to burn down police communication infrastructure: any towers on top of police stations, etc…
-hacking groups like anonymous can be really helpful if they can take down websites, communications channels, new arrest databases so they can’t convict any arrestees, etc… of the police (they already hacked Blackberry and told them not to hand over text msgs about where riots are breaking out to the police or else Anons will steal and dump employee data)
-make tons of fliers and throw them off rooftops near rioting
-taking over media stations. the media has been horrendous, vilifying propaganda for days. sickening. any media, from the local college radio station to a TV news desk. it can be really powerful. (see: oaxaca, greece in dec. 2008, etc…)
-setting up blockades and barricades everywhere as much as possible. everyone is into the looting and maybe fighting the cops, but the barricades help block off the shopping streets so people can loot without the police being able to zoom in in their vans.More immediate and e

Harlem [Dream Deferred]

What happens to a dream deferred?
…
Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over
like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?

- Langston Hughes

What I oppose is people saying I support an eruption in principle, so long as nothing bad ever happens. I oppose the political abandonment of the people involved by joining in the moral condemnation from the establishment. People who do that do not belong in a revolutionary movement. In the end, you can do as I have said, accept the eruption as a simple fact which has happened, or you can join in the moral condemnation which you know is a part of the effort to suppress it. I have been consistent when I have said that a critique of acts in the rioting is contingent upon a loyalty to the crisis itself, that is what political solidarity and encouragement is, but what you’re doing is not that at all, it is accusing the rioters of being rioters and then condemning them. It is as stupid as that. You do it again perfectly in your comment – you support rioters by staying and voyeuristically taking pictures, that is “solidarity,” but then make your support contingent on them following your instructions on a real-time basis.

It is true that you’ve ‘got me’ in the sense that yes I support an eruption against the consumerist regime and will defend it verbally against the attempts to suppress it. I will also defend them even when it is not convenient, because I am compelled to do that, whilst offering my own political encouragement in my small way. But I am not ‘in charge’ of this. I as an individual am irrelevant to them, and me rocking up to their actions and looking and tutting at them would not make me any more authentic in this respect. Loyalty, political solidarity and critique all go together, you can’t pick and choose, that is just self-important posturing.

On the last point I’d just ask you to read the article because I said exactly why I thought it was different, because the motivation seemed be a perverse form of consumerism based on looting rather than the specific cocktail of problems seen in the 80s – although generalised deprivation is still the important factor as I made plain in the article.

Original article: We have to support the eruption of the unheard and the unspoken in our obscene society.

Later comment: I don’t support an eruption, there is one, it has happened, it is a fact. Whether I support that eruption is what is irrelevant, it is a fact seperate from my beliefs about it.

In your latest reply to me, you write:

If you had read what I said, I said these are the wrong targets, the wrong targets, the wrong targets! I will say it again and again. It is wrong to target your own working class community, but it is a political failure, an inability to express ourselves, and think about violence politically, and this is what we have to do.

Again, this just shows that you’re not aware of what you’ve actually been saying: that what you say about your own position doesn’t match your position when you actually express it. Because in your article you said “any attempt to pass moral judgement between different kinds of violence is a betrayal of the revolutionary principle” [i.e. you are against doing so]. Now, whether you like it or not, to say of something that it is ‘wrong’ is a moral, value judgement.

Furthermore, in your original article there is absolutely nothing which says that “it is wrong to target your own working class community”. It simply wasn’t there, and you have not said it again and again. And saying that you’ve said it again and again doesn’t mean that you have.

What you did say is that it is right to “not support the attacks against ‘working class homes’ in poor areas”. But given that your original article (though not your later comments) specifically repudiates saying such attacks are wrong, it simply suggested that your attitude to the attacks was somewhere in between supporting and opposing. i.e. that you’re neutral. That was the implication of your article. And if, later, you want to say that they are wrong, then in itself that’s good, but it is flatly incompatible with other bits of the article.

But on a deeper level, what is your position here really? “I support the legitimacy of your riot, so long as it has none of the unpleasant charachteristics of a riot (i.e. on the basis that it is not a riot), because as soon as anything gets set fire to, or anything gets dangerous, I will walk away and condemn you”

Not at all. In fact, as a matter of fact I stayed around when it was getting dangerous, and when things were being set on fire, and I have the pictures of burning vehicles to prove it. What about you? Were you there at all? Do you know whether you’d have walked away? Alot of people did.

And it is not true that all riots have those characteristics. Not all riots burn down people’s homes, or even cars in working class areas. And in any case, even if it were, it would still be perfectly possible to oppose that happening within a general context of support for the riot, and in particular its anti-police, class elements.

In fact, in your latest reply to David, you appear to concede some of these things. I’d suggest than an effective antidote for saying things which you later decide you don’t really mean would be to actually go and talk to people involved (those who riot, and those whose cars got burned), or *begin* your analysis from within a class perspective, thinking about what you would need to say to those people were you to meet them.

I agree with you in your first point, the language is aloof, and it does perhaps reflect my own distance from it. I’m sure if my house was burnt down as Communard states, I would be less so. I think my defence on this score is two-fold. Firstly I think most people’s engagement with this incident is aloof, it is through a camera lense from a helicopter, or whatever, but, at the same time, I don’t actually think increased proximity to the events would make me more circumspect, rather it might actually intensify the sense of transgression and carnival. But secondly, for your average rioter, these feelings are genuinly what exist, it is a statement of reality, and a fact we have to accept. I say honestly, I looked at the images of fire and looting, and I did feel the adrenaline and excitement of that in a small way. And if we are honest I think most of us did – which is part, not all by any means, of our original support for the riots.

On the second point, I admit that my handling of the issue was clumsy, but I am also let down by the language itself in some ways. It is wrong to state as a matter of fact that different forms of violence cannot be judged politically, and I was never making the claim that intentions and the source of the violence was not something, all infact, of what we should consider. This is how we judge police violence against the violence of rioters, its purpose and place within the structure of our society. Political judgement is what we need, and I was differentiating this from the conservative establishment moral condemnation of all rioting and all violence, without any reference to its source or place in that structure. But furthermore, as we in the revolutionary milieu are drawn into this game, we stop looking at the totality, the structure, and join in the moral discourse which, without us considering it, actually condemns all violent resistance, because in the real world, no revolutionary situation is ever going to avoid those excesses. We have to stay loyal to the crisis itself, the rioting in this case, but also, as you say, push for its politcisation and radicalisation.

The mistake in your criticisms expresses itself firmly in the last point, because it in fact flatly contradicts my own intentions – the whole point of writing this article is avoid exactly that polarisation and elimination of the radical synthesis between the two forms of nihilism. What I mean to say following on from before, and perhaps correct myself, is to say our moral condemnation of particular parts of the violence we find distateful is irrelevant, if it is not based within loyalty to the generalised act itself – in exactly the same way as the establishment condemnation is irrelevant for the same reason. And if we stuck to this, standing on the sidelines and seperating the good violence from the bad violence, the good rioters from the bad ones, in a way which made the whole event look futile and ridiculous, then we would make ourselves irrelevant too. But what we can do, is situate these events within the structure, we can infact, through our political encouragement try and give the riots real political purchase and basis in class consciousness – and incidently help to direct the violence at the proper targets. I don’t think this is utopian, we just have to continue to do what we always should – present our ideas through our existing means, and try not to abandon the people involved by falling into the establishment view.

P.S. Looking at the stats page, is this now the busiest day ever in terms of the volume of traffic for this website? I think so, excellent.

I think the main way in which I disagree with your article is that you do seem to make something of an abstract defence of violence, whilst also writing that this is insufficient.

Perhaps it is not your intention, but for example where you write “There is a transgressive and carnivalesque feel too – why target a shop full of fancy dress costumes? The huge fires that lit up the city skyline seem to add rather than detract from this as well” you skim over the fact that the fires – random, uncontrolled – mark a degeneration from the initial battling with the police, which did at least relate to police violence. It just seems a bit aloof from the reality of what those fires must be like for local residents.

You are on firmer ground if you are arguing that the “real” violence is symbolic violence, the violence of capitalist society etc. Also in revolutionary struggles, violence and force have often played their role. But I disagree that “any attempt to pass moral judgement between different kinds of violence is a betrayal of the revolutionary principle”. Surely precisely the point here is that we can and must differentiate between various kinds of violence? Does it not matter who perpetrates it, against whom and with what intention? If not, what is the basis for a critique of police violence? I would not oppose kids standing up to the police, but I would oppose them setting fire to some random shop or bins on a housing estate.

I don’t at all accept that we are irrelevant or that critique is irrelevant – if you think that, all that is left is to support either the police or the riots. But moreover I don’t understand what you mean by this – what is the political intention? In fact we are basically limited to critique. Trying to ‘politicise’ the riots is far more utopian – the people involved could of course be drawn into a more positive way of expressing grievances, but I don’t see how you would make the existing forms of action political in character.