There's a Riot Going on

Los Angeles, 9th June 2025: for a third day, people come together to fight immigration deportations, Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, to fight ICE with fire, flames and bodies on the street, Mexican flags. The movement of the people everywhere is beautiful, necessary. And though it's what comes after that matters, how it plays out, it's what comes before, too the whole thing. Setting self-driving cars on fire inserts the human, the worker, the saboteur back into the abdication of agency to the hands of tech-bro-billionaires. The protestors put up make-shift barricades, purple tables and benches block the streets, preventing the destruction of community in the name of the greater national body, and its policing of which bodies can or cannot make up a part of that body. 

The President seems to want to declare civil war on the state of California. The state calls in the LAPD and tries to suppress the riots while also resisting the entry of the National Guard and other federal bodies. The protestors say fuck the police, all of them. This is perhaps best understood, not so much as an 'insurrection'--the language the government uses--but as a war of defense, an ongoing rearguard action that gets portrayed as a 'riot'. Or, it actualizes what is already a civil war, as mayors are arrested when inspecting ICE detention centres, as judges try to block presidential orders invoking emergency powers only meant to be used for times of open conflict: a civil war declared by the government on its own people, in their name, or in the name of some of them. 

Later on in the day, the state of California takes the President to court, the President threatens to arrest the governor. What happens next, if someone is killed, how this plays out, the balance of forces, who sits on what fence, is anyone's guess. But when the state turns authoritarian--turns more authoritarian--to fight. And we've seen this before. First there's the democratic election of the fascist, and then the fascist street gangs, or first it's the fascist street gangs and then the democratic election of the fascist, or the two are two heads of a hydra, and the street gangs are not only the street gangs, but the police, and the fascist vigilantes, and they are ICE, and the army. To fight, to fight fire with fire, judging the situation, burning the self-driving car.

*

 

   

There's a riot going on.

Sly Stone died today. As his career spiralled, collapsed, he would re-record the parts, the mixes, record entirely different versions of albums that had already been released, accumulated hours, potentially hundreds of unreleased tracks, multi-tracks, turning the self into an orchestra, drum machines, overdubs, as if to take everything up into himself, the inflated grandeur of addiction, its hubris, perhaps, but also the splitting and impossibility of the collective the band as the Family envisaged in its heyday. His cover of 'Que Sera, Sera' on Fresh: a song which he apparently performed in private sitting at the piano with Doris Day. What does that mean. The unexpected, gentle beauty of its fatalism. Lament at the heart of celebration, but perhaps, too, celebration at the heart of lament: giddy, out of control, manic, the kind of grim celebration of holding on and of not giving a fuck, teetering on but never quite entering the state of nihilism, redeemed--redeemed?--by its gospel background, by the collective life in music it emerged from in the church, by the upright stance of 'Stand', or the woozily beatific romance of 'You caught me smiling', for all its pain, its fear of going insane, or the literally childlike chants of 'Everyday People' and its idealized collective beyond hatred and discrimination.

 
And Sly and the Family Stone were always missing the gig, never showing up--but the possibility that he might, that they might, and that the show might be great, transformative, catharsis, release: an image of what we (who?) might be. Making stars into emblems of our hopes, holding them over us, despising them when they fail us, elevating them: this is the practice of celebrity, the altar on which, willingly or unwillingly, Sly Stone sacrificed himself, was sacrificed. The singer channels the collective only at the wealth-excessive cost of becoming a king, a king who then falls, living in a campervan, fed by a local retired couple: that drama of rise and fall, so that what could have been collective aspiration--the Black Panthers' reported demand that he politicize his music, politicize those nascently political hopes--falls by the waysides of addiction and excessive wealth, gold paint sprayed over the walls of the mansion, marble floors scuffed beyond recognition. And what more is there to say. A singer for whom--as for all singers, perhaps--words fail.

 
The title track to There's a Riot Going On is famously silent. And on 'Just like a Baby', on 'Poet', the vocal is present, but receding, just another textural element amidst the instrumental wooze, the bass and drums seeming to become the lead instrument, wah wah whooshes, whether from guitars lifting and dropping pedals or from a chorus opening and closing their mouths, music as a kind of amniotic fluid, or lighter fluid perhaps, ready to be lit: the same oceanic drift, vast energy at a standstill, found in Miles Davis' (instrumental) music of the 70s so influenced by Sly, the rumour that he made his band listen to Sly's 'In Time' on repeat. (But was the song Davis played 'In Time' from Fresh--a song of delay, with its ironic play on Sly's reputation for lateness on stage and lateness in delivering albums--or 'Time' from There's a Riot, with its philosophical speculation on the nature of the universe? And how do those two relate? The time of the commercial cycle, the chart, time as money, and time as a flow that the music accesses along some sort of deeper, mythic substratum: or both times are equally mythic, myths the music is trapped between even as it seeks to reinvent time in a kind of oceanic splendour. Time, the times, temps, durée: marching, dancing, rioting.)

Sly Stone's music was modern, for sure: the insistent use of multi-tracking to build up virtual collectives that supplant or support or challenge real ones, the pop of slap bass, of a drum machine. But archaic, too, in some way: a keyboard that channels a harpsichord, an organ that--as with Davis--moves on past the church and the strains of the horror movie into a kind of synthesized future, or an idea of the future, a construction, improvised in real time. And children's songs, yodels, everyday songs, everyday kitsch. To find a collective there. Fusing them into a kind of indistinguishable stream, of approaching and receding lights--"in time"--where time seems to have lost its meaning, to have retreated--to extend the piece, the jam, beyond the limits of the pop single, to repeat and vary, not so much to ecstasy, increasing heights of energy, but into a kind of chugging gasp, a running on the spot--but beautiful.

 
Drifting past words, Sly Stone's music expresses and oozes that which goes beyond words, yet in doing so it loses words' capacity: the inability to put the riot into words, to formulate the demand. In Sly Stone's music, whether brief achieved bliss or the hazy, narcotized beauty of nightmare, music exists as dreams. Whenever an edge appears it disappears again. Roles are constantly changing. You can live there, get lost there. But when the time comes, you have to come out the other side again. "The universe needs to be a little stronger / Time they say is the answer, huh / But I don't believe it". And time is what we make of it, when dreams and the reality that endlessly in fantasy refigure as utopia or as nightmare, as working-through, crash up against each other and in the present strike a fire, blown by the winds both in and out of our control.

*

 

And clarity, crisp hard: the other side of the coin. The rhythm sounded by Horace Tapscott in 'The Dark Tree', the version from The Giant is Awakened: Dodot-dot-dash, dotdot-dot-dash. Morse code from another uprising, another time. 

I listen to 'The Dark Tree' and then I listen to There's a Riot Going On and then I listen to them both again. Perhaps the best way to get the truth of the situation would be to play both those albums not back to back, but both once. But to listen to both at once would be cacophony, indescribable, unlistenable. As morse code turns language into abbreviated sonic signals that can then be decoded and turned back into language: a carrier, emergency transmission, made music. Tapscott would tap out that rhythm on the horn of his car or tap on the windows and doors of houses to announce his arrival at friends' houses in the late night rambles he would take towards the end of his life. And perhaps if you decode that rhythm some linguistic clarity, but which would in turn betray its conversion into music, two torn halves, a split. Dotdot-dot-dash, time is the answer, riot, silence. The imperative that we formulate an answer.

Calvin Hernton in 1966

Calvin Hernton, in the article pictured above, was writing about the insurrections in Watts, Los Angeles in 1966 (here published in British socialist newspaper Peace News during his time in London). He also wrote, brilliantly, about the wider wave of urban insurrections, from the Harlem Rebellion of 1964 through Newark, Watts, Detroit (and Atlanta, Baltimore, Birmingham, Boston, Buffalo, Chicago, Cincinnati, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, New Britain, Rochester, Plainfield, Tampa, Toledo, Washington D.C.) in his 1968 essay 'Dynamite Growing out of their Skulls', which is one of the most important essays of that period about the long hot summers, and which has much to teach about what's changed and not changed since then. And here we are again in June 2020 as anti-blackness is -- once again! -- revealed as the structuring order of a society simultaneously decimated by mass unemployment, by a virus whose effects -- of course! -- are disproportionate, and social, not 'natural', in their effect on those who are not 'the people who think themselves white' or thinks themselves comfortable, safe, middle or upper class, male, who wear that identity like a magic cloak. And a President who encourages neo-Fascist militia to declare open season on 'leftists' and people of colour, who describes resistance as terrorism, and who hides in a bunker when the smell of the smoke reaches his nostrils through the White House walls. (And as, here in the UK, the government here refuses to set a date for the enquiry into disproportionate BAME deaths from COVID due to concerns that this would be a 'bad combination' with the Floyd protests in the US.)

Hernton grew up in the South under American racial apartheid; he lived through the era of McCarthyism, was watched by the FBI, harassed by cops in New York, was in London when Stokely Carmichael was refused re-entry into Britain after the speeches he'd given at the Dialectics of Liberation conference, the same year that Carmichael had his passport confiscated in the States for visiting Cuba. His work in prose and poetry speaks with righteous anger and realistic despair about this situation--in his poems about the Harlem Rebellion or the Birmingham church bombing, in the late poem he wrote for the murdered graffiti artist Michael Stewart. He knew as well as anyone that it was never just about 1966, or 1964, 1965, 1967, 1968. History doesn't move in a straight line from past to present, but, in his words, the past "haunts", "traps" us. Has its own sparks, the fire next time. The 1960s, or LA in 1992, might seem the obvious historical parallel (if parallel is really the right word for the way history moves). But take it further back. Robert Greene II's concise and on-the-money article at Jacobin draws parallels between the Red Summer and what he dubs the current 'Red Spring'. Pandemic, global conflict, racial terror in which the victims and those who resist are labelled 'terrorists', liberals wring their hands over violence against property. How much have the co-ordinates changed since the selection of poems that Claude McKay published in The Liberator in 1919?

And so the sparks of June 2020. As Hernton puts it: "Not even a child should have been surprised".

“And that is the nature of the historical moment...": On the London Riots, August 2011

(Click the picture to enlarge)

Saturday 6th August, 2011: family members, community activists and local residents marched from Broadwater Farm to Tottenham Police Station, to protest the police shooting of local man Mark Duggan. Demanding to speak to a senior officer, they were refused dialogue, and stayed outside the station for hours, waiting to be spoken to, waiting to be heard. The arrival of a younger crowd and what seem to have been the usual heavy-handed police tactics (there were rumours that cops had attacked a 16-year old girl) then sparked off what turned into a full-scale riot, a riot which has since spread, in the past few days, to Brixton, Liverpool, Manchester, Nottingham, Birmingham. Prime Minister David Cameron has returned from his holiday and is talking about authorising the use of water cannon and plastic bullets on protestors. Memories of Brixton and St Pauls in the 1980s come flooding back. Of course, seeing all this on the television and thru the prism of the internet is a totally different thing to seeing it on the ground – mis-information, wilful or not, confusion, rumours, outright lies, knee-jerk opinions and reactions abound, and one has to pick one’s way thru the mess. Seeing the disparity between what was being reported on ‘reputable’, ‘balanced’ news outlets, and what was actually happening in-situ, during the November 2010 education protests, is proof of that, if proof were needed. So what to make of it all?

The quotation that I’ve appropriated as a title for this post comes from Darcus Howe, being interviewed by a typically hostile and aggressive BBC journalist who, rather in the style of ‘Hard Talk’ frontman Stephen Sackur, attempts to force him into a ‘gotcha!’ endorsement of the riots. She doesn’t get that (instead, she’s deflected with the rather wonderful “I have never taken part in a single riot. I've been on demonstrations that ended up in a conflict. And have some respect for an old West Indian negro, and stop accusing me of being a rioter. You won't tickle me to get abusive, you just sound idiotic. Have some respect.”), but Howe does say: “I don't call it rioting, I call it an insurrection of the masses of the people. It is happening in Syria, it is happening in Clapham, it's happening in Liverpool, it's happening in Port of Spain, Trinidad, and that is the nature of the historical moment...” Howe is not, as I take it, arguing that the riots are genuine revolutionary action (he make it clear that he has never been a pure rioter, but a politically-motivated protestor), but he is saying that they are more than just mindless thuggery; that the political, economic, social and racial causes behind them deserve closer examination; and that the fact of these riots cannot simply be tut-tutted away by ‘non-violent’ liberals or rabid, racist conservatives.

Of course, the spark for the London riots *was* political – the shooting of Mark Duggan, which is just a single point on the edifice of racial profiling, unexplained deaths, and general brutality for which the police never do, and never are expected to answer (as if, perhaps, ‘it couldn’t happen here’ – yes, America, images of Miles Davis covered in blood outside Birdland, perhaps, or Thelonious Monk gifted years of mental trauma after an unjustified beating, or Oscar Grant, yes, how could we forget him? (ok, we'll grant you Smiley Culture, yeah, he died here, didn't he?)). But, in the transition to a full-blown riot, the original motivation becomes lost in a sea of other, individual and collective motivations – resentment at the poverty in which one finds oneself and the contempt with which one is daily treated; resentment at the lack of horizons, at the insistence that this is how it is and will always be, that *you* are the unavoidable by-product of economic policy and are regrettable but disposable, human cannon fodder/ 'collateral damage' in the worldwide war of free-market economics – anger even more personal than that, at a failed relationship or the way that is entwined with the social – losing one’s job and its personal consequences, failing to get a job, going back to the job centre to be treated with snooty derision, seeing oneself lambasted and parodied or just ignored in the news media, on the shiny televisual box that shapes how everyone thinks – maybe even a desire somehow to ape those action heroes one sees on that same box, to be a warrior, an action man, to engage in physical acts of violence as an assertion that yes, you are making a mark on the world, yes, *you are there.* It’s this super-abundance of motivations, and, at the same time, the negation this produces – the sense that one doesn’t quite know why one is doing this, why one is smashing this particular window or taking this particular object (beyond the fact that one is told all the time by big papa advertisement that it is desirable, you’ve gotta have it (the blackberry, the trainer), even if you can’t, can’t afford it, could never afford it) – that spreads, almost organically, in the riot: no programme, no specific relation between ends and means, no end(s) in sight, just this pure act, this open moment of negative possibility. The only alternative to poverty one is allowed is the spurious notion that one can somehow pull oneself out of poverty, be Alan Sugar’s apprentice, bawl out a tried-and-tested number on The X Factor, be mocked or paraded or degraded in the freak-show spectacle of Big Brother, exist in that other unreal-world of Z-list celebrity, Botox, bling, false smiles and breasts and lives – the only alternative is to be rich, to be born somewhere else, to get lucky; and the only *real* alternative, now, is to riot, to still be in the place and the situation in which one was the day before, but to transform it, yes, negatively, but still to transform it, for a few days at least, before ‘normality’ is restored by the big guns (plastic bullets, anyone?), before police sentences are slapped down (and Mark Duggan’s murderers are never touched, of course, of course), before Liberal/Tory condemnation dies down and we all forget about the temporary inconvenience of the England-Netherlands football match at Wembley being called off, or that we were worried the Olympics might be affected (O God forbid).

Hey, I’m not *celebrating* the riot: let’s face it, most of the internet commentators who seem to some extent to be sympathetic to the rioters, who, at least, don’t call them animals and scum and say ‘bring back thatcher’ and ‘this is like planet of the apes’, would be fucking terrified if it was *their* street that was on fire, *their* corner-shop window being smashed, because they don’t know what it’s like to live without horizons, without a university degree that enables you to talk about Marx and sociology and the real political causes of the violence etc etc, without the privileges they daily enjoy even as they condemn the system that extends them these. I’m not excluding myself, I’m talking about myself, in fact, what courage of convictions I possess I don’t know, it’s easy to type a few hundred words while the news unfolds on screens before you – but, yeah, let me carry on for just a moment. I’m not celebrating the riot, but neither am I going to fall into the other camp, of weak pseudo-pacifist condemnation of what those nasty urban youths are getting up to. As Chris Goode puts it in an invaluable blog-post working thru his own thoughts on the riots, the binary choice we are presented with – that Darcus Howe is presented with by that idiotic BBC journalist (does she call him ‘*Marcus* Howe’ at the beginning of the clip or am I just imagining things?) – between ‘condemning’ and ‘condoning’ what is taking place, absolutely fails to grasp the complexity of the actual situation. If the violence was motivated by an actual political programme, with specific goals in mind, then it would be truly scary for those in power, then it would be, perhaps, true *revolutionary* violence – the fact that it isn’t renders it brief, impotent, disruptive, but it still exists as an objective fact, in some sense mimetic of the latent, implicit, hidden and not-hidden violence that allows capitalism as we know it, as it infiltrates nearly every portion of our daily lives, to exist, to continue, to suppress, to exploit. One could see it, in some sense, as capitalism turned on itself – every day you are tell you can and should and must have the latest gadget or item of clothing, the latest craze invented as a distraction in a self-sustaining, never-ending circle of acquisition and consumerism – and so when you smash a window and you take that pair of trainers for yourself, without paying for it, you are at once negating the system by eliminating that all-important factor of money, and you are embodying its values, those advocated attitudes of dog-eat-dog, take-what-you-can-at-others’-expense; embodying those values and turning them against the system that spawns them. This doesn’t make ‘looting’ a revolutionary activity – not in the semi-motivated, indiscriminate sense of vague boiling rage that would seem (to this outsider) to characterise the riots currently taking place – but it does make it more than simple stupidity, more than the thuggery and hooliganism of the Bullingdon Club (we smash stuff because our privileged position in society allows us to) or the Reading Festival-goers, middle-class kids who go on a rampage at the end of three days of drink and drugs and pop music. In other words, we can *understand* the riots, understand and even be excited by the potential that is there, for genuine revolutionary ‘movement of the people’ (in Fela Kuti’s words), even as its direction into blind shop-window-smashing and building-burning remains un-channelled, its energies un-directed, un-fulfilled.

In ‘V for Vendetta’, Alan Moore’s anonymous anarchist instigator (following Robert Anton Wilson) pontificates on the difference between ‘chaos’ and ‘anarchy’.

Evey: "Is this the land of do-as-you-please?"
V: "No, this is only the land of take-what-you-want. Anarchy means ‘without leaders’, not ‘without order.’ With anarchy comes an age of true ordung, of true order, which is to say, *voluntary* order. This age of ordung will begin when the mad and incoherent cycle of verwirrung has run its course. This is not anarchy, Eve. This is chaos. Involuntary order breeds dissatisfaction, mother of disorder, parent of the guillotine. Authoritarian societies are like formation skating. Intricate, mechanically precise and above all, *precarious.* Beneath civilisation’s fragile crust, cold chaos churns. And there are places where the ice is treacherously thin."

Let’s say now that we’re witnessing chaos. But let’s say too that there is the potential for anarchy – or, if you don’t hold to that political persuasion, for that afore-mentioned revolutionary movement of the people. (The rioters are Black, Jewish, White, Men, Women.) Yes, the crack-down will begin and things will return to the way they were – but not even that, the charred buildings and the smashed windows that will take months to repair will provide a constant physical reminder of what happened – and, more importantly, tremors such as this, added to the more politically coherent protests and marches of November 2010 or March 2011, added to the Arab spring, added to everything, suggest that the earth-quake to come may be more than just a simple riot.