2009-03-26

Violent class war must be condemned, not understood

George Pitcher

It is a decade since the anti-capitalist movement exploded on to the streets of Seattle to disrupt a World Trade Organisation ministerial gathering, followed a couple of years later by the insurrection at the G8 summit in Genoa, where a protester was killed.

At around the same time, our own May Day "riots" were a peculiarly restrained and British affair, with rather well-spoken anarchists – "World Bank! IMF! How many kids have you starved to death!" – corralled into Oxford Circus by police. I seem to remember one class warrior climbing the awning of John Lewis, which had little resonance of the storming of the Bastille.

What surprised me in those days was the degree of middle-class support they attracted. Sure, they were called "crusties" and were all said to have dogs on strings, but activist groups with names like Smash the Rich were largely indulged by, well, the rich. Maybe we had taken Swampy, the Newbury bypass folk hero, to our middle-class hearts.

Anyway, the anti-capitalist market, like any other, is cyclical and it has come round again. By rights it should be more of a red tide this time. While at the turn of the millennium, a few dotcom entrepreneurs with ponytails had blown up their businesses and triggered a market correction, now we have an entire banking system that has asset-stripped itself, apparently for the benefit of its own.

But, just as polite dinner party talk eight years ago suggested that "they had a point" about global inequities, we can already hear the murmur of some assent from the law-abiding and well-to-do. It's there in Sir Fred Goodwin's neighbour, who says that she can't condone what the vandals did to his house and car, but she understands why they did it. And it's there in the knowledge that a prime mover in the internet-plotted G20 Meltdown protests that start this Saturday, who intends to "harness the rage" and wears a placard round his neck reading "Eat the Bankers", is a 66-year-old anthropology professor called Chris Knight.

Direct action led by intellectuals and with the tacit support of the middle classes is nothing new. But the depth of the world crisis in capitalism, and the consequent anger directed at the institutions that precipitated it, makes the potential for what could develop at next week's G20 in London all the darker. As we go in to the traditional season of class war, with May Day at its heart, we could be in a very different place from the crusties of the new millennium, for whom the fiercest focus of rage was, at one point, a branch of McDonald's in Whitehall.

So it's as well to ask ourselves whether any of this insurrection can be justified, before it happens and we're caught saying that while we don't condone it, we understand it. The first answer to that is not platitudinous, though it may sound so: violence cannot be justified. At the end of the road that starts with fatuous, big-me comments – such as Prof Knight's "If the police want violence, they'll get it", and "this is just the beginning" from the Goodwin family home's wreckers – lie dead bodies.

The police, as ever, will be asked to step in to the breach to stop that happening while protecting the democratic right to protest. That, from the poll-tax rioters to the Luton anti-war Muslims, is a fine balance. But it's a challenge they shouldn't have to face unsupported.

The rule of law requires robust government. That we don't have. And into that vacuum rush the anarchists. Indeed, it is the very helplessness of the Government in the face of the global crisis and the inability of David Cameron's Opposition to provide anything by way of replacement, that fuels the frustration of the mob. It may be a far from pretty spring.

Source: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/georgepitcher/5056584/Violent-class-war-must-be-condemned-not-understood.html