"2024 United Kingdom Riots"

On a discussion post on the worldwide farmers' protests, the matter of the riots that occurred, primarily in England, between 30th July and 5th August 2024, was raised to illustrate that a conflict between the Police and another party is not necessarily a part of our working class struggle against capital and its class personification, the bourgeoisie.

The question that needs to be answered is to what extent, and by which forces, were these riots by the lumpen proletariat orchestrated? If we look to official sources, we find that the "riots had limited formal organisation". The question is, what was this "limited formal organisation"? It is public knowledge that there was formal orchestration of the riots by groups such as remnants of the English Defence League, Patriotic Alternative, Britain First, Ulster Defence Association. What is not public knowledge, and may never be, is how many, if any, of the rioters were informants in the pay of bodies of the UK state, and whether there was any higher authority coordinating the actions taken by the known orchestrators listed previously? And what is the economic basis of this "limited formal organisation"? Certainly not the impoverished—both mentally and financially—that carried out their tokenistic attacks on the Holiday Inn, etc.

It should be noted that the official title of these skirmishes is misleading, as rioting occurred in Britain outside of these in 2024 (for example, on 18th July 2024, a riot took place in the Harehills area of Leeds, Yorkshire, England, triggered by the abduction of four children by Social Services and Police), hence the inverted commas of the title. The timing of the Harehills' insurrection—twelve days before the orchestrated disturbances—may be particularly pertinent to our investigation. A previous instance of the UK's "Extreme Right-wing" orchestrating an event in reaction to proletarian insurrection can be noted in the revolutionary period of 2011. Immediately proceeding the suppression of the action of 2011 against Police murder, this mysterious body again summoned its constituency, the "anti-social scum", to give the impression from a movement of the lumpen element that a part of the working class oppose the working class action itself.

In a time of reaction, such as we are living through now, it is the forces of reaction that should be studied and analysed and exposed. For the sake of unity, we should put aside, for the present, the role that that leading intellectual light of Aufheben had in suppression of the August 2011 insurrections and the ignoring of his teachings by the mercenary forces of the state in last August's skirmishes.

Our general theoretical task is delineation. In this case, between the lumpen proletariat and the proletariat proper.

FOOTNOTE: For those unaware of the disturbances referred to above, these were provoked by a false online post reporting that a murder of three children in Southport was carried out by a 'an asylum seeker called Ali Al Shakati, who was "on MI6’s watchlist" – a claim that quickly spread through social media networks'. As it transpired, the murders were carried out by one, Axel Rudakubana, son of Alphonse Rudakubana, a former senior officer of the Rwandan Patriotic Front and a member of The Community Church, Southport. For background, and nothing more, to the allusion to the British academic journal, Aufheben, see Aufhebengate.