What Community?

I was doing one of my irregular piss about trawls through my old word docs and found this, which I wrote in autumn 2011 about the riots of that summer. I published a version of it in Catch Magazine at the time, but this is the original.

Looting the Lexicon

I’m no Malcolm X, but I’m no Norman Tebbit either. ‘Malcman in the Middle,’ if you like. Being in the middle might be boring and not a sexy as stringing them all up, or garroting all the coppers, or taking everyone in London off to Butlins together and talking about our feelings, but I’m not inclined to apologise for that. I find it unlikely that a complex problem will have a simple solution. Simplicity, usually, is for simpletons.

But there’s a difference between simplicity and clarity. Too much of the language being used around the events of early August is vague, or meaningless, or is used as George Orwell once said, not to reveal meaning but to obscure it. In the two months since the riots and looting, things have got worse, with debate settling into familiar ruts and easy clichés, and most politicians and journalists claim to be able to end rioting simply by opening more youth centres or more jails, as if a profound sociological crisis could be solved by scrapping one trident missile and rewriting one line of a budget. If we are going to have a meaningful and productive discussion about what happened we need to start with first principles, and that starts with thinking about the words that we use.

I’ve been suspicious about the word ‘community’ for a long time, at least as it’s used in political discourse, where it has a long and sorry history. In the late 1990s for example, the Lord Rogers-endorsed political orthodoxy was that inner city areas like Gorton or Mile End suffered from a lack of communal feeling or ‘community spirit’ thanks to their unsympathetic architecture and urban landscape. The prescribed solution was to build anew, ensuring that the new Utopia that sprung up was designed in accordance with the wishes of the residents; ‘the local community.’ The writers of ‘Towards a Strong Urban Renaissance’, the 1999 report on the future of cities, never realised the circularity of stating on the one hand that dysfunctional design and degraded infrastructure made for a hollowed out, disparate population with no collective identity or solidarity, and on the other hand that the attendant social problems could be solved simply by talking to this population and listening to its (coherent? unanimous?) voice.

Anyway, fast forward to now and the word ‘community’ is being passed round like a bag of coke at a Bullingdon Club party. What is a community? Is it just a generic word for all the people who live in a geographical area? If it is it’s a rather useless concept, since if August showed us anything it’s that having a mix of people in an area doesn’t necessarily make it happy or socially cohesive. In fact, the evidence has been there for years, if you care to look. Middle class people who live in Brixton – like me, indeed – will say that they love the area for its diversity, its capacity to challenge one’s expectations, to expose one to funny food in the market. All this is true, up to a point, but what is also true is that any number of studies of Brixton - or London Fields, Dalston, Peckham, Kentish Town, Hammersmith, or anywhere else in London you care to mention – show that people here tend to associate with others who earn like them, learn like them, talk like them, think like them, dress like them, and usually look like them.

John Major once said that when faced with criminals society needed to “condemn a little more and understand a little less,” the only example I know of where a politician (openly) made it his policy to promote ignorance among the electorate. Reading my facebook during the riots I began to think that the internet was broken, and that the Daily Mail comments page was leaking into my newsfeed. People I used to know at school poured scorn on any attempt to understand or explain what was happening. ‘It’s criminality and greed’ they shrieked, la-la-laing with their fingers in their ears – an easy misunderstanding if you don’t know the difference between a cause and a motive. By all means declare that those people breaking windows and stealing trainers were motivated by nothing more than the desire to own and possess, and at the same time to disrupt and to destroy. Maybe that was all that was in their heads. But why, and how, do we come to a state of affairs, in this city – one of the richest and by its own proclamation, ‘greatest’ in the world – where a large number of young people are prepared to behave like this?

I began by listing a couple of people I am not. I could add semiotician to the list. I’m no Roland Barthes, for example, but in the last analysis I damn community for its lack of meaning. As Gramsci made clear, ideology is intimately linked with the concrete and material. To be ideological is not simply to be an idealist. Thus the hollowing out of our politics, the removal of ideology from our political parties, is paralleled by a turn to the abstract. For all their talk about ‘what works’, politicians now are less, not more engaged with reality.

‘Community’ is too vague to call up anything concrete. It is evocative rather than indicative. It calls to mind indisputed Good Things: friendly people, shops where they know your name, identifiably local places rather than characterless nonplaces, the personal rather than the anonymous, the specific rather than the general. A vision, of Police Community Support Officers biking through the morning mist to the Tesco megastore. It is apolitical. A solidarity without politics for a political culture without ideology. In short in this small angry island it is the only form of society we really deserve.