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On Monday 19 April the police and officers from Immigration Enforcement conducted raids on shops on Deptford High Street. The raid started with Agege bread, an Afro-Caribbean bakery, and then proceeded to a number of other black or asian owned businesses at the south end of the High Street. As far as I can tell, nobody was arrested or cautioned in connection with any crime. The immigration officers also failed to find anybody without documentation.

The officers gave a number of different reasons for their actions. At one shop they told staff that they wanted to check that the gas on the premises was safe, at another shop they claimed to be checking the lighting, at another they said they wanted to check whether the shop was obeying fire safety regulations. After each of these claims proved unsubstantiated, immigration officers proceeded to check the immigration status of people they found inside the shop.

Officers were reported as being rude and often refused to offer any clear answer when asked about the reasons for their actions. At one shop in particular, they completely closed it down for around 4 hours, and refused to allow the shopkeeper to leave, even though he was neither under arrest nor being held according to any other powers. When he asked to leave, they threatened him with a caution. There were also reports of officers asking at a number of shops whether the shopkeepers could give them access to the flats above. They had no warrants to search any flats on the High Street, and were very unclear about why they would want to enter the premises anyway.

After the raid I handed out information from the Anti-Raids Network and spoke to shopkeepers. A common complaint was that raids on the market had been stepped up in recent years. One shop has already been raided five or six times in 2015; another shop three or four times since January. This is spoiling their business: as well as having goods seized, the presence of police and immigration officers on the market completely undermines business, and encourages customers to stay away. One shop had three employees taken away by Immigration Enforcement earlier this year. When I asked employees at a shop whether they thought immigration officers were focusing on any types of people in particular, they told me clearly that the officers only targeted black and asian people, and generally ignore white people.

In February the local Labour Party, apparently in cooperation with Lewisham Council, organised a meeting for market traders to discuss issues facing them. In attendance were the local labour councillors and Prospective Parliamentary Candidate for Lewisham Deptford Vicky Foxcroft. First among the issues was the problem of speculative raids, which the councillors claimed were unauthorised. Traders were worried that their business was being destroyed by the actions of the police and Immigration Enforcement. Traders came away from the meeting feeling like something would be done about this by the councillors. However, nothing has changed since then, and many feel like their business will not survive if they and their customers continue to undergo harassment.

Another feeling on the market was that one reason for the increase in immigration raids over the last few months was the coming election. Traders felt that they and their customers were being punished for the racist rhetoric around immigration and refugees that has characterised public debate over the last few months.

Finally, another potential reason behind the raids is the imminent opening of a new £47 million development on the High Street this summer, the Deptford Project. The Project is planned to include “132 new homes, 14 artisan arch space workshops, 7 commercial units, 2 restaurants and a new market square.” This new build, one of a large number over the previous decade, will dramatically reconfigure the racial and class make-up of the area, and is a potential drive for the new businesses opening on the High Street (a skate shop, a bike shop/cafe, a coffee shop, the Job Centre pub, an art shop, &c). It is noticeable that none of these new businesses have been subjected to raids or check-ups on their gas, electric, or flats above their shops. It is also noticeable that their clientele is more likely to be white and middle-class. One interpretation of these raids could be that they are a purposeful attempt to undermine the economic base of minority stallholders on the market, to make it appear an even more attractive investment to real estate speculators.

At this point shopowners, traders, customers, employees and just about everyone else on the market subjected to these raids are feeling helpless. People consistently told me that they aren’t sure what they can do, or who they can talk to, to stop this happening. Many have already tried to raise complaints with official channels, and either been lied to or ignored in response. One person told me that the thing they liked most about working and living in Deptford was that people supported each other, regardless of where they were from or what the colour of their skin was. They also told me that it felt like this sense of community and openness to others was being destroyed by the raids, and that they worried about the future of the market if they are allowed to carry on.

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this is a translation of a piece that originally appeared here.

Under the soles of his shoes, you can still recognise the dirt of history. “This is all that remains. A mix of straw and shit by which we delude ourselves into erecting cathedrals to the worker’s dream." Here’s a man, I say to myself, imbued with a consistency that bursts through in a total melancholy. It’s Mario Tronti, the most celebrated of the theorists of Operaismo. He has only recently finished writing a book on this subject: the origins of his thought, how it has changed and what it is today. I don't know who will publish it (I would guess a decent publisher). I read a profound sense of despair. Like a chronicle of defeat articulated through the long agony of a past that has not yet passed at all, that refuses to die, but is no longer wanted.

“It’s the others who keep you going”, he says ironically. When life, if only, demands other trials, other choices. Perhaps it is for this reason - to find an escape - that he has distracted himself with Tai Chi: “the gestures of this oriental martial art reveal, in their slowness, a secret harmony. Everything is concentrated on respiration. I did it for a bit. With curiosity and attention. But in the end I realised I wasn’t good enough. Out of place. The orient requires a mindset that can create empty space [il vuoto]. I live in a house full of the things I’ve accumulated over time.

How did your interest in Tai Chi start? Thanks to my daughter who loves and practices oriental culture. She would have wanted to become a nun, so she chose the same profound consistency in this world that I’ve only touched.

And how have you taken this decision of hers? With the respect that is required whenever approaching what concerns those close to you.

Is there an element of unpredictability with children? Always: with individuals, just like with history.

Did you expect that the story - I mean yours - would end this way? I always expect the best. Then come the knocks. Coming up against facts without an airbag can do you damage. I was a communist, marxist, operaista. Some things end. Some things last. I have learnt and applied the lesson of political realism: you can’t ignore the facts.

And the facts today are indicative of a great crisis? Great and long. It concerns all of us a little, at many diverse levels. It’s lasted at least seven years and still nobody is able to tell us how to get out of it. We’re living in a time without epoch.

What does it mean? It is our time, however it lacks an epoch: this period that has arisen and will continue into the future. History has become small, the daily report has prevalence: gossip, complaints, platitudes.

So the epoch is time hastened with thought? Not just that. It is the time that leaps forward. It occurs when things happen that visibly transform our living world.

Nostalgia for revolutions? No, if anything the twentieth century was the century of revolutions. But not only that. Where are the grand ideas, the great literature, the grand politics or the great art? I don’t seen anything like what the first half of the twentieth century produced.

When did the explosion of creativity end? In the 60s.

Your golden years? That’s the irony of history. There was a great twentieth century, and a small twentieth century built out of an awareness that it is no longer able to reflect on itself.

Is this a farewell to the idea of progress? These days Progressivism is the thing furthest from myself. I reject the idea that whatever is new is always better and more advanced than what was there before.

It was one of the inviolable creeds of Marxism. It was the false security of thinking that the defeat was only an episode. Because meanwhile, we thought, history was on our side.

And now? We saw how it went, didn’t we?

Do you feel like you’ve been defeated, or you’ve failed? I am defeated, not a victor. The victories are never final. But we have lost - not a battle - but the war of the twentieth century.

And who has triumphed? Capitalism. But without class struggle, without an adversary, it has lost its vitality. It has become something of a monstrosity.

Do you recognise in yourself a certain amount of intellectual pride? I recognise it, but it’s not such a bad thing. Pride offers clarity, distance, it gives you the force to intervene in things. Better anyway than the renunciation of thought. In all this chaos I would like to protect the 'point of view'.

The 'point of view'? Yes, I cannot position myself on the level of general interest. I was and remain a partisan thinker.

When did you discover your party? I was very young. Some people attribute to my Operaismo in the 60s. I think it was during my time as a student that my path was fixed.

In a book about you by Franco Milanesi - unsurprisingly titled In the Twentieth Century - he describes your thought. When was it born? Even before Operaismo I was a communist. A Stalinist father, a large family, the wealthier suburbs of the city. These are my roots.

In what area of Rome were you born? Ostiense, which was a bit of Testaccio. I remember the market. The cassisti who worked there. They weren’t working class, but common [popolo]. I was part of that story. Then came intellectual reflection.

What were the points of references? What opened your eyes? I say it often: we are a generation without masters [maestri].

You were, in your own way, a master [maestro: maestro/maestri can also mean instructor/teacher/leader]. I don’t follow?

Operai e capitale, your most famous book, has had a very large influence. Einaudi published it. What do you remember? It was a piece of luck. I didn’t know anyone in the publishing industry in Turin. It occurred to me to send the manuscript without imagining anybody would receive it positively. I know there was a big discussion and many disagreements among the editors, the strongest being that of [Norberto] Bobbio.

That was predictable. Absolutely, look at the situation. At this point I wrote directly to Giulio Einaudi to explain the meaning of my book.

What did he say? He completely understood it. Against the advice of nearly the entire editorial team he dug his heels in and the book was published. That first edition was quickly sold out. This was 1966. I was 35 years old. This text, since revised with the addition of a postscript, is still being read today.

Are you satisfied? It’s a book in which people are still stuck. People are still dealing with that stuff. It’s hard to make them understand that, in the meantime, things have changed. They think that the proletariat has stayed the same.

Is that not so? For me Operaismo fulfilled its role for a brief period. Then began the period of the autonomy of the political, cursed by everyone.

Why was it cursed? I am still hostile to the post-Operaismo generation.

You’re alluding to the 70s? They started the small twentieth century. This is where the drift started.

It was a great misinterpretation? Let’s face it: it was a generational thing, anti-patriarchal and libertarian. I’ve never been a libertarian.

Where did ’68 fail? It was a fork in the road, both paths of which were wrong. On the one hand it radicalised in a completely futile fashion and turned people to terrorism. For me, being passionate about the tragedy of history, I saw in what happened the futility and the senselessness of tragedy.

And the other path? At the end of ’68 there was a great turnover in the managerial class. The race to sneak into the establishment.

Not too bad for the irony of history. I am one of its paradoxes and its unpredictabilities.

And the myth of the working class? The “rude pagan race” as you have termed it. It was not what we thought. The workers wanted a wage rise, not the revolution. This was one of the reasons that led me to discover the virtues of political realism.

It was a goodbye to illusions? We saw red. But it wasn’t the red of a new dawn, rather that of the sunset.

Where does this “defeated” Mario Tronti situate himself? I am a man out of his time. I have always shared the elderly Hegel’s view that a man more resembles his own time than his own father. My time was the world of yesterday: the twentieth century. In any case it will never be the retirement home for beautiful souls.

With what emotional resonances do you remember it? My tone is now that of a serene desperation. Perhaps that’s why I almost never go to public meetings. It’s too pathetic to go around talking about the way the world is. And then, if I tell the truth, the end of my story is nothing like what it was. It has nothing of tragedy about it.

You have passed from Operaismo to Machiavelli, Hobbes, and now political theology, via the prophets, to the figure of Paul. If someone had predicted it thirty years ago I wouldn’t have believed it. But, look, Paul was the great politician of Christianity. In his letters you can read What is to be Done? by Lenin. I pay a lot of attention to catholicism, its institutional aspect. It is strong and long lasting.

People have accused you of flirting a bit too much with reactionary thought. From the intellectual point of view I find it part of a stimulating intellectual horizon that includes figures like Taubes, Warburg, Benjamin, Kojève, and Rosenzweig. A constellation that is anomalous and unmentionable in the orthodox tradition. Posthumous men.

Would you call it eclecticism? It’s not that. I take what I need. I’m very open-minded. I’m intrigued by reactionary thought. Well, I won’t give up the philosophers of the Restoration if they allow me to understand the French Revolution better than the Enlightenment philosophers.

Do you still feel like a man of the left?

It’s a beautiful contradiction, I realise. But how could I be of the left while maintaining the anthropological pessimism that proceeds from my realism? Declaring yourself for the Enlightenment, historicism, positivism - as the left does in a certain way - is to delude yourself that the problems that face us are simple.

Where do you situate yourself today? In the defeated party. In a Benjaminian sense. He presents the image of the Angel, looking back with wings that catch the storm.

It’s a beautiful image. It brings to mind the terrible and cruel God of the Bible. Do you believe in anything, or did you believe in anything? To those who divide the world between believers and non-believers, I say that I am neither one nor the other. I am, so to speak, on a kind of border, like Simone Weil described it: do not cross it, but do not turn back. At the same time, I think that the “crooked timber” of humanity, in order to survive, needs some form of faith.

And have you found it? In some sense I was a believer, too. I believed that you could overthrow capitalism, bring about socialism and finally communism. None of this had anything to do with science.

Does none of this faith remain? I am more cautious. I clearly perceive the link between realism and passion. Realism alone is opportunism, pure adaptation to reality. To correct this requires a form of passion.

We live in a time of sad and exhausted passions. Sad, certainly. But not totally exhausted. The trouble is that these days you have no control over history.

What do you mean? This period is very confused. Everything carries on its own way. At the start of the twentieth century there was talk of a great crisis of modernity. Then it came. And now we’re up to our ears in it, we don't know in what direction to go. So it’s stalled. You look without seeing.

Your concerns seem like those of a man of the past. That’s what it’s like in a way. But I don’t care. Why should I? I remember certain old men who, close to death, said: I wished I didn’t have to go. My father believed in a better world. He wanted to see it. Bless him. I say to young people: thank god I’m not your age. I’m glad that I’m going to see the back of this world. That’s what I say.

A few months ago I attended the UNISON National Delegates Conference. On the last day we heard from a rep whose colleague had killed himself after being refused the sick days needed to access the critical mental health support that might have saved his life. His manager had made it clear to him that if he were to take time off he would face disciplinary action which could potentially lead to his sacking. Faced with either remaining at work while suffering from a serious illness, or losing his job as a result of accessing support, he killed himself.

This week I found out that a teacher at my secondary school, well-liked by staff and students, had killed himself three days before the start of the new school year. He was a friendly, though often miserable man. He was a union rep. He had been a union rep when the school was put in special measures; when it was forced into becoming an academy; when a hedge fund manager and fundamentalist Christian took over the school; when management negotiated to undo terms and conditions and purposefully decided not to rehire many of his co-workers; when workloads increased and structures of oversight and control escalated. As I said, three days before the new school year he killed himself.

The impact on mental health caused by changes to the national welfare infrastructure, whether the disabled living allowance, Jobseekers allowance, pensions, housing benefits, has been well documented. Diminishing payments, proliferating measures for oversight and management, and the refusal of payment for even the smallest errors or infractions have all led to increasing precarity for welfare recipients: both in terms of objective conditions and psychological stability. The very infrastructure of the welfare state has contrived to reject the forms of life it had previously supported, recoding every request for help as a demand for punishment. In response many people have rejected life altogether.

Again, the relationship between this impoverishment of surplus labour, and the impoverishment of people in work is well documented. Those of us in the public sector haven't had a pay rise in years - some of us are young enough to have only known pay cuts or freezes. Likewise terms and conditions have been gutted wholesale by many employers, outsourcing is still rampant, and industrial tribunals have been further gutted. On a macroscopic scale it is easy to quantify these changes in terms of working hours, pay, or spending power. But this is also the destruction of life. These changes each render our lives a little more fragile or frugal, make each day a little longer and more difficult to get through.

(originally posted at novarawire on 27 June 2014)

Yesterday saw ‘Brixton Unite’  - a multi-agency police operation – take place in Brixton. While the claim by local government and the Metropolitan Police is that the operation was a response to ‘gang crime’, for many it is emblematic of the politics and management of gentrification: economic and social cleansing, racist policing, and the dispossession of urban space. Below Tom Abree offers four thoughts on yesterday’s events.

1. This wasn’t a re-run of ‘Operation SWAMP81′.

Despite the billing yesterday’s operation was not comparable to the Met’s Operation SWAMP in ‘81. For one, the number of officers involved was only a fraction of the hundreds of uniformed and plain-clothed officers who triggered the Brixton Uprising; and the vast majority of police and PCSOs in Brixton on Thursday spent the day involved in ‘community liaison’ activities around the market, Coldharbour Lane, and Windrush Square. This didn’t seem to mean much more than talking to children and having a laugh with stall-holders, but it’s a powerful indication of priorities during the operation.

Furthermore SWAMP didn’t have a council sponsored open-air festival attached to it, pacifying locals with free food cooked by catering students from nearby Lambeth College, CPR displays, fire engines and fresh-faced police cadets. That is not to say that  ‘Brixton Unite’ was any less coercive or racially targeted but rather it’s priority was to hide any of the contradictions that gave it purpose. That is important to remember.

2. Trying to make policing total – ‘operational integration’ remains more spin than reality. For now.

Though heavily reliant on the (limited) goodwill afforded local police by local residents, this was by no means a ‘local operation’. It featured a number of organisations and agencies, including the British Transport Police, the MET, Lambeth Council, Trading Standards, and Lambeth Borough Command. When asked by monitors, officers denied knowledge of any sort of larger operation (‘we’re just individuals, we came here on our own’). But when talking to more supportive members of the public, they could be overheard giving various reasons for their presence including: recent stabbings; a spate of violence; and even having been invited by the community (funnily enough the last time the MET met the community, on the 12th February at Brixton MOPAC, they were shouted out of Lambeth Town Hall as murderers and thugs).

Border Force (formerly UKBA) were a no-show. But overall this seems to have been a renewed attempt to give ‘total policing’ some content. What was projected looks to have been inter-agency cooperation to present (to the media, to the government, and to the community) a self-image of integration and coherence. What it actually came down to was a series of oddly dislocated and forced actions throughout the day that seemed desperate to symbolise a complete image of police power.

This is probably not the last operation of this type to be rolled out in London and its likely that we’ll see copycat events such as ‘Tottenham Unite,’ ‘Hackney Unite,’ or ‘Lewisham Unite,’ or ‘Carnival Unite’, before the end of summer. Those might be larger, better funded, and more coordinated operations and its that possibility which means that we should start thinking carefully  - now – about the reasons behind them, and how best to respond to them in future.

3. United in gentrification.

Brixton has been undergoing complex processes of gentrification since the days of SWAMP ’81. There was pretty broad consent on the ground that ‘Brixton Unite’ was another tactical innovation in the battle that’s raging down Coldharbour Lane, through the market, around the Rec and up the hill. It’s a battle over who can unite in Brixton, the forms unity is allowed to take, and what a ‘united Brixton’ will look like in the future.

The operation was managed by two plainclothes officers who looked to be from Scotland Yard and observed everything happening at the Underground Station from the entrance to Morley’s department store. Every hour or so they would take a stroll through the market and then liaise with uniformed officers outside the vegan cupcake shop at the covered market.

It’s not a coincidence that the tube was the centre of operations for most of the day. Any Londoner who pays rent and travels to work will know that this city is being carved up, one zone at a time, according to the imperatives of international capital. They just need to look at their bills and local house prices to know as much. In Peckham, improved transport links are contributing to a reconfiguration of Rye Lane according to a new and ascendant bourgeoisie. The vegan cupcake shop on the edge of Brixton market is a giveaway to how far this process has already gone in SW9. ‘Brixton Unite’ wasn’t just a mask for more antagonistic policing, it was also a statement of intent about the classes of people that local institutions intend to unite around, and against.

4. United in Anger.

What we know is (a) gentrification continues at a startling rate (b) this is only a prelude to more extensive and spiteful operations  and (c) local institutions – traditionally charged with mediating conflict – are happy to endorse this sort of police work. Given we know this, we need to begin to think seriously about how to fight back. There were signs on Thursday of how this counter-power might work.

Importantly, it has to be hyper-local, focusing on particular areas, even streets or blocks. This is because any intervention that isn’t by the community is doomed to be meaningless fronting. It’s also because police vehicles are faster than text call-outs. Police don’t usually publicise when and where they intend to operate. When raids and stops happen, we can’t and shouldn’t be reliant on a disparate network of activists to get to Brixton (or anywhere else) in time to intervene. This means prioritising organisation on your estate, at work, or in your community centre. Density of experience and confidence can make a massive difference in how much you can do during an intervention. When passers-by joined in and interrupted police stops, there was a snowball effect that effectively annulled police control over the situation. With a bit of imagination and work this might become a normal occurrence. An entire street coming to the help of a resident entirely transforms the dynamics of power that the MET relies on. Priorities should therefore be: legal rights training; regular stalls distributing information and encouraging involvement; educating people most vulnerable to attack by the police, in the places they live. Were this to happen on a sustained basis our ‘unity’ against racism, social cleansing and the dispossession of the city would gain greatly in strength and these kinds of policing might prove increasingly difficult to enforce.