With the UK riots kicking on into their fourth day, the political debate has begun in earnest about their origin and nature. Initially one thought this would be a simple Left/Right split, but that is proving not to be the case. Various commentators from the Left have sought to portray the events as a symptom of a broken and unequal society. But they cannot portray it as a positive political assertion because there is so much random violence, looting and a degree of victimisation of the weak going on.

Conversely, many on the Right are willing to argue that any attempt to explain — rather than condemn behaviour — is to be complicit with it; but far less so, and with less confidence than they once did. Some of this is pure political gamesmanship — the US Right would like to present the events as a product of the UK welfare state, so they lean towards an explanatory stance. But there are clearly enough people on the UK Right who are so freaked out by the events that they’ve had no choice but to abandon the “laura norder”/”string me up” rhetoric.

But common to nearly all commentators is one major error — the idea that these various incidents form a single event, whose meaning can be consolidated and easily interpreted. In that respect, this “wave of action” — for want of a better term — is co-opted to another purpose, the propping up of simplistic Right and Left formations, which have long since lost any power on the street or in everyday life, and exist in debate and discourse only. The truth is that there is no one thing going on in the UK — rather there are multiple and contradictory events, interleaved and occupying the same space.

These events kicked off following a protest march in Tottenham, a depressed and miserable area in north London, with a large poor, black population. Some poor areas — Whitechapel or Hackney — have a sense of local autonomy or identity. Tottenham doesn’t, and people know that it’s a dumping ground, especially for those on benefits. Bizarrely, the area is a major focus not merely of drug dealing, but of street prostitution — many people were “decanted” there from Kings Cross a decade or so ago, when the latter area was being “renewed” as an urban hub.

Effectively, the police treat areas such as Tottenham as containment zones — and individual citizens there with corresponding contempt. So it has been no surprise that police accounts of the shooting of a young man have already been shown to be an amateurish confection, with a correspondingly heavy-handed reaction to protest surrounding the event. That spark appears to have been a fairly traditional one — violent killings by the state often unleash a violence — against property or persons — which is in part motivated by a sense of obligation; to let the police get away with such a killing is felt to be unbearably shaming. Some manifestation has to be made.

That manifestation quickly consumed Tottenham. As with most such riots, the damage looks random. But also, as with most such riots — the US ones of the 1960s, for example — there will later emerge a logic of property damage. Some shops will have been torched but not others. There is not necessarily anything progressively political or radical in such actions — but one wouldn’t necessarily presume that the Carpetright store, which  has become a burning icon of the events, was chosen merely for its prime location. Equally, the corner stores that appear to have been looted aren’t the small privately run corner stores that still exist on UK high streets — from photos and reports (your correspondent is far from the UK at the moment) they would appear to be Tesco Express’s, the range of convenience stores that the supermarket giant has been spreading across the country in the past decade.

From its beginnings in Tottenham, events jumped radically — and in a fashion that caught the police entirely by surprise. From Tottenham, it jumped to Croydon in the south — a far more mixed suburb, economically and socially — and Ealing in the west, a reasonably middle-class zone, as well as half a dozen other places. By now it was clear that some of this was an entirely different event — targeted mayhem by anarchist groups, both the relatively organised anarchists of  “black bloc” groups, and even more way-out elements, who see disruptive disorder as a political tactic (the V for Vendetta masks are a mark of their presence).

The rise of such “chaoticists” — again for want of a better term — is the result of a split within anarchism across Europe, between those who believe that disruptive damage should be relatively targeted — i.e. banks, McDonald’s, etc, institutions that are both powers and themselves or symbolic of such — and those who believe that a more “situationist” disruption of the basic process of everyday life is in order.

The fact that outbreaks leapfrogged all over the map suggests that a “chaoticist” strategy was in play, and was designed in reaction to the “kettling” tactics of the police as employed in events in the central areas of London over the past years. Kettling — detaining whole groups of protesters and bystanders alike for hours on end — is easy in narrow streets, amid large buildings. It’s impossible in Ealing Broadway, and the police were utterly outplayed by the fluidity of the city.

In Greece and other places, this split within anarchism has occurred also — but there, one thing has been remarkable: no looting. Shop windows can be trashed and smashed, but the products stay there. Why? Because such events remain vestigially political. To loot would be to concede to the attractions of consumerism, rather than to reject its logic.

The UK events were significant for that new development (in this current cycle at least) — mass looting, and the in-rush of a focused criminal element,  white and black. It is this third force that has given the events their anti-social character, because they appear to have simply turned on the shops in their local community. There has been little rush to the West End or similar, and a lot of the third-stage operations have targeted retail parks — places you pretty much have to drive to, to smash and loot.

Thus there is no one event here, to interpret as a sign of this or that. The most visible elements — the third force of looters — seem to be composed of organised criminal gangs taking advantage of police defeat, and teenagers, born in the ’90s, into what one might call the most politically deprived society. Older black activists taking part in these events in places such as Hackney appear to be standing up to a racist police force; but the hooded teenagers on the rampage have been born in the ’90s, into a society that has now had 30 years of governments that repudiated the old European social contract, and put nothing else in its place.

Thus, the UK hangs suspended between the social contract of the US (the mythical but beguiling notion of mass opportunity), and that of Europe (of a vestigial idea of social collectivity). The old UK was demolished by Thatcherism, and that process was consolidated by Major and Blair. Instead of fairness and opportunity, new Labour filled the yawning gap with surveillance and social-psychological management. The result is that the UK has the worst of both worlds, and those at the bottom the worst of that — “bare life”, sustained on crap public housing and £50 spending money a week, amid three million CCTVs. You try that for a while, and see if you don’t smash the window of Footlocker, and run away on the trainers you just stole.

Some commentators have suggested that the welfare state is to blame, which is nonsense. Northern Europe has more of a genuine welfare state and in some cases pockets of persistent unemployment and deprivation. But it lacks the huge and celebrated inequality of the UK, and the sense of utter atomisation unique and visceral to the UK. You can have a life of sorts on European welfare. You can have nearly none on UK welfare, and cutting up rough allows that the feeling of being alive to be recovered for a moment.

Thus, to speak of the cause of these events is an error. Threaded through what is a political uprising is an enormous amount of opportunism, and in some cases, a turning on the weak and equally deprived. They speak not to a crisis of Left or Right, but to a growing crisis of western Europe and the US that cannot be addressed within those terms, because the political bases that made such undertsandings possible has evaporated. These events have become political, but there is no sole political intent within them, and any attempt to recuperate such serves vested political interests that chaos itself challenges.