They occupied Westminster Bridge in London on the weekend, the “occupy” protesters, targeting the NHS bill that is currently rolling through the UK parliament, that would allow private contractors to take over key parts of the organisation under the guise of GP control of patient care. Three thousand people filled the stone pontoon, doctors and nurses in the uniform of protesters, activists dressed as doctors and nurses. It was powerful, positive and a little bit sexy. “Dull would he be of soul who could pass and not say/tonight some of these kids are going to get laid.”
The “occupy” tag had been picked up from the “Occupy Wall Street” protests, currently into their third week, but of course the Westminster Bridge protest had its own roots, having been planned by UK Uncut, the student-based group formed to contest the shock doctrine cuts introduced by the Con-Lib government earlier this year. UK Uncut had been focusing on occupying chain stores that weren’t paying tax, a canny move that had gone beyond the usual “no cuts” rhetoric, to point out the other side of the fiscal crisis of the state — the difficulty of gathering tax.
The Westminster Bridge protest marked a move to more forceful mass assembly, after a previous misstep — the occupation of “royal” grocers Fortnum & Mason, a tourist attraction with no real connection to people’s lives. Branding it with the “occupy” tag was part of the lightning-fast process by which the movement had spread around the world — started, it appears, as a discussion topic on the site of the Vancouver-based Adbusters, and rolled over into action by various New York groups.
Lest it be thought that the global take-off be first-world imperialism, it’s clear from the Adbusters list that the impetus for action was the Arab Spring. Occupy Wall Street became a booster station, like the “human microphones” — people verbally relaying speeches, due to police bans on PA systems — employed by the crowd these past weeks. But more than a booster, for the “occupy” movement is also a movement on from the Arab Spring, a protest that not only targets a more abstract idea but also thus concretises it.
The Arab Spring protesters face lethal danger, but in doing so they also face a very simple concrete object, the dictatorial state, all of them either Cold War client relics, or uneasy clients of the new West. Objectives, and hazards are clear, and they structure strategy. The chance of being killed is ever present but so is the possibility of victory and, as importantly, that you would know it when you see it — the oft-repeated image of the last helicopter leaving the roof as the crowd surges.
The challenge in the West, where the abstract processes of capital and state have long been dematerialised — we used to occupy stock exchanges; about the only open call market left is the metals exchange, who would be glad of the attention, and might put on sandwiches — has always been that no “natural” target unites diverse groups. The anti-globalisation movement — kicked off by Zapatista supporters in Europe, and other groups, in 1997 — found one in the lavish conferences held by groups such as WTO, WEF, World Bank, IMF, G8, integrated by the signing of the the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade in 1994, and the completion of the global financial order envisaged at Bretton Woods, the first such shindig.
The protests focused on these talk fests acquired enormous moral force not merely from the ethical passion with which they rejected the “Washington consensus” neoliberal development, but because they were so much more serious in intent. The global groups’ meetings began in diffidence, and by Doha, had collapsed into inconsequence, as the wholly abstract processes of the global market took over from states.
Yet what killed global neoliberalism as a state project — or a supra state project — was not an anti-state project, but an alternative one, that of neoconservatism, the projection of US power into this century, and the values that went with it — martial, exceptionalist, theological — as opposed to those of neoliberalism, which had been like a multiracial Coke ad, as written by a bank. But of course these were two sides of the same option, and of course the decentred nature of neoliberalism disguised its centres of power.
Amidst all this, even more than in 2000, the question was, what the f-ck do you occupy? UK Uncut had one answer, which was, everything.
Massively distributed actions, somewhere between an old-fashioned demo and a flash mob, they responded to the franchising of life — worse in the UK than just about anywhere — by taking that as its organising principle. Occupy 50 outlets of Topshop or Boots, and the chain, which had become invisible by sheer repetition, a background pattern, becomes suddenly visible as a thing, an agent (one reason why the Fortnum & Mason gig was such a misstep). Occupy Wall Street looks like a reversion to an older pattern; in fact it’s an augmentation of the UK Uncut idea, for there is no more a “Wall Street” than there is a “Hollywood”; it’s another tourist street, with a statue of a bull, some Doric columns and a US flag.
But the idea is infinitely franchisable across the Western world, because it becomes — occupy your own space. Occupy the space that is multiple, that is both a real space, and a co-ordinate of abstract capital. Wall Street is everywhere, but also nowhere, and in merely being in the street in an intentional and collective form, your presence becomes a political act.
So the “occupy” movement — taking in whole swathes of other groups — represents the next stage of revolt, beyond the global anti-capitalist movement. But it is not a direct development from that, for this massive protest everywhere, comes out of its opposite – the WikiLeaks moment, the focused and conspiratorial challenge to the corporate-state nexus, at a massive level, equal to the spread of the forces it challenged, from global Icelandic banks, to the US state department.
The dialectic of freedom has gone from the networked openness of the global anti-capitalist movement — a networking of laptops and Nokias, now looking as slow as a melting glacier — to the instantaneous global presence of commingling movements now, radically connected by Facebook, live streaming, Twitter and a dozen other techniques.
Where will it go? What will come next? That will depend on the nature of the global capitalist crisis in the next few weeks — the likely default of Greece, the possibility of mass upheaval there, the concomitant troubles of the southern eurozone, and a mass capital strike in London and New York, as private liquidity is removed faster than public liquidity can replace it. In the US and the UK, decisions by key unions will be crucial — they are either going to join to these new forms of protest and organisation or die in a fresh ditch. Those most likely to come under the greatest pressure — aside from, like, ATM users — will be hedgers, Ed Miliband and Labour, Barack Obama and the Democrats. It is not going to be pretty.
But it will be beautiful, bright and glittering in the smokeless air, gliding at its own sweet will, and bliss to be alive in the beauty of the morning, as we occupy the bridge, then cross it.
Crikey is committed to hosting lively discussions. Help us keep the conversation useful, interesting and welcoming. We aim to publish comments quickly in the interest of promoting robust conversation, but we’re a small team and we deploy filters to protect against legal risk. Occasionally your comment may be held up while we review, but we’re working as fast as we can to keep the conversation rolling.
The Crikey comment section is members-only content. Please subscribe to leave a comment.
The Crikey comment section is members-only content. Please login to leave a comment.