Our immediate inspiration came from the Indignados and Occupy Wall street, above all, the tents of Tahrir Square to organise to Occupy the London Stock Exchange, or at least the public square in front of it on a sunny Saturday afternoon on October 15th. Of course, we arrived to discover Paternoster Square already occupied. Immediately we discover one thing about our city. Like inspector Borlu, in the novel, The City and The City, we arrive at a crime scene and discover a corpse. And like in the novel, all is not what it seems. Our “public” space is not so public after all. The neoliberal city had made a corpse of our commonwealth. The global elite and the 99.99% exist in two different cities occupying the same space. These parallel worlds must never be allowed to cross: the world as imagined by the tiny elite who control the fate of millions in their glass fronted offices and the lived reality of the rest of us. It is the breach caused by this movement, puncturing this partition, designed by the global elites to isolate themselves from the consequences of their actions. A separation which the corporate and government controlled media find increasingly difficult to maintain, which has been one of the principal subjects occupying the news headlines around the world this year.
If the struggle of man and woman against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting then it is important to remember what came before us. The elites would say to us,”You partook in this binge, and now the bar is closing it’s time to pay the tab”. We must remind them there were movements that came before us to challenge the dogmas of neoliberalism. In January 1994, in protest against the introduction of North America Free Trade Agreement, the Zapatistas occupied the capital of Chiapas state in Mexico and issued their famous declaration from the Lacandon Jungle. Like ours it inspired a global movement. And like our movements it used the internet to coordinate global days of action. Of course, this was in the days before Twitter and Facebook. But it was, arguably, better organised and far more intellectually coherent than our own. It organised global days of action, such as J18, which shut down major financial centres, such as the City of London, involving 40,000 people. It was instrumental in organising the protests, which shut down the WTO in Seattle in 1999, which in turn inspired the great counter-summit protests, the largest and most dramatic of which was Genoa in 2001. Our great advantage over these precedents is one of timing. That we are part of a global movement with antecedents was something that was at times easy to forget in the daily struggle to remain warm, dry, and deal with the other distractions we faced at St Pauls Churchyard.
One year on we are both excited about the protest movements Kicking Off Everywhere, but also angry about the human misery caused by austerity. And frightened, as in the case of Golden Dawn in Greece, of some of the sinister forces being unleashed by this chaos.
We have made it one our tasks to fill history with the presence of the now. In putting together the New Putney debates we, as Walter Benjamin might have put it, blast out of the continuum of history inspirational moments, filling them with contemporary relevance.
So surveying the scene one year on what do we find? We have seen, and indeed are continuing to see, a year of protest and resistance. Across Europe we have seen a year of occupations, mass demonstrations and general strikes. And across the Atlantic, on opposing sides of the hemisphere the Chilean and Quebec student protests show that it is possible to resist both the privatisation of, and the privatised, higher education system. And in the case of Quebec to bring down a government as well. But we must admit there is a certain asymmetry to the situation. The scale of the attack is nowhere equalled by the scale of the resistance to it. I think this is certainly true in Europe - even in Greece. I am writing this piece from Madrid where only yesterday there were marches in fifty cities in Spain with a clear message to the government that it has no mandate for its assault on the welfare system and the unions are promising a general strike if this assault is continues without the assent of the people. But if anything, the pace of the attack is accelerating as austerity bites into the economy. In Portugal, the government’s assault on social security has been halted for now, but nowhere has this assault been rolled back. And most of the time, the elites are able to use the coercive power of the state to impose their will and frustrate us. While our lack organisational maturity means we are not able to concentrate our energies and forces in a strategic way to overcome this.
But it is particularly the open and direct democracy of the Occupy and 15M movement, which the state finds the most threatening thing about us. Our global movement can only realise itself through the appropriation and re-appropriation of public space. For a real democracy can only emerge from the ground we occupy, from the space we need, both figuratively and literally, to create and develop our form of direct democracy. That space is not just in the streets, but in every office, school or public building faced with closure. The occupation at Barnet Library shows in a small, but important way, how our movement develops by giving an added relevance to occupation and purpose to the organising of public assemblies.
There is no clear way out of this crisis for those who rule over us. Mervyn King sees no end to a Euro crisis which could trigger a global depression. Years, if not decades, of stagnation and austerity lie before us if we allow it. For what we are living through is not so much an economic crisis but an environmental and a political crisis to which the economic crisis is wholly subordinate. We have a political system which is constrained to appease the bond markets and impose the same austerity policies whoever is in power. And the economic crisis has served to distract us from the only true existential crisis facing humanity: climate change. Only by changing the current political system can we build an economic system that serves the interests of humanity and the environment.
If we see both triumph and disaster as impostors even if we celebrate our victories and cry over our setbacks it is because we expect to see plenty of both in the coming years. But in the in the end there is only one victory that counts: the one that brings an end to a system, which is sending humanity towards an environmental and social abyss.
A long term perspective is important. The crisis we are living through is going to be with us for years if not decades. And the scale of the resistance we will have the privilege of witnessing will dwarf in scale anything we have witnessed in our lives. Walter Benjamin wrote that each generation is imbued with a weak messianic power. We should feel like we are at the beginning of a epic journey and we have only just started to climb the first foothills of a mountain range. And we are entering massive mountain range. Our journey will have many ups and downs and we are prepared for both.
If the struggle of man and woman against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting then it is important to remember what came before us. The elites would say to us,”You partook in this binge, and now the bar is closing it’s time to pay the tab”. We must remind them there were movements that came before us to challenge the dogmas of neoliberalism. In January 1994, in protest against the introduction of North America Free Trade Agreement, the Zapatistas occupied the capital of Chiapas state in Mexico and issued their famous declaration from the Lacandon Jungle. Like ours it inspired a global movement. And like our movements it used the internet to coordinate global days of action. Of course, this was in the days before Twitter and Facebook. But it was, arguably, better organised and far more intellectually coherent than our own. It organised global days of action, such as J18, which shut down major financial centres, such as the City of London, involving 40,000 people. It was instrumental in organising the protests, which shut down the WTO in Seattle in 1999, which in turn inspired the great counter-summit protests, the largest and most dramatic of which was Genoa in 2001. Our great advantage over these precedents is one of timing. That we are part of a global movement with antecedents was something that was at times easy to forget in the daily struggle to remain warm, dry, and deal with the other distractions we faced at St Pauls Churchyard.
One year on we are both excited about the protest movements Kicking Off Everywhere, but also angry about the human misery caused by austerity. And frightened, as in the case of Golden Dawn in Greece, of some of the sinister forces being unleashed by this chaos.
We have made it one our tasks to fill history with the presence of the now. In putting together the New Putney debates we, as Walter Benjamin might have put it, blast out of the continuum of history inspirational moments, filling them with contemporary relevance.
So surveying the scene one year on what do we find? We have seen, and indeed are continuing to see, a year of protest and resistance. Across Europe we have seen a year of occupations, mass demonstrations and general strikes. And across the Atlantic, on opposing sides of the hemisphere the Chilean and Quebec student protests show that it is possible to resist both the privatisation of, and the privatised, higher education system. And in the case of Quebec to bring down a government as well. But we must admit there is a certain asymmetry to the situation. The scale of the attack is nowhere equalled by the scale of the resistance to it. I think this is certainly true in Europe - even in Greece. I am writing this piece from Madrid where only yesterday there were marches in fifty cities in Spain with a clear message to the government that it has no mandate for its assault on the welfare system and the unions are promising a general strike if this assault is continues without the assent of the people. But if anything, the pace of the attack is accelerating as austerity bites into the economy. In Portugal, the government’s assault on social security has been halted for now, but nowhere has this assault been rolled back. And most of the time, the elites are able to use the coercive power of the state to impose their will and frustrate us. While our lack organisational maturity means we are not able to concentrate our energies and forces in a strategic way to overcome this.
But it is particularly the open and direct democracy of the Occupy and 15M movement, which the state finds the most threatening thing about us. Our global movement can only realise itself through the appropriation and re-appropriation of public space. For a real democracy can only emerge from the ground we occupy, from the space we need, both figuratively and literally, to create and develop our form of direct democracy. That space is not just in the streets, but in every office, school or public building faced with closure. The occupation at Barnet Library shows in a small, but important way, how our movement develops by giving an added relevance to occupation and purpose to the organising of public assemblies.
There is no clear way out of this crisis for those who rule over us. Mervyn King sees no end to a Euro crisis which could trigger a global depression. Years, if not decades, of stagnation and austerity lie before us if we allow it. For what we are living through is not so much an economic crisis but an environmental and a political crisis to which the economic crisis is wholly subordinate. We have a political system which is constrained to appease the bond markets and impose the same austerity policies whoever is in power. And the economic crisis has served to distract us from the only true existential crisis facing humanity: climate change. Only by changing the current political system can we build an economic system that serves the interests of humanity and the environment.
If we see both triumph and disaster as impostors even if we celebrate our victories and cry over our setbacks it is because we expect to see plenty of both in the coming years. But in the in the end there is only one victory that counts: the one that brings an end to a system, which is sending humanity towards an environmental and social abyss.
A long term perspective is important. The crisis we are living through is going to be with us for years if not decades. And the scale of the resistance we will have the privilege of witnessing will dwarf in scale anything we have witnessed in our lives. Walter Benjamin wrote that each generation is imbued with a weak messianic power. We should feel like we are at the beginning of a epic journey and we have only just started to climb the first foothills of a mountain range. And we are entering massive mountain range. Our journey will have many ups and downs and we are prepared for both.
Love it. Just remove the brackets from 'and woman', please.. :)
ReplyDeleteDone
Delete