chess | A few thoughts on the Occupy movement, politics and economics

I like the Occupy movement, and the 15M movement across Europe which pre-dated it. If you don't know what I'm talking about you can find some more information at http://takethesquare.net and the website of the London occupation http://occupylsx.org, or the global map at http://occupytogether.org - or the article that 'started' the Occupy movement in particular and underlies many of its principles and methods at http://www.adbusters.org/magazine/91/capitalism-crisis.html - which also explains what that big Capitalism Is Crisis banner you might have seen on the news is about and why it isn't just an 'anti-capitalist' statement. I have been spending quite a bit of my energy attempting to support it, although mostly by the virtue of Arguing With People On The Internet which I'm not sure is the most useful thing ever.

If any of you have any questions about it, or politics and economics in general, or how to get involved, I have been doing a lot of talking and thinking about this stuff lately and am very happy to provide information about or enter into debate about it :-).

I am, however, worried it may have a bad case of the That Stuff Is Easy syndrome, though. The only thing that the current movement as it stands is truly good for is spreading the word - waking people up - explaining how the current system is corrupt, how certain financial institutions are cheating, as well as the general issues of global inequality (which less people are likely to get behind, as solving that will reduce living standards for those like us who are on the top of the pile globally!).

The movement thinks it can develop alternatives - it can come up with solutions - and maybe it can, by getting people talking, by getting them together. But the alternatives will take time. There are simpler stop-gap solutions that can be put in place - more restrictions on the use of money in political campaigning, maybe even debt forgiveness / jubilee or some similar 'reset switch' on the world economy - but the massive changes to the world that many people are advocating can't be done well in one step in a handful of weeks or months.

It's all very well, very inspiring and comforting, to share our grand visions of the future and utopian ideals, to dream of what might come - but there are serious individual problems with the current order that a much broader swathe of people can get behind solving, and I fear that they will get lost in the very attractive noise about more radical alternatives which haven't had enough time to be developed or trialled and are likely to come to nothing - or worse than nothing - if forced or rushed.

I love the idea of universal rights to basic sustenance without forced labour, direct democracy, a world where nobody starves or freezes on the streets again, and I can see why people want to seize the opportunity of change given by this current crisis, but the more of that kind of thing we attempt to embrace the further off necessary change gets and the more people we alienate and the more likely it is that instead we get one of the nightmare scenarios instead - collapse to the level of small communities due to violent revolution, or a society which is worn out too much to care about the plight of all the people discarded at the bottom...

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I would have to say I don't understand the St Paul's camp protesters. What does the movement seek to achieve, and how does it see camping in church grounds achieving it?

I read the Capitalism Is Crisis article. That argued, persuasively, that we've come to believe Capitalism can't be changed for something else; which it clearly can be. However it then seemed to argue that no one knew what yet, but it would definitely involve revolution (I don't understand how we can know the method until we know the goal).

I couldn't understand how we got from 'We need a serious intellectual exploration of hitherto unexplored economic options' to 'we should camp in St Paul's'. It may just be me, but I don't think any clearer in a tent.

The 'Occupy' camps in London are basically there to achieve publicity / awareness-raising, and secondarily to promote networking between people who are concerned about these issues. It's likely that no particular intellectual advances will happen on site - but a lot of people are being brought up to speed on the various organisations, movements and theories that are out there, and the attention is (hopefully!) getting more people bumped out of complacency and thinking about the issues.

They're at St Paul's because it is about fifty meters from the London Stock Exchange, and anywhere nearer is private land which the police have barricaded off to prevent them occupying. The idea was to direct attention to the problems surrounding the financial sector, but that backfired rather when the church decided to showcase its problems instead...

(Other Occupy / 15M camps in other countries are doing slightly different things - in the US it is mostly publicity-raising again, as far as I can tell, but in the European countries with a much more advanced state of economic collapse, they are actually attempting to feed and house people and produce a secondary source of healthcare / production apart from the collapsed national economy.)

That Rolling Stone article is long on innuendo and short on facts. Wall Street is 'cheating', in some fuzzy undefined way, by obeying the law? The author draws the parallel between overburdened mortgages and mortgage-backed securities, yet flip-flops from considering them to be equivalent bets to wanting jail time for bank officers. The tax argument is facile and duplicitious - any public company paying more tax than the minimum it was legally required to do would be guilty of fiduciary misconduct, and open to (at the very least) shareholder lawsuits. That applies equally to Goldman Sachs, Berkshire Hathaway, Coca Cola, General Motors or Ben & Jerry's. The article's lack of research or basic journalism would be shocking, but that boat sailed long ago...

I also fail to see how any article, let alone one titled Capitalism Is Crisis, which says:
"By acknowledging how deeply we are immersed in capitalism, how capitalist logic has come to curtail our ability to imagine anything beyond itself, we might open up spaces in which alternative possibilities reveal themselves"
is not anti-capitalist. The earlier paragraphs try to dress it up as referring to neoliberal capitalism, uncritically using that meaningless term, but it's anti-capitalist (or, more likely, Marxist) rhetoric with a veneer of postmodernist academia and a pretence that the various different options haven't been exhausted over the centuries. I suspect the author has a very clear idea of what "alternative possibilities" he would like to see, given his PhD topic.

I understood Chess saying "isn't just an 'anti-capitalist' statement" to mean, it was an 'anti-capitalist' statement, but it's not just that; it has something to put forward beyond rage.

In that sense the Capitalism in Crisis article (which curiously presents no argument that capitalism is in crisis; presumably we are meant to confabulate the Euro and Capitalism) does have a point to make beyond 'I don't like capitalism'. That of 'we have come to believe there are no other options, because we've tried a couple that didn't work'. That's an attitude I recognise in myself and now he points it out I realise I don't actually have any evidence there are no other options.

I haven't figured out how putting up tents near a stock exchange moves us towards knowing what any of those options are yet, but perhaps it'll all make sense eventually.

There's a reason why most systems of government have Ancient Greek names: the space was largely mapped out 2000+ years ago. The only difference is what to call it and who gets to centrally plan the economy.

The author's - and the audience's - ignorance of historical evidence and economic reality doesn't make those things go away. It just shows that this movement, like every other leftist mob demanding immediate satisfaction, is driven by youth. The mob is a petulant child demanding toys and sweets, whining that it's "not fair".

The facile comparisons to Tahrir Square and baseless claims of "police brutality" (and "ethnic cleansing" at Dale Farm) show a group hopelessly out of touch with reality and any sort of historical context.

The mechanisms already exist to effect a peaceful change of government, and representation of substantially any viewpoint, but they require rather more effort and involvement than squatting in a tent on the steps of a cathedral.

I find http://ourfiniteworld.com/2011/10/10/the-united-states-65-year-debt-bubble/ a much more convincing demonstration of how current capitalism is, in fact, in crisis.

I'm curious as to why you find that convincing, his central issue (real costs increasing due to increasing scarcity of raw materials) doesn't seem to be anything to do with capitalism at all.

Her I think, view is that this scarcity will cause a debt based approach to collapse, because if you don't have growth you'll have to default on your debts. She points out that paying back debts is harder if you don't have growth. There seem to me to be some missing steps in this argument.

However there is an issue around debt transfer between nations allowing unhealthy trade deficits/surpluses to last a long time. In theory this can't happen because the surplus country would have to be stupid enough to keep lending to a country which is going to take all it's resources and then default.

While I largely agree with you - the protest comes across as basically Marxism in a funny mask - it's worth pointing out that there is definately a big problem in the way wall street operates. Not so much in terms of tax avoidance - that's more a problem of government than of Wall Street - but in terms of whether Wall Street serves as an efficient allocator of capital or a way of extracting rents.

From 2004-2008 Wall Street was a terrible allocator of capital (abetting a classic Hayekian property boom), and huge rents were extracted (both from European banks and hence governments, and from the US government directly).

Oh, absolutely. The bank bailouts were a huge mistake, and I said so at the time. The housing bubble and subsequent bailouts make most sense if viewed as a 20-year plan to subsidise social housing, with significant collateral damage, but I think it was more likely just plain incompetence.

I do find it particularly ironic that the hard-left Occupy Wall Street protestors and the Wall Street banks both want exactly the same thing: bigger, Democrat-run US government, with more regulation on banks, and more Keynesian economics from the Fed.

OccupyLSX has been co-opted by the SWP, UKuncut, and the unions and doesn't have a clue what they want.

I was writing a message about how I disagree with your specific radical (but implementable) ideas, but i think the core point is that you are right - the occupy movement has pitched its camp too far to the "idealist" end of the spectrum. What is needed is advocacy for innovative, but reality-based, solutions.

This neatly captures my misgivings, I think. To have a chance of doing anything other than damage (which any protest does, irrespective of all efforts to avoid it) the protest must be asking for somebody who can do something, to do something helpful, that they can do.

That is how previous protests have worked - or not worked (see the protest against the war in Iraq, Climate Camp etc).

But that is not what this protest is trying to do. 'Protest' is perhaps the wrong word, although it seems to be the only word we have at the moment. 'Movement' is perhaps a better word. There is no central demand - the idea is to develop links and to raise awareness so that people do not simply blindly accept the situation as it is.

For example, I was talking to my small group leader at church about this today; I laid out various ideas around artificial scarcity and how the world could be a better place, and he went, "But what about innate human selfishness? How does that fit into capitalism?"

The Occupy movement is there to go - "Maybe it doesn't - so let's explore, what other systems are there that we could use instead?" - and to go - "Maybe it does, but we haven't actually _got_ capitalism due to the rent-seeking / oligarchic behaviour of some of the financial sector" - and to keep these thoughts alive in the public discourse about how we should face the current economic slowdown.

Perhaps this is what's puzzling me - I don't think movements, organisations, groups or think tanks are new concepts. I don't even think tents play a very useful role in them. I think networking is possible without squatting.

In this light I can't make sense of the near-square-mile squatters as 'movement networking'. From the above it seems I'm not the only one. You've been there so I'm sure you have a better idea of what's going on than I do, but I just wondered if the movement could use any of the hundred or so time tested ways of getting together and talking without shutting down a cathedral and exercising hundreds of police?

Very personally - if the Occupy LSX camp hadn't shown up, made a big song and dance, and displayed some heroic attempts at self-organisation, I wouldn't have found out about many of the issues behind the global movement; I wouldn't currently be trying to re-study economics, I wouldn't have been helping to connect makers of 3D rapid prototyping devices with people attempting to set up a bootstrap industrial base in economically devastated areas of Greece.

I'm sure I'm not the only one that the efforts of the protest camp have inspired to look deeper into the issues and get involved.

Also, on a note that might alienate our less Christian friends ;), the whole thing has led to a lot of impassioned sermons and excellent witnessing to crowds that would normally not be exposed to that kind of thing much, especially the Sermon on the Steps this week...

The camp is there as a symbol - as an inspiration - as an invitation to look into what is going on and break out of complacency. It probably won't solve anything itself, but it might just inspire enough people to get involved with social justice to pull us out of the worst effects of this global economic slump...

(Also, the camp didn't shut down the cathedral. The cathedral shut down the cathedral in order to attempt to scare off the camp. When it realised that wouldn't work it ordered some pointless deckchair-shuffling to save face - deckchair-shuffling that the camp would have complied with in the first place if it had just _said_ that - and reopened...)

I might note, slightly cynically, that one might almost think that the reason that the camp is -there- is in order to be thrown out and cause a public outcry. What -is- the camp's exit strategy?

The camp doesn't have an exit 'strategy', as you correctly surmise.

There are the following probable exits I can see from here:

1) Police-backed eviction with lots of photogenic running and screaming and bleeding; good for public sympathy, bad due to suffering caused to everyone involved / discouragement of future similar activism if it gets particularly nasty

2) Camp just fades away and becomes irrelevant; people drift off because they've had enough or have found a more solid cause etc. Possibly combined with camp movement to a less controversial location at least for a time, or one of the movement demands being left and therefore a critical mass of people declaring victory and going home.

3) The global crash/revolution comes; the camps never really leave, but become soup kitchens / transition-community hubs / overrun by chaos / an allotment project on Finsbury Square / whatever.