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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...
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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no subject
Date: 2011-10-30 10:04 am (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2011-10-30 12:18 pm (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2011-10-30 01:50 pm (UTC)From: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.
no subject
Date: 2011-10-30 08:01 pm (UTC)From: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?
no subject
Date: 2011-10-30 08:50 pm (UTC)From: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...)
no subject
Date: 2011-10-30 09:25 pm (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2011-10-30 09:34 pm (UTC)From: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.