After four and a half months of peaceful, prolonged protest, the authorities finally called time on the St Paul’s occupation in the early hours of Tuesday morning.
Riot police and bailiffs, enforcing the will of the 1%, were confronted by peaceful defiance from occupiers who were joined in solidarity outside of the police cordon by many other occupiers and supporters. The shadowy, undemocratic City of London Corporation were aided in arranging the eviction by the craven cowardice of St. Pauls’ clergymen, who, despite having previously suggested they would provide “sanctuary” in the event of a violent eviction, decided instead to invite police to physically remove peaceful protesters from the steps of the church – just as Giles Fraser feared. Fraser, who was prevented by police from passing through the cordon, tweeted the next morning: “Really proud of the way Occupy conducted themselves last night.”
A cathedral spokesperson had told the Evening Standard back in December, “The only radical alternative would be putting [protesters] inside the cathedral. We have said all along that what we do not want is for this to end in violence. If [during an eviction] they run inside, the doors are not going to be shut. Everything has been discussed.”
Occupy was never about critiquing religious establishments, but since landing on the steps of St Paul’s obvious antagonisms between faith, morals and established religion have been exposed which are not unconnected to Occupy’s central issue of finacial inequality.
When given a choice between looking after the people and looking after their accounts, the chapter’s agenda became obvious. Giles Fraser resigned from his role as Canon stating that he couldn’t stand by and watch violence being perpetrated in the name of the church. When highly respected members of the clergy are leaving their positions in order to escape restrictions on their own ability to act morally – restrictions imposed primarily by financial concerns – it becomes clear just how deeply the power of finance has penetrated every area of our society. How can there be such a thing as ethical capitalism when even establishments whose very business is ethics cannot extrapolate one from the other?
A second Occupy site, the School of Ides, was also evicted simultaneously, immediatley after bailiffs moved in, with the building flattened to the ground just hours later. It’s worth noting that while the School of Ideas was literally bulldozed shortly after its eviction, the government are metaphorically bulldozing liberaries and access to higher education for many.
These scenes were precipitated last Wednesday when Occupy LSX somewhat predictably had its appeal rejected at the Royal Courts of Justice. The case was fought on a narrow plain encompassing only the vagaries of land ownership and the question of whether the encampment blocked a public highway. Let’s try to ignore the risible irony of the City of London Corporation positioning itself as protector of the “public good” when the spacious walkway in question is one of the last remaining examples of publicly owned land in the entire Square Mile. Given that the legal system was devised in line with political and economic values that favour the one per cent, it was always likely that the Corporation’s claim to the land – home to hundreds of people these past four months without hindering pedestrian access in the slightest – would be upheld.
If the case were fought on a moral or ecological plain there would be no contest: Occupy would win hands down. History, to be written by a world stupefied at our era’s inaction on climate change, poverty and global inequality, will record that Occupy the London Stock Exchange saw the coming storm and helped sound the warning bell. History will also note that the established men and women of our age responded with dismissive scorn and references to their deluded idea of “common sense”.
OccupyLSX’s case was not destined to be successful in court but it did put forward a strong public defence of the right to meaningful protest. Protest is not about being ‘allowed’ to walk from A to B, wave banners, then return home only to see that the government is proceeding with its illegal war or unmandated privatisation regardless. It is about the right to make a prolonged case for genuine change. Whilst it is to be commended that legal process was respected in this country – unlike in the violent clearances of Occupy camps elsewhere – it remains the case that the parameters of debate are set by the media, politicians and institutions of the very system we are here to dismantle. There are profound implications, verging on tragedy or farce, when the people who control how political discourse is conducted then appoint themselves to judge the validity or success of our protest against them. As long as the targets of our actions are also the dictators of the form our dissidence takes, we risk being stifled into adopting methods of demonstration designed to fail.
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Regular repetition of the Occupy motto “you can’t evict an idea” must not breed complacency. We have work ahead of us to be at the heart of the transformation that we all know is necessary; this work will require active participation not distracting disputes. We must be honest with ourselves that Occupy LSX, towards the end, was characterized less by vibrant political activism and more by insecurity and drift, fuelled by the destabilising threat of eviction and the inevitable tribulations of a social experiment in full media glare. Slavoj Zizek’s advice to Occupy Wall Street bears repeating here: “There is a danger. Don’t fall in love with yourselves, with the nice time we are having here. Carnivals come cheap—the true test of their worth is what remains the day after, how our normal daily lives will be changed. Fall in love with hard and patient work—we are the beginning, not the end.”
Some voices from across the political spectrum have suggested that Occupy should jettison the homeless and mentally ill to avoid presenting a messy appearance or to give ourselves an easier ride. This fails to recognise that we are all part of the 99% and that many people without secure homes or with shaky mental health have been integral to the Occupy Movement – including having contributed invaluably to this newspaper. A statement agreed by consensus this month confirms that Occupy is a movement committed to working in solidarity with the homeless.
The occupation of public space has been crucial to the global uprisings of 2011 and the St. Paul’s camp will be missed by many. Its prominence and symbolism provided a platform for occupiers to interact continuously with the public. Evictions of camps in other countries have sometimes caused the activism that established them to fizzle out but OLSX has stood strong in the belly of the beast for over four months, engendering hope that foundations have been laid for a movement far stronger and more sustainable than the fabric of our tents. Part of Occupy’s power is that it unites radical and progressive people under one banner. Occupy first, to raise awareness of injustice. If enough people join our cause, then Occupy to halt the flow of capital and to undermine the one percent’s exploitative systems. Above all, stay unified and keep growing.
Thirty years of neo-liberal culture has left a legacy of atomisation as normality. The space for public assembly has disappeared into a landscape of business parks, Tesco superstores and luxury apartments. What looks like public space has been privatised and monopolised, as demonstrated by the recent injunctions at Paternoster Square and Canary Wharf. Unions have been neutered and the established Left has contorted itself out of all recognition. Those whose moral grounding would naturally align them against neo-liberalism have been scattered to a diaspora of causes: environmentalism, ‘third world’ poverty, efforts to salvage the Labour Party and practical attempts to live despite capitalism by retreating into private worlds of postmodern cynicism, Eastern practices and like-minded echo chambers; all the while failing to confront the common enemy. This reinforces Mark Fisher’s concept of Capitalist Realism whereby the capitalist elite, lacking organised opposition, claims that ‘There is no Alternative’ while mainstream culture continually cements this as our ‘reality’, reproducing capitalism every time it fails. All that is offered now by policymakers in the West, locked into their dogma, is ever uglier, more hopeless versions of the status quo.
Fortunately there is hope to be found in the freshness, savvy and subversive humour of networks such as UK Uncut, Move Your Money, Frack Off and the student movement as well as Occupy and those who protested the demolition of the community at Dale Farm. These groups, via a diversity of tactics- including putting bodies on the line- are beginning to plot a course for the Left to escape its straitjacket of self-defeatist defensiveness. Movements are beginning to assert strong values around which we can build a new consensus. Together we have the chance to force this post-crisis period to be a transformational moment in UK history in the way that 1945 and 1979 began to redefine the country’s prevailing ‘common sense’.
Post-eviction, new occupations, events and direct actions will fill the void left by St. Paul’s. The unique social atmosphere of Occupy must go ‘on the road’ with flash mobs in train stations, outside galleries and at national landmarks. Effective tools of coordination and communication will become even more vital, as will regular convergences – in the form of General Assemblies and National Occupy Conferences – of the movement’s driving forces: people, passion and determination. Occupy’s future will lie in initiatives such as this summer’s ‘Occupy Near You’ walk: Occupy London, acting as the nomads eviction has made us, will visit every London borough, creating bursts of free-thinking across the city, returning to St Paul’s at the end of July – this time without the tents. Where politicans so often fail to connect with and listen to people, Occupy will reach out across all preconceptions of class, ethnicity or employment status. We will visit places too often in the blindspot of justice; places where riots took place last year and where the BNP have made gains, parts of society where the boom was never felt as well as those where community and creativity are thriving. We need to learn about local issues and to find common cause, so that we can connect and work with as many people as possible.
One of the best parts of being involved with this newspaper is the opportunity it gives us to engage with passers-by whilst distributing it. Many have already decided whether they sympathise with or are dismissive of our cause but in either case they are remarkably often willing to converse about the important aspects of life: meaning, happiness, the kind of society and life we desire, the type of planet we will be leaving future generations if our rapacious consumption continues unabated. These are not the conversations ordinarily had at our nation’s bus stops or in our post office queues, never mind in the deflective, trivial discourse of Question Time or politicians’ interviews.
This is what the occupation of public space has achieved. Tahrir and Syntagma Squares, Zuccotti Park, Occupy LSX and all the other camps worldwide are not mere signifiers of protest, they form islands with separate jurisdictions. The collective endeavour and refreshing honesty found in “occupied territory” differs so starkly from the surrounding society that it begins to subvert social norms, cutting through the humming anomie of modern life. The Occupy Movement has become an uncontrollable meme, a worldwide and technologically-networked Paris Commune, a space that frees people’s previously privatised imaginations to not only dream of but also to practice alternative ways of being. This is what authorities around the world fear about the global Occupy movement and why they see it as something that has to be extinguished before the flame can grow and spread. As far as the ruling elite are concerned, there can be no space allowed to practice alternatives or even to discuss them, despite the increasingly obvious disintegration of their own ideology.
The struggles of ordinary people to confront entrenched powers are as old as history and what history teaches us is that our efforts must be both smart and persistent. We have to grow to love adversity, a word not to be feared by anyone who has camped all winter on London’s streets. We have to keep coming back for more, armed with fresh focus, new ideas and bold hearts, because as Voltaire said “It is dangerous to be right in matters where established men are wrong.”
@OccupyLSX you did us proud.
Keep up the good work
99% Perfect: wp.me/pu0VR-hK