Normally this would be something to shrug off as the natural cry of a parent who’s just lost their six-month-old baby (happy anniversary on St Patrick’s Day, by the way), but then he dared challenge my pride; “write a real story,” he continued. So I did. Occupy isn’t dead. It’s just been beaten into a coma by those in power; quietly plotting its return while recovering in the hearts and minds of anyone smart enough to identify as progressive.
Occupy Castle Street
Occupiers lived in conditions to rival those on Castle Street. In the U.S. they were shot with rubber bullets, beaten into comas, and drenched in pepper spray without provocation. They were derided as anarchists, hobos and communists, and falsely accused of trying to completely topple an already teetering economic, political and social environment. They lived in tents for months on end, and had only McDonalds for a toilet. It was a shit-filled hell, all in the name of protesting against social and economic inequality, greed, corruption, and the influence of corporations on government.And who can blame them when the movement effectively started as a response to the U.S. mortgage crisis; a crisis that acted as they catalyst for the collapse of stock-markets around the world, and was caused by bankers basically selling parsley and calling it high-grade skank? At least, unlike Kony protesters, they got off their arses, rather than just joining a Facebook group.
But the Occupy movement carried within itself a fatal flaw; a lack of clear direction – Occupy came to represent any possible problem that people had with their lives. Initially a relatively small demonstration against corruption on Wall Street, it quickly expanded to cover almost every issue the Western world had. It underwent a supernova, the energy of which could not be sustained forever.
I sat down with David Fielding, Professor of Economics at the University of Otago, and an expert in the economics of violence and conflict, to follow this further. Fielding agrees that it was Occupy’s lack of direction that harmed its cause (or causes).
“Once there is that focus point, anyone whose interest is vaguely connected with that point will coalesce on [it]. So if you looked at the range of banners in the Octagon, that was quite a broad range of different people, but they were all there at that point because the Occupy Wall Street movement had created a focus.”
Fielding contrasts this, interestingly, with the Arab Spring, “because everyone in that process was interested in one thing, and that was democracy. They had a relatively broad spectrum of different people protesting, but they all wanted one thing. Whereas the people in the Octagon – what they wanted was much less focused.”
A movement that went more according to plan, ironically by having greater focus, is the worldwide protests of 1968, in which many of the generation who have caused our current problems would have taken part. With just a bit more focus, there’s still potential for Occupiers to have an effect. If you look at Egypt, for example, “there were thousands and thousands of people pouring out onto the city square, and they brought about a change of government.”
Getting Iron Fisted
Adding to Occupy’s problems was what Professor Kevin Clements, Chair of Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of Otago, describes as the iron fist under the velvet glove of state rule. Basically, if governments can use violence to shut you the fuck up, they will. And they haven’t held back from doing so, “because they didn’t quite know how to deal with it and because it did have a reasonable degree of popular appeal. But the force that’s been used to clear out the occupiers is completely disproportionate to the challenge that the police were facing.”Clements argues that the use of excessive force is almost invariably a sign of a government’s vulnerability. “The Occupy movement definitely got under the skin of the decision-makers and financial sector, and they didn’t quite know how to handle it and … its popularity. Now they’re feeling that if they can keep these public spaces clear, it will go away. But it won’t. It’s not going to go away, because like the environmental movement, it’s addressing an issue which is getting worse rather than better.”
The use of violence is intended to up the ante, by raising the cost of protest higher than it currently is, and it’s intended to underline the power of the state and the right of the state to inflict pain upon citizens who challenge orthodoxy. But try as it might to cover up that iron first with welfarism, the reality according to Clements is that the fist is there, and the state has to reveal it every now and then “in order to demonstrate it’s still top-dog, and that it has a monopoly of power.
“There’s a calculation made that if you can nip the non-violent protest in the bud with measured violence, then you should do it. And if we discover that the state systems themselves are seen as sources of the problems, and act as colluders with the rich and the powerful, then they’re going the way of Louis the 14th and France. They’ll be wiped out.”
Using the example of asset sales in New Zealand, Professor Clements argues that the current government’s attitude toward inequality and the wishes of most Kiwis has undermined its legitimacy. “Who has the right to raise and deal with issues of inequality? Well, if the state doesn’t have that right, and this government doesn’t show much evidence of it, then the people have to say ‘the balance of power has moved too much in the direction of the rich and the powerful and the few, and needs to move in the other direction.’”
This has raised some interesting questions about whom the state is actually there to serve. “The traditional [Marxist] assumption is that the state is there to serve the ruling class, the ruling elite and the bourgeoisie and so forth; and more democratic theory says that states have to protect the interests of the rich and the powerful, but they exist primarily to do the balancing between the rich and the powerful, and the powerless and the poor.”
“At the moment, most Western democracies have swung far too far in the direction of the market, far too much in the direction of casting a blind eye towards inequality and injustice, and far too much in the direction of state power rather than citizen rights. So I think the Occupy movement will come back again because these issues haven’t been resolved.”
“If inequality keeps on continuing to grow at the rate that it is, states everywhere are going to find themselves under pressure … And then, when contradictions get so great, you can’t avoid the fact there will inevitably be conflict. And probably quite bitter and violent conflict.”
The Revolution will be Live
It’s also important to remember that Occupy stands for a much larger sentiment of discontent, which has been building for more than a decade. And as Associate Professor Geoffrey Craig, an expert in anti-globalization protest movements at the University of Otago Department of Media, Film and Communication department points out, the media is very much to blame for this misperception of its death.“The media is basically a spotlight which seems to move randomly to different hints, and so of course, that’s always a problem with media reportage. Mainstream news media has a limited concentration span; there’s a temporality to the news cycle which means it’s hard for them to continue to report a story when there’s no new developments of it. It’s very much event-oriented.”
While Craig believes that people are generally able to take their news with a pinch of salt, he notes that “a lot of media attention has been focused on the closing of the camps and thinking ‘oh that’s it’, [but] it’s not the end of the movement.”
Nor was it the start. Few of us at university age will remember that at the end of the 1990s, there were huge anti-globalization protests which disappeared when the terrorist attacks of 9/11 shifted focus from personal financial and economic issues to that of national security.
According to Professor Philip Nel, of the Politics Department at the University of Otago, we’re still caught up in this today, to the extent that “there’s no state that’s willing to support a global movement for social change without clear benefit for it from a national security point of view.”
Professor Nel refers to the example of the anti-slavery movements. “The fact that the Brits were willing to put their power behind freeing slaves is why we got rid of it eventually.” He says the same applies here; Occupy has failed so far because there’s simply not that level of diplomatic pressure. “It’s successful in the sense of focusing our minds on an issue, but in terms of changing the behaviour of states and financial institutions, I don’t think they’ve been very successful. It’s not their fault, it’s the system’s fault.”
What’s worse, according to Professor Nel, is that no state is likely to throw its weight behind the movement when what the protestors do is essentially illegal, as petty a crime as it is to occupy public spaces such as the Octagon.
In-E-Quality
But what nobody can argue against is the legitimacy of the Occupiers’ concerns over levels of inequality. Even the World Bank came out with a 2005 report showing that inequality is a problem for development. It’s a well-recognized fact among economists that while some level of inequality may be desirable, the levels seen in the West today are a different story. Too much equality can destroy people’s incentives to produce, but too much inequality leads to antisocial behaviour and people who have lost interest in the system. “We’re on that verge,” says Professor Nel, “and if we’re not careful we may slip.”On a similar note, one of the interesting things in this discussion is that we keep framing the debates as if class doesn’t exist. “Class does exist, and it is important, and although it may not play itself in the way that 19th-century Marxism and communism might, it’s definitely a phenomenon,” says Professor Clements.
“You can’t have a situation in the world where two-thirds of the world are running poorer and one-third is running rich. And you can’t have situations within countries where you have a hugely powerful and wealthy upper-upper-class, and a relatively deprived, sometimes absolutely deprived, middle and working class.”
“The question is: ‘How much freedom are states willing to give their citizens in terms of putting these things on the table before they act repressively?’ If it looks as though there’s a massive coalition that would like a radical rethink of the whole state project, or of Western industrial capitalism, or something like that, then [the state] is going to act very negatively, very violently, and very swiftly.”
Professor Dorian Owen of the University’s Economics department points out that inequality is “a side-effect of a system in which you’ve got technological progress and different levels of education, where the unskilled are going to be left behind. And one of the obvious ways, although it’s easy to say and not easy to do, is to make sure the education levels and the human capital have been built up so people aren’t left behind. And it really is the prerogative of the system to try and do that.”
Professor Owen helps scarfies understand by comparing inequality to sports: “What degree of competitive balance do you want in a league? Obviously you don’t want it to be exactly equal because that may not be optimal in any sense from a welfare point of view. On the other hand, if it’s ridiculously wide then that may not be good either.”
And what about the future of the system? “If your car breaks down, do you just scrap it or do you get the carburetor sorted out? Admittedly that’s a fairly big failure that has occurred and a lot of people have suffered quite badly as a result of it, but whether that’s a call for completely scrapping the system I don’t know. Obviously from a completely political point of view, some will argue that it shows that capitalism doesn’t work but you’ve got to compare it with the alternative. What is the alternative and will it work better?”
Not just for Lolcats
Anyone who consumes any news media knows that the power of the Occupy movement lay in social media. One of the noticeable features of our time, though not unique to it, is that ideas are disseminated much quicker than before. Reform movements in Europe were successful due to the rise of the printing press, and modern technology just makes this process instantaneous, and with a much wider spread.But this movement isn’t the first to successfully use online media. Even way back in 1995 there was a movement to stop the world from accepting an agreement that would give special privilege to multinational corporations. “Simply by using email and text messages, before Facebook and so on, they managed to put so much pressure on the Governments of France, the UK and the USA, that they dropped the whole idea,” Professor Nel says with pride.
By combining the power of the masses with just a few states willing to support them, Occupy could yet cause change to opponents as powerful as Wall Street. Craig points out that “the internet was only having a preliminary influence in the 1990s. The Indymedia activist site started as a result of the anti-globalisation protest movements and they used the internet to good effect, but they didn’t have social media in the same way that we have now, so that’s been really important too in giving the Occupy movement a life beyond the protest activities in the street.
“And of course that’s what’s really interesting about the Occupy movement … It’s an old-fashioned physical occupation of the streets and public spaces, but it’s a profoundly mediated protest phenomenon as well. It’s the combination of the two that makes it really effective.”
One of the successes of the Occupy movement has been its sparking discussions in local communities. Inequality in New Zealand, for example, has grown over the past 30 years to a level where it’s becoming clear that it’s having an effect on our productivity. Keeping this issue in the public consciousness is important. “Even though they may not have an effect changing things globally, they may still have an effect here, and even in Dunedin,” says Professor Nel. “So it’s a local issue – the fact that there was attention in Dunedin is a good thing. We have high inequality in this city.”
We are lucky as students that we can afford to be at a tertiary institution, learning skills that will ultimately go back into improving New Zealand and the world. But if the state continues to act is if they are ignorant of inequality, the problems left for us to fix when we become the decision-makers just get bigger and bigger. Communication and accountability, not dictatorship, are vital.
So keep your eyes peeled. On May 1, 50,000 people were expected to flock to Chicago to Occupy for a month while the leaders of 80 nations converged there for a joint G8 and NATO summit. This plan caused the Obama administration to move the G8 meeting to Camp David. The movement is far from finished. If you’re part of the 1% and unashamed of it, you may be going the way of Middle East dictators.
