Occupy and the Arab spring will continue to revitalise political protest
The Arab spring, notably in Egypt and Syria, seems to be running out of steam. The vivacious drive of the Occupy movement has faltered and it is not clear what new life will appear. Can popular protest regain its energy and inspiration, or is that it?
Rather than retreating into the comfort of despair or cynicism, perhaps this is a moment in which we can try and gain a broader view of matters.
Power is the ability to get things done. Politics is the means to get those things done. Democracy is the name for regimes that believe that power and politics coincide and that power lies with the people. The problem, as Zygmunt Bauman has reminded us, is that power and politics have become divorced. What we call democracy has become a sham. Power has evaporated into the supra-national spaces of finance, trade and information platforms, but also the spaces of drug trafficking, human trafficking and immigration – the many boats that cross the Mediterranean and other seas.
But the space of politics has remained the same as it has for centuries, localised in the nation state with its prosaic variations of representative, liberal democracy. Politics still feels local – we might feel British or Greek or whatever – but it isn’t. Normal state politics simply serves the interests of supra-national power. Sovereignty has been outsourced.
The premise of western representative democracy is the following: citizens exercise political power through voting; representatives are elected; governments are formed and these governments have power to get things done, a power identical to the will of the people.
The belief that many of us had (or perhaps still have) is that if we work for a certain party, then we can win an election, form a government, and have the power to change things. But every day this is proven to be wrong.
Take Greece, where last November the former prime minister George Papandreou had the idea of holding a referendum to ratify a eurozone bailout deal negotiated at an EU summit in Nice. It was a democratic gesture of a rather old-fashioned kind. Of course, Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy were appalled because they knew that such a popular referendum showed a deep misunderstanding of the nature of contemporary political reality. Contemporary power is not the people and is not located in local or national governments. It lies elsewhere, with the European Central Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the interests of various financial institutions that the European states serve. How could Papandreou be so naive?
Now we have unelected governments of technocrats in Greece and Italy, and elected technocrats elsewhere. At this point in history, representative liberal democracy is no more than a kind of ideological birdsong. Politics does not have power. It serves power. And power is supra-political and out of the reach of common citizens.
The casualty of this separation of politics and power is the state. The state has become eviscerated, discredited, its credit rating has been slashed. Greece is only a slightly more extreme example of the situation here in the US, where I live, and elsewhere, in Britain, say. The state is in a state.
So what do we do? The answer is surprisingly simple. We have to take politics back from the political class through confrontation with the power of finance capital and the international status quo – the people who, little more than a year ago, were insisting the Egyptian government was stable. What was so admirable about the various social movements that we all too glibly called “the Arab spring” was their courageous intention to reclaim autonomy and political self-determination.
The protestors in Tahrir Square refused to live in dictatorships propped up to serve the interests of western capital and corrupt local elites. They wanted to reclaim ownership of the means of production, for example through the nationalisation of major state industries. The various movements in north Africa and the Middle East still aim at one thing: autonomy. They demand collective ownership of the places where one lives, works, thinks and plays. This is the most classical and basic goal of politics.
The Occupy movement is fascinating from the standpoint of the separation of politics and power. To be with the Occupy protestors when the chant went up, “this is what democracy looks like”, was really powerful, as was the way in which they conducted general assemblies peacefully, horizontally and non-coercively.
The movement tried to remake direct democracy, with a mixture of the old – concepts such as assembly, consensus and autonomy – and the new, with Twitter feeds and mobile demonstrations organised through messenger services. It has yielded a period of massive political creativity.
It is important to remember that the separation between politics and power did not happen by chance or through the quasi-automatic movement of capitalism. It happened with the connivance of generations of politicians, such as Tony Blair, who embraced free-market capitalism as the engine of growth and personal gain. It has led to a situation where the state, and the entire political class, are discredited.
Occupy is the becoming-conscious of a deep disaffection with normal politics, particularly among the young. And perhaps it is the phenomenon of politicised, radicalised youth that – after two decades of postmodern irony and posturing hipster knowingness – is so striking and exciting.
True politics requires at least two elements: first, a demand, what I call an infinite demand that flows from the perception of an injustice; second, a location where that demand is articulated. There is no politics without location.
If the nation state or the supra-national sphere is not a location for politics, then the task is to create a location. This is the logic of occupation. The Occupy Wall Street protest in Zuccotti Park taught us that much. Otherwise, we are doomed to the abstraction of demonstration and protest. The other thing it taught us is the unpredictable character of location.
It is unclear how the different elements of the Occupy movement will develop. But they certainly will – this genie of popular protest cannot be put back in its bottle. But what it requires is a location or, better, a network of interconnected sites.
So what is the next location? Where to occupy next? It is not for old men like me to offer advice, but a massive occupation of Olympic sites in London in order to stop the dreadful, sad jingoism of the whole tiresome spectacle would be nice.