Classifying an Occupation

Never have I lived in a country that is so determined to classify me. Every government document requests some demarcation of ethnicity, sexuality and/or disability. Then I must position myself as left or right as if there is a boundary somewhere across which I must not pass if I am to be able to express an authentic political opinion.

No wonder that the media and established politicians, and a few academics, are confused by the 'Occupy' movement. They can only use the term 'anti-capitalist' to describe it because they have no classification for 'amorphous bunch of anarchists, bourgeoisie, socialists, christians, communists, buddhists, environmentalists, capitalists with a small 'c', and even some people who work in the city'. The protest doesn't shoe-horn itself into 'left, right, left' and has explicitly stated that they don't know how they are going to achieve their goals which  is refreshingly honest. No-one else knows what they're doing either but the government keeps on trying to fit reality into ideology because thinking outside those constraints requires too much imagination.

Spending an afternoon with the Occupy London protest has filled me with hope. Fitting in with my middle-aged sensibilities it's clean and self-organised and there is a working group for everything. There is first aid, a newspaper, legal observers, a university, a kitchen, an ecumenical meditation centre, and solar cells powering much of it. It is reiterated everywhere that 'this is a protest not a party' and the Tranquility Group are on hand to calm anyone down who thinks it's Glastonbury. The General Assembly operates via consensus, which initially filled me with dread reminders of a Gandhian NGO I used to work for (think meetings that went on for hours and decisions held hostage by personalities that could best be described as intransigent). But even in this much larger gathering there seems to be a decision making process and agreements generally adhered to. Okay, the Socialist Workers Party haven't taken down their 'Capitalism is Crisis' banner (it has been agreed that the prominent banner position has to be alternated each week), and no-one wants to be in the 'process' working group' (admin!), but what are we if not human. And this is nothing if not a very human process with frailties and foibles accepted, along with hard work and a long term approach driven by a belief that this could work. There is no spun fig leaf to cover the pretense that one leader, one party, one ideology has all the answers, and no three-line whip to enforce the charade as was seen last night in the British Parliament's debate on a European referendum.

The very presence of the camp on 'hallowed ground', partly, is also raising interesting questions about the commons, both physically in the form of land ownership and the commons that is embedded in institutions. The camp has redefined trespass and now has a working group to map land ownership in London, which will undoubtedly turn out to be a complex web of 'commons now made private' (as in Paternoster Square, the attempted site of the first camp) and 'government but not really commons' (as in some of the site around St Paul's which is 'owned' by the City of London). It's anyone's guess where the boundaries of the commons now lie. Similarly for the commons that are publicly owned and shared institutions. For example, the funding cuts and 'reforms' to institutions such as the NHS and schools are eroding the vestiges of the only bulwark against rampant inequality in this country. Public education and universal health care were at least something to balance out the differences between socio-economic categories.


There is one glaringly obvious gap though in the camp's population ... it is missing representatives from the estates and from the most economically marginalised who are the most vulnerable to the government's contingency plans of funding cuts in order to maintain its largesse to banks and lobbyists. But if the camp can manage to bridge those gaps it will be a force to be reckoned with. The best thing that could come out of the Occupy movement is the possibility of alternative connections and the desecration of classification in the process. With that may come new solutions, new forms of political organisation, a revitalisation of the commons, and a reminder of where power really lies.