Just because there has been a crisis does not necessarily mean that change will follow.
The financial crash and credit crunch of 2007/8 appeared, at first, to directly challenge both capitalist realism (an ideological assumption that the pursuit of money based upon private property is the only fair and sustainable way to run an economy (see Fisher 2009) and neoliberal normativity (the ‘common sense’ that we need to ‘inject market principles into all aspects of society and culture’ (Gane 2014: 1092). With the collapse of Lehman Brothers, it seemed that the contradictions of global finance were finally going to be revealed (see Sayer 2015), and yet, despite the catastrophic economic and social costs of this downturn, the forces which mobilised in the immediate aftermath were more conservative than radical. Probably the most popular discourse being peddled by the media, economic experts, and politicians circa 2008–10 was not one of a need for change, but of an international imperative to restore capitalism – to ‘get business back to normal’ and to ‘balance the books’ – while the answer to neoliberalism’s failure was ‘more neoliberalism’, which took the form of austerity coupled with large amounts of public money being channelled into buoying the market through bailouts and quantitative easing. For the experts, there was never any question whether this was the best available approach, and the message in the UK was simply to ‘keep calm and carry on’ while brazenly insisting (as David Cameron did) that, rich or poor, ‘we are all in this together’ (Sky News 2010).
There were certainly localised murmurs of resistance right from the start, but it seemed to take a few years for the short-term effects of austerity and post-crash injustices to meet longer-term frustrations of democratic deficit, socio-economic inequality, and unjust international distribution. Against the broader rhetoric that this crisis was somehow a ‘natural’ phenomenon – a disaster that had come out of nowhere, which was beyond our control, but which we now simply had to deal with – protest groups began pointing out the legacies of capitalism, neoliberalism, European colonialism and American imperialism, patriarchy, racism, and ableism, which had together created severe inequalities of both wealth and voice. From December 2010 onwards, starting in Tunisia, there began a sudden resurgence of popular mobilisation and social movements which, despite arising in very different circumstances, began to develop a mutual recognition of one another as fighting for common causes of socio-economic justice and democratic voice, in cities as diverse as Tunis (Mabrouk 2011), Cairo (Rashad and Azzazi 2011), Madrid and Barcelona (Castaneda 2012), Athens (Madden and Vradis 2012), Tel Aviv (Alimi 2012), Istanbul (Ozkirimli 2014), Oaxaca (Arenas 2014), Santiago (Guzman-Concha 2012), Abuja (Adebayo 2016), Durban (Mottiar 2013), Hong Kong (Wasserstrom 2014), Taiwan (Ho 2015), Auckland (Land 2012), Toronto (Kohn 2013) and many more.
Numerous theories exist as to why 2011 was such a hotbed of activism. For some, the rise of civil disobedience that year can simply be understood as ‘an idea whose time had come’ (Chenoweth 2014). With the onset of the financial crisis, inevitably a moment had arrived for long-term grievances to be addressed and nothing could be done to stop this process. The claim was that pressure had been steadily building throughout the 20th century – led by movements including civil rights, post-colonial nationalism, second-wave feminism, counter-culture (anti-war and environmental), anti-Soviet nationalism, anti-neoliberal and alter-globalization – which would (at some point) simply become uncontainable by the powers that be. For the western media, for instance, the Arab Spring of late 2010/early 2011 was easily interpreted as evidence of a demand for liberal democracy which had been a long time coming, ‘proving’ that the rest of the ‘undeveloped’ world would ‘inevitably’ envy and desire a western governmental structure at some point (see Badiou 2012: 48–54). Change was afoot and the time had come for such ideas to be spawned around the globe.
For others, 2011 was best explained as a matter of increased consciousness and the recognition of specific common injustices spurred by the financial crisis. From this angle, the sudden upswing of activism was a direct consequence of post-crash global indignation on the part of those who had witnessed the fallout of the crash and wanted ‘to restore government to citizen control, to regulate finance for the common good, and to get banks out of the business of buying legislators and influencing law’ (Taylor and Gessan 2011: 4). In addition to longer-term activists, this new context saw a fresh generation taking to the streets, as they watched the liberal promises of the 1990s (accessible education, secure employment, peace, environmental justice, democracy, human rights, equal opportunities) evaporate into student debt, precariousness, war and destruction, and a democratic and economic monopolisation of influence into fewer and fewer hands. The crisis, in other words, had provided both the occasion and opportunity for an awareness and recognition of unequal and unjust social structures that had long persisted whereby, despite the meritocratic promises of neoliberal parliamentary systems and capitalism, economic security, opportunity, and distribution remained strictly a lottery of class, race, gender, geography, and (dis)ability.
Finally, a third explanation linked to this mutual identification of separate but common causes was one of technological determinism, arguing that 2011 was the direct result of new communication tools and platforms. Just as the printing press and the internet had done for previous movements, the social media of Web 2.0 was argued to be the central driving force of post-crash resistances. Not only did this technology appear to offer horizontality (which echoed aims for direct democracy), as well as portability and (relatively) covert communication, indeed it was also seen as forcing international accountability upon governments, media, and economic elites on a scale which had previously never been possible (Stekelenburg 2012). As observed by journalist Paul Mason, who was on the ground during many of the 2011 protests, one reliable similarity across the world was ‘the smartphone glow on activist faces’, evidence for him that this was nothing less than ‘a revolution caused by the near collapse of the free market, combined with an upswing in technical innovation, a surge in desire for individual freedom and a change in human consciousness about what freedom means’ (2012: 3).
However, while these three explanations all seem to capture something of a post-crash ‘age of resistance’ in which ‘the possibility of radical change has been firmly placed on the historical agenda’ (Douzinas 2013: 9), few have then gone on to ask: why nothing actually changed in the face of such international pressure. Since 2011, we have not seen the rise of democracy and socio-economic justice which these movements stood for, but instead their antithesis: the continued ideological justification of extreme global inequality; the plutocratic sway of the super-wealthy over politics; the democratic deficit of liberal parliamentary models of government (despite claims to the contrary); as well as a rise of anti-establishment populist nationalism and the proliferation of explicit racism, misogyny, and hate. To illustrate this point, while 2011 had seen Time magazine name ‘the Protestor’ as their prestigious ‘Person of the Year’, by 2016 this title had been given to Donald Trump. How do we account for such a turnaround in the space of five years? How have we moved from the hope and popular drive for equality and justice after the crash to the division and uncertainty of today? ‘Of what’, asks Badiou, ‘are we the half-fascinated, half-devastated witnesses?’ (2012: 1).
This book, based upon ethnographic data collected from the Occupy movement in London between 2012 and 2014, will offer an explanation. It is my suggestion that, despite their best intentions, post-crash movements were ultimately limited by normative ideas of what was possible, sensible, rational, and reasonable, as a response to the financial crisis of 2007/8. In the first place, the wider context of movements like Occupy (in) London made political organisation extremely difficult, with norms of individualism and libertarianism undermining collective mobilisation and symbolic efficiency. Second, these strategic problems also made it harder for movements like Occupy to make their resistance ‘appear’ and be ‘heard’ against a wider context that distributed them as ‘non-sense’, while, finally, unintentionally extending the norms and presuppositions of that which they were resisting against. Ultimately, it is my contention that the reason why nothing has changed is that movements like Occupy (in) London (which represented the possibility of a post-crash alternative) were simply unable to undermine the hold that ‘common sense’ exerted after the crisis.
This isn’t to say, however, that there is nothing to learn or reflect upon, or that we can’t turn the experiences of Occupy (in) London towards addressing foreclosures which persist today. Far from it. In the first place, the use of urban occupation by the movements of 2011 demonstrated that the semi-permanent occupation of urban space through protest camps and squatting possesses a radical potential. What’s more, as experiments in democracy, these movements have firmly placed equality and justice back onto the public agenda, while highlighting some of the organisational problems which persist on the left, such as internal inconsistency; authority and leadership; and the problem of reconciling collective identity with horizontality and inclusivity (i.e. a structured structurelessness). And finally, as historical events, the movements of 2011 encourage us to reflect upon how we understand, configure and construct the relationship between power and resistance, and this helps us to understand the apparent paradox that – despite one of the greatest ideological crises in history and one of the most internationally connected resistance ever known – nothing changed.
At first glance, to say that nothing changed after 2007/8 may seem a little disingenuous. We have surely witnessed many changes in the last ten years, from previously stable economies (like Greece and Spain) going bankrupt and being forcibly steered towards austerity in order to access international loans, to the rise of right-wing populism throughout Europe (e.g. the vote for the UK to leave the European Union – EU) and the USA (e.g. the election of President Trump), as well as new refugee crises caused by global inequality and civil war in the wake of power vacuums left by the Arab Spring (e.g. Syria). Yet while these events certainly resemble change, they also indicate a lack of change at a more fundamental level. Following Žižek, we might even call these events ‘pseudo-changes’ or ‘pseudo-events’ which offer ‘the semblance of a radical change … so that ‘nothing would really change’, so that things (i.e. the fundamental capitalist relations of production) would basically remain the same’ (2008a: 231). In other words, what we have surely not seen is any fundamental change to the infrastructures and principles of global finance, nor have we seen wider cultural changes to address the role of entrenched historical structures that maintain inequality; instead we have witnessed renewed commitments and continuations from the previous world order. International markets continue to polarise extreme concentrations of wealth and poverty along traditional post-colonial/imperial lines (whether former European colonies or new American and Chinese forays into the global south for raw materials), with a continued trust in state-backed market competition to distribute fairly and set appropriate limits on the state. The civil frustration and cynicism which has resulted from this system also continues, most obviously expressed in the anti-establishment rhetoric of movements on both the left and the right.
One way in which this lack of change was covered up was through a successful framing of the crisis as a problem of the state (i.e. policy) and expertise (i.e. economists) rather than capitalism or neoliberalism itself. For instance, the suspiciously rapid post-mortems on the crisis (such as from the International Monetary Fund – IMF) blamed ‘group think’ and ‘intellectual capture’ in creating a situation in which a crash was deemed ‘unlikely’, while pointing the finger at incomplete economic models and a consensus culture that excluded contrarians (Turner 2017). Behind such an allocation of blame, the fundamental neoliberal belief in the capitalist market as a self-correcting ecological phenomenon that would eventually rediscover its equilibrium could continue (King 2017; see also Krippner 2011). Rather than a revolutionary shift away from such a system that perpetuated exploitation and inequality, and towards a more equitable distribution of resources and a parallel move towards democratic inclusion, since the crisis we have instead witnessed the emergence of a greater (and growing) gulf between the rich and the poor in terms of wealth and voice. Or as Sayer (2015: 1) puts it:
the rich continue to get richer, even in the worst crisis of 80 years – they can still laugh all the way to their banks and tax havens as the little people bail out banks that have failed … generally, the less you had to do with the crisis, the bigger the sacrifices – relative to your income – you have had to make … meanwhile a political class increasingly dominated by the rich continues to support their interests and diverts the public’s attention by stigmatising and punishing those on welfare benefits and low incomes, cheered on by media overwhelmingly controlled by the super-rich.
Rather than change, we have only seen the continuation of trends, with a ‘growing split between the top 1% and the 99% and the dominance of politics by the 1%’ (Sayer 2015: 3) who aptly demonstrated their ability ‘to be the most able group at ensuring their incomes continue to rise in defiance of the economic crisis’ (Dorling 2014: 4). Despite the crash, the richest 1 per cent now have as much wealth as the rest of the world combined, with the eight richest individuals now owning as much as the poorest 50 per cent (Oxfam 2017).
And yet, at the time, many activists and political theorists alike had clearly seen the crisis as a radical opportunity to bring about fundamental and historical shifts in the way in which societies and economies were organised. For instance, while admitting that ‘little had apparently changed’ (Gamble 2014: 16), it remains Andrew Gamble’s contention that the financial crisis was a unique juncture in which ‘radically different outcomes were at stake’ (ibid.: 29). For Gamble, it seems, the crash clearly presented an opportunity to directly question the ideological underpinnings and premises of the economic status quo, and therefore offered a chance to undermine and upset what had previously been considered to have no alternative. He argued that ‘as the crisis has unfolded, it has also begun to cause an upheaval in previously settled views of the world: in our assumptions and expectations’ (ibid.: 27), upsetting the ‘obviousness’ of capitalist realism and neoliberal normativity. This was a chance for an alternative to pounce and capitalise upon the crisis in a system which had been dominant for so long.
On the other hand, however, others argued that despite such optimistic rhetoric which surrounded the post-crash moment and movements, the crisis actually demonstrated just how entrenched was the notion that ‘there is no alternative’ in political thought and imagination. As Philip Mirowski pointed out, for instance, rather than spurring transformation, it seemed instead that ‘unaccountably the political right had emerged from the tumult stronger, unapologetic, and even less restrained in its rapacity and credulity than prior to the crash’ (2013: 1–2). Proceeding to explain this outcome, Mirowski suggests that ‘the most likely reason that the doctrine that precipitated the crisis has evaded responsibility and the renunciation indefinitely postponed is that neoliberalism as worldview has sunk its roots deep into everyday life, almost to the point of passing as the ‘ideology of no ideology’ (ibid.: 28). Even a crash on such a scale as this was not enough to shift the ‘common sense’ principles of neoliberal capitalism: that ‘free market’ competition, supported by compliant state and inter-state institutions, is better than any alternatives for achieving distributive justice and liberty. The fact that this neoliberal crisis had been followed by a continuation of, rather than a change in, the status quo, was an indication of just how much of an intellectual hold this doctrine had on limiting political options.
Yet neoliberalism itself had begun as a marginal school of economic thought in the early 20th century and was for a long time sidelined and marginalised in favour of Keynesian economics which attempted to use state intervention as a tool for balancing capitalism’s most exploitative effects (although this humanist project was only made possible by colonial exploitation and violence elsewhere (see Bhambra 2016; Narayan 2016). It wasn’t until after the horrendous experiences of big authoritarian states during the Second World War that there began to be a concerted turn away from emphasising the distributive role of the state in economic doctrine, with figures such as Hayek (1979) criticising ‘totalitarianisms’ of the left and right, and advocating instead state-supported market competition as a fairer method of distribution that was free from (what he saw as) the inevitably oppressive tendencies of government. Developing these ideas through international organisations (such as the Mont Pelerin Society), inconsistencies began to develop within neoliberal thought regarding how far the state could legitimately intervene in the market in order to ensure competition. But while this lack of clarity became ‘neoliberalism’s curse’ in that ‘it can live neither with, nor without, the state’ (Peck 2010: 650), this loophole also gave the ideology an immense flexibility: from early justifications of Central Intelligence Agency-backed coups and the installation of free market-friendly dictators in South America in the 1970s (e.g. Pinochet in Chile (see Fischer 2009); through the rise of oligarchies in the former Soviet Union and China from the 1980s (including, for example, American and German involvement in the post-Yugoslavian civil war (see Gowan 1999); and right up to the commercialisation of military involvement in Iraq (Klein 2008).
During the recent crisis, therefore, nation states and international organisations (such as the IMF, the EU, and the World Bank) simply felt that they were acting legitimately when they decided to bail out private interests, justifying this ‘socialism for the rich’ (Žižek 2011: 67) on neoliberal grounds and supporting the continuation of market competition while simultaneously cutting spending on social welfare which was seen to be undermining incentives for competition. There was no alternative. Neoliberalism, to use Mirowski’s phrase above, now passed as an ‘ideology of no ideology’, meaning that it was no longer recognised as one political option among others, but instead was considered to be the rational, reasonable, common-sense political model for managing capitalism. Subsequently, ‘any naïve leftist explanation that the current financial and economic crisis necessarily opens up a space for the radical left [was] … without doubt dangerously short-sighted’ (Žižek 2009a: 17), because such a position simply failed to recognise the extent to which neoliberalism has become unrivalled in its ability to capture and police the political imagination and possibility of alternatives.
This ideological limit is what theorists before the crash were already referring to as ‘post-politics’ or ‘the foreclosure of the possibility of politics and the tacit embrace of global capitalism’ (Dean 2006: 115). The obvious problem this presents for advocates of radical change is that such a foreclosure automatically undermines the potential to even imagine the possibility of an alternative, and is therefore ‘radically reactionary’ because it automatically ‘forestalls the articulation of divergent, conflicting and alternative trajectories of future … possibility and assemblages’ (Swyngedouw 2009: 610). Under such conditions, an alternative future simply cannot be fathomed. It has ‘no name’ (ibid. 2010: 18) and the very viability of a change in direction is denied. Neoliberalism therefore survived its crisis, because it had become the means of distributing reason, common sense, and normality, with any alternatives (both imagined and yet to be imagined) pre-positioned as unreasonable, abnormal ‘non-sense’. What we might call ‘neoliberal normativity’ therefore defines a political rationality that came to operate as a ‘normative order of reason’ which could ‘legitimately govern as well as structure life and activity as a whole’ via discourses that ‘constitute a particular field and subjects within it … norm and deviation are the means by which subjects and objects in any field are made, arranged, represented, judged and conducted … discourses, when they become dominant, always circulate a truth and become a kind of common sense’ (Brown 2015: 117).
Under neoliberal normativity, there is very little consideration for motivations, drives, or aspirations outside of instrumental economic ones (Brown 2015: 44), with the facilitation of competition through state and legal support (ibid.: 36) legitimising inequality in policy, jurisprudence, and the popular imaginary (turning people into ‘winners or losers’ – ‘shirkers or strivers’ – rather than democratic citizens who deserve better) (ibid.: 64). And yet, in the post-crash moment, those who spoke from a position that advocated this approach were simply heard and seen from a position of rationality, expertise, truth, knowledge, and authority, while those who advocated for an alternative were already pre-positioned – and often internalised the position – of speaking and appearing from a position of irrationality, falsity, ignorance, naivety, powerlessness, and ‘non-sense’. Such a dynamic was itself a direct consequence of neoliberal normativity, creating (what Rancière 2001, 2010 calls) a distribution of the sensible that shaped, designated and policed sensible or non-sensible – legitimate or illegitimate, meaningful or non-meaningful, rational or irrational, political or apolitical – voice and appearance.
So, how might we understand the possibilities and limitations of post-crash resistance within this situation of foreclosure? This will be the overarching theme of the book, but I do not wish to develop this discussion in a way that unfairly dismisses the Occupy movement (nor, by clumsy extension, the other movements of 2011). Those who quickly dismiss post-crash movements as naïve, pointless, disorganised, facetious, apolitical events, I argue, simply play into those wider norms that also seek to dismiss the possibility of alternatives. From a position of public theorising and assessing such movements, academics must be careful to be constructive as well as critical, recognising that their critique can add to the wider normative efforts to foreclose and limit political imaginations.
For example, while I might agree with Mirowski that ‘the neoliberal worldview has become embedded in contemporary culture’, I would also encourage a more nuanced reflection on the consequences of this for post-crash movements, than his (rather condescending and dismissive) diagnosis that:
when well-meaning activists sought to call attention to the slow-motion train-wreck of the world economic system, they came to their encampments with no solid conception of what they might need to know to make their indictments stick; nor did they have any clear perspective on what their opponents knew or believed about markets and politics, not to mention what the markets themselves knew about their attempts at resistance.
(2013: 328–29)
As I will unpack throughout this book, while there is certainly truth to Mirowski’s observations that the Occupy movement tended to confuse ‘openness with democracy’, that it over-emphasised individual self-expression which denied the movement a collective identity, and that it had a problematically libertarian preoccupation with formal organisation (ibid.: 328); I nevertheless argue that this critique needs to be made in a manner that doesn’t simply end up dismissing the post-crash movements as ‘non-sense’. Instead, I hope that my account, rather than extending efforts to limit and police the alternative possibilities post-crash movements represented, supports the empowerment of alternatives and helps to overcome such foreclosures by backing activists’ ‘capacity to intervene in our setting, making it and us different from what we were before … not of continuity with … capitalism but of rupture, of a hole or break’ (Dean 2012: 216).
While I will therefore endeavour to build a constructive critique that doesn’t end up further diminishing or foreclosing possibilities, there also remains a responsibility to be critical of post-crash movements, and ‘ensure that our desire to see real politics return does not prompt us to misidentify political dissatisfaction with the current order as the dawning of a new political age’ (Winlow 2012: 20). Most importantly, in order to explain why ‘so rarely in history have so many people voiced their discontent with the political designs of the elite … yet rarely has mass protest resulted in so little political gain’ (Swyngedouw 2011: 8), we need to understand the operations of power during the crisis in foreclosing and ultimately preventing change. How was it, for example, that those prominent pundits of neoliberalism – whether politicians, economists, or journalists – were able to speak from a position of authority even as this worldview was collapsing around them? And how was it that, while encouraging us to stick with pre-crash models of society, economy, and government, such individuals and institutions were able to respond so coolly ‘to calls for a radical overhaul of their management by calling them unviable and unrealistic’ (Worth 2013: 49)? These are the questions I will explore below, but first there follows an introduction to our case study.
The Arab Spring and European Summer of 2011 were followed by the American Fall. Attributed by many to the Canadian magazine Adbusters – itself a product of the North American element of the alter-globalization movement of the late 1990s (see Klein 2001) – the common story is that ‘it was an exchange between [editors] White and Lasn … in early June 2011 that produced the idea to camp out, the actual name of the movement: Occupy Wall Street, and the start date: September 17th’ (Kaneck 2012: 12). Lasn registered the domain name ‘occupywallstreet.org’ on 9 June 2011, before sending an email to subscribers stating that ‘America needs its own Tahrir’, and publishing the now-infamous poster of the ballerina pirouetting on the Wall Street bull with the caption: ‘What is our one demand? Occupy Wall Street. 9.17.11’. But we might want to push this origin story a bit wider. As the reference to Cairo’s Tahrir Square itself demonstrates, Occupy Wall Street surely came about as a result of something more than a conversation between two magazine editors, and was directly inspired by and connected to events taking place in North Africa, the Middle East, and Southern Europe. In particular, the very tactic of occupying urban space, while it possessed a long history, was an idea which, in this context, was directly adopted from those movements.
It could also be easily argued that the Occupy movement was itself a result of pre-existing activist networks who actually responded to the call to protest and occupied Zuccotti Park (near Wall Street, New York). Thus, the Occupy movement could be seen as a direct descendant of connections that were formed in the alter-globalization movement, as well as in the 2003 international march against war in Iraq (widely recognised as the largest international march in history) and various environmental, climate, anti-poverty, and economic protests since (such as regular rallies at G8 and G20 meetings). What’s more, Occupy itself was immediately preceded by post-crash resistances in the USA that directly fed into it, such as attempts by Anonymous to occupy Washington, DC in June 2011, or the online Tumblr campaign of ‘we are the 99%’ (when people shared ‘selfies’ in which they held placards detailing their debt or lack of employment/educational opportunities, ending with the common tagline ‘I/we are the 99%’).
But whatever its origin, what was truly exceptional about Occupy was the way in which it soon ‘erupted around the world in a synchronised fashion’ using ‘similar symbols and narratives’ even while ‘the actual protests were sustained by quite different local networks in different cities’ (Uitermark and Nicholls 2012: 1). According to one count, there were at least 1,518 different Occupy camps established in 70 different countries around the world (Occupy Directory 2015), yet each protest adopted a slightly different take on the overall sentiments of the movement which – carried through from the Arab Spring and the European Summer – might be described as based on democracy and socio-economic justice. In different contexts this took on diverse meanings, with ‘resistance’ assuming a different significance for Occupy Wall Street (as the symbolic centre of capitalism, international finance, and the crisis); in contrast with Occupy Central in Hong Kong (which was fighting for the right to democratic sovereignty from the Chinese government); with Occupy Nigeria (which was sparked by the removal of fuel subsidies in the context of poverty and post-colonial exploitation; while the country exports more oil than any other African nation, it still relies on imports of refined fuel); and with Ocupa Sampa in São Paulo (which took on the increasing militarisation of university campuses and the criminalisation of student activism).
In London, the movement began one month after Occupy Wall Street on 15 October 2011. Inspired by the New York activists, Occupy LSX targeted the London Stock Exchange and had originally intended to set up a protest camp in Paternoster Square (the location of the Exchange). However, when the activists arrived, they found themselves forced back by police and ‘kettled’ onto the steps of the adjacent St Paul’s Cathedral, where they remained until their eviction in February 2012. While this original protest outside the cathedral remained the focus of much media and public attention – usually incorrectly identified using the universal moniker of Occupy London (hence why I use Occupy (in) London to describe the city-wide movement) – a number of other camps and squats were also established throughout the city, including the Bank of Ideas (a squat in a former bank which held events and talks); Occupation Finsbury Square (initially a relief camp for the overcrowded St Paul’s site); Occupy Leyton Marsh (a community-led occupation which attempted to protest against construction work for the 2012 Olympic Games); and Occupy Nomads (who, when I met them, had set up camp at Mile End). In addition, a number of working groups were also established to focus on specific issues, such as Democracy Action (DAWG); Energy, Equity and Environment (EEE); Economies (EWG); the New Putney Debates; Press/Social Media; the Occupied Times Newspaper; and the (controversial) Occupation Records. Some of these groups opted to meet away from the campsites and squats, with one particularly popular site being the Quakers’ Friends House in Euston (where many of my interviews took place).
With so many different groups, there were many alternative objectives expressed by the movement in London, and these were occasionally even self-contradictory. This makes it especially difficult to pin down exactly what Occupy (in) London wanted to achieve, and this, as will be argued in Chapter 4, also created a major strategic problem of organisation. But one way in which we might try to get an initial idea of what motivated the occupations in London is through the ‘About’ section of the occupylondon.org.uk website:
Ordinary people and communities around the world are being devastated by a crisis we did not cause. Our political elites have chosen to protect corporations, financial institutions and the rich at the expense of the majority.
Occupy London is part of a global movement that began in 2011 – the year of protest.
Inspired by Occupy Wall Street and the Arab Spring, and answering to the call out made by the Spanish Plataforma ¡Democracia Real YA! in May 2011 for a Global Day of Action on October 15th 2011, Occupy London began outside the London Stock Exchange in solidarity with protests in Spain, Rome, New York, Portugal, Chile, Berlin, Brussels, Zagreb, and many more. By mid-afternoon on October 15th 2011, the 2000–3000 Occupy London protestors moved onto the grounds of St Paul’s and stayed there (around 170 tents) until they were forcibly evicted on 28th Feb 2011.
Occupy London brought together concerned citizens to fight for a new political and economic system that puts people, democracy and the environment before profit.
OL values equality, diversity and horizontality.
Decisions are made democratically in ASSEMBLIES that are open for everyone to attend and actions are implemented by WORKING GROUPS.
To begin with, this public statement gives us a clear sense of post-crash injustice and indignation, pointing to the undemocratic and devastating consequences of the current system, but (importantly) stopping short of naming what that system is (i.e. neoliberalism, capitalism, colonialism, imperialism, parliamentarianism, patriarchy, and so on). The connections are then made with other movements around the world, offering a mutual recognition and solidarity with other struggles for democracy and socio-economic justice, as well as with their roots in the initial call to action by the Spanish Indignados. Finally, we get an idea of the broad principles that the movement stands for – putting people, democracy and the environment before profit, as well as valuing equality, diversity, and horizontality.
These principles also guided the movement’s organisational mechanisms and the ‘assemblies’ mentioned in the passage refer to Occupy’s processes of decision-making. The General Assembly (GA), in principle, was designed to allow anyone within or outside of the movement to contribute and speak. Consensus had to be reached for a motion to be passed, and individuals and groups could ‘block’ motions if they did not agree. The GA also adopted an array of collective hand signals that prevented interruption but allowed interjection – such as waving hands to show agreement, or raising one hand to ask the randomly selected chair permission to speak – with the aim of facilitating democratic debate. It soon became apparent, however, that despite these measures to create a horizontal and inclusive decision-making process, hierarchies, divisions, exclusions, fractures, and cliques were beginning to appear within the movement. Starting from within the GA, these then became further exasperated by the eviction of the St Paul’s group, whose decision not to reoccupy opened up a fundamental divide within the movement over the importance of the Occupy movement actually occupying physical space.
Perhaps the greatest divide was personified by two groups: on the one hand, the former St Paul’s contingent (who had appropriated the universal name Occupy London), and on the other, the remaining occupiers of Finsbury Square. The former St Paul’s group had the upper hand, consolidating its adoption of Occupy London through bank account access, press releases, invite-only organising committees, as well as ownership of registered domain names, Facebook pages and Twitter accounts. The group began to distance itself from Finsbury Square, seeing this camp as a lost cause that was plagued by violence, alcoholism, drug (ab)use, homelessness, disorganisation, and dirt (all of which were problems that, if anything, were only made worse by the division and the withholding of money that had been donated to something called ‘Occupy London’). As the post-camp St Paul’s contingent had managed to monopolise the symbolic and material resources of the movement, as well as attempting to cut off Finsbury Square, this left the remaining occupiers in the camp with little choice but to try to somehow maintain the site by themselves. They also began bitterly denying any ties to Occupy London which caused severe symbolic confusion for the public. Splits like this, as I will argue in Chapter 4, had serious implications for the movement’s organisation and identity, allowing un-checked structures and hierarchies to persist within the (ostensibly) structureless and horizontal democratic space, as well as undermining the efficiency of their collective symbolic appearance.
Given that there were many other Occupy movements outside of the USA, there has been very little sustained research into groups beyond Wall Street. My selection of Occupy (in) London as a case study was therefore intended as more than one of convenience, in that I wanted to add to the wider literature on Occupy a study into one of the major nodes of the international movement, as well as into a post-crash protest at the heart of international finance, capitalism, and colonialism. Beginning in April 2012 in Finsbury Square, I conducted participant observation at the camps, squats, and one-off protest events, while keeping up with the movement’s literature, online activity, and mailing lists. I also organised a total of 42 interviews with 36 activists over three years, who were mostly recruited via snowball sampling, and with repeat interviews taking place in separate years (see Appendix 1). My aim was to experience the movement’s culture and to learn how its members viewed their own resistance as well as the ‘powers’ they were up against; why they saw occupation as an important tool; and about the challenges and struggles they were facing. In addition, my approach was also guided by an attempt to avoid three broad epistemological stances which seemed to typify much of the research into the Occupy movement: (1) abstract empiricism; (2) romanticism; and (3) cynicism.
By abstract empiricism, I mean a tendency within the social sciences and social movement studies to see data collection as an end in itself, with the aim of simply documenting social phenomena in order to further scientific knowledge or advance methodology. For C. Wright Mills, while it was also true that researchers should not rely solely on grand theory (1981: 46–7), the penchant for abstract empiricism had created a problematic ‘tendency to confuse whatever is to be studied with the set of methods suggested for its study’ (ibid.: 59). Rather than emphasising the demands and politics of movements like Occupy, or seeing research as an opportunity to support social change, instead abstract empiricism gives the impression that these new movements were simply an exciting opportunity to retest previous scientific models. Many researchers appeared to respond to post-crash resistance only by diligently reapplying concepts and frameworks, producing papers which emphasised their own data collection, rather than the political, radical, and normative aims of the movement itself. Overlooking how ‘any statement of fact is of political moral significance’ (Wright Mills 1981: 178), the goal of such work was to produce grounded theories (see Glaser and Strauss 2017) which might accurately describe objective laws and patterns that create the phenomenon of social movements.
Occupy began and the race was on to develop ‘a novel data-collection methodology’ (Thorsen et al. 2013), such as proposing ‘the use of cognitive linguistics as a tool in narrative analysis’ (Catalano and Creswell 2013); or by introducing ‘a methodological framework we have designed to gather empirical data on the affective, every day encounters, or micropolitical life, of the protest camp’ (Feigenbaum et al. 2013); or how about a content analysis of movement material to examine similarities and differences in cultural orientations (Kern and Nam 2013); or perhaps a novel application of ‘three Information Studies paradigms’ (Skinner 2011); or a chance to combine ‘Melucci’s theory of collective identity with insights from the field of organisational communication’ (Kavada 2015: 872); or to develop ‘new social movement’ theory towards understanding Occupy as ‘a new new social movement’ (Langman 2013).1 While such approaches certainly have some merits in developing methods and schemes through which we can better understand social movements, this is nevertheless where they tend to stop – as if this was the task as an end in itself – rather than using this as a starting point to develop strategy or promote the politics of the movement in question. While I would certainly agree, therefore, that ‘analysing Occupy is important for understanding both the political importance of social movements and the theoretical limits of social movement approaches’ (Pickerill and Krinsky 2013: 280), abstract empiricism tends to overemphasise the latter task at the expense of the (arguably more important) former responsibility of emphasising the importance of social movements.
The scramble to understand the role of social media is indicative of this, offering insights ‘into the media culture of the Occupy movement … based on mixed qualitative and quantitative methods’ (Costanza-Chock 2012); seeking to describe ‘the ways in which individuals can use a particular social media platform, the microblog Twitter, to learn about the Occupy Wall Street movement’ (Gleason 2013); or examine ‘the temporal evolution of digital communication activity … using a high-volume sample’ (Conover et al. 2013). There is a place for such empirical work – and it would be wrong (as well as simply inaccurate) to suggest that researchers aren’t sympathetic to the movements they study (with many being initially drawn to the research through political empathy) – but such empiricism simply must be situated within wider political theory and context, as well as promoting the voices of activists themselves. Rather than asking soulless ontological questions about ‘why and how people do things they do, especially why they do things together’ in order to ‘understand why [people] cooperate in general’ and get ‘to the heart of human motivation’ (Goodwin and Jasper 2015: 4), we need to ask why movements are not more successful, why change appears so elusive despite resistance, and what are the key problems of strategy and political possibility.
However, this would require taking an approach that emphasises the democratic voice and appearance of activists, while also taking a critical and constructive position to their experiences and arguments. Researchers should not define their role as perfecting a methodological toolkit that can unlock some objective ‘truth’ behind social movements, and must avoid an ‘uncritical repetition of a reductionist account’ which bears ‘no resemblance to the social theories and processes of movement theorising we encounter within movement’ (Cox and Flesher-Fominaya 2013: 8). Instead, as Prentoulis and Thommassen have argued, academics could ‘treat the protestors as political theorists rather than as objects of social reality … the aim is to let the protestors speak for themselves, and to treat their language as the language in which our analysis is cast’ (2013: 169). While admitting that ‘this is at once necessary and impossible’ (ibid.) because research inevitably involves a level of translation and interpretation by the investigator, this nevertheless should be a guiding principle, even if we admit that ‘the research will not get the authentic and unmediated truth about the protestors, as if such a thing existed in the first place’ (ibid.: 171). This approach is politically significant and, by not adopting it, academics risk denying the democratic voice and appearance of protestors, undermining and dismissing their politics (which is already being foreclosed), and silencing them ‘just at the point when they are trying to make their voices heard’ (ibid.: 169).
Our aim should be to emphasise the politics and goals of the social movements we study; however, this should not allow us to fall for the second popular approach which was taken by researchers of the Occupy movement: romanticism. At the expense of a more critical or constructive reading, this included over-the-top praise for the movement by, for instance, comparing Occupy to famous moments of leftist history, describing the camps as ‘much like the Paris Commune, a truly autonomous democratic community’ that was ‘reclaiming public space and transforming it into a ‘public sphere’ (Benski et al. 2013: 550). As I will argue below, such a fetishisation of Occupy as (somehow) removed and autonomous from wider society – creating a ‘physical and political space for reasserting the power of the people’ (Lubin 2012: p184) – was problematic insofar as it overlooked structures of inequality and complicities with post-crash normativity. Thus, I argue that it is overly celebratory to argue that ‘the overall Occupy movement was an example of communicative action in the weak public sphere and it serves as a place of developing citizenship, which contributed to the theory of deliberative democracy in many meaningful ways’ (Min 2015: 73) as, while Occupy certainly had democratic potential, it was far from able to simply achieve this in practice.
To be fair, much of the romantic gushing over the movement was focused, unsurprisingly, around the exciting period in which the camps were still on the ground, and before a more patient and critical reflection could take place. Speaking at Zuccotti Park, for instance, Naomi Klein suggested that we might ‘treat this beautiful movement as if it is the most important thing in the world … because it is … it really is’ (2011), while others made similar grandiose claims that ‘this changes everything’ and that ‘historians may look back at September 2011 as the time when the 99% awoke, named our crisis, and faced the reality that none of our leaders are going to solve it… this is the moment when we realised we would have to act for ourselves’ (Van Gelder 2011: 3). There was a clear feeling at the time that this was something important, something consequential, and something that would affect a lasting change. This was nothing short of a revolution, and any politicians or elites who dismissed or criticised Occupy would do so at their own peril, because ‘like the spokesmen for Arab dictators … [they] couldn’t be more wrong and, as time will tell, may eventually be forced to accept the inevitability of their own obsolescence’ (Rushkoff 2011).
Because so much of the romantic research on Occupy finished once the camps had been evicted, such accounts could only tell us so much about the movement in the optimistic heat of the event when theorists and activists were more likely to be upbeat, enthusiastic, exuberant, and (above all) defensive in the face of critique. Subsequently, I argue that the temporal distance of my data from the height of the London movement (even by a few years) helped to alleviate this, allowing the activists I met to be more self-critical and reflexive than they might have been at the time. During the post-crash period of crisis and uncertainty, when events appeared to be happening simply ‘too fast’ to allow for sustained reflection, this approach also permitted me to ‘slow down’ my analysis (Gane 2006). Indeed, as Žižek has argued in defence of social theory, there is ‘a fundamentally anti-theoretical edge’ to the injunction that there is simply ‘no time to reflect on all of it, we have to act now … now is our chance, we need to do something quickly, not slowly reflecting and doing nothing’ (2008b: xv; emphasis in the original). On the contrary, Žižek invites us to respond to such rallies against thought and reflection, and to ‘gather the courage to answer: ‘yes precisely that! … there are situations where the only truly ‘practical’ thing to do is to resist the temptation to engage immediately, and to ‘wait and see’ by means of a patient critical analysis’ (ibid.). This book is unusual in continuing the study of the movement into 2014 – two years after the camps in London had been totally evicted – but this has made possible a patient critical analysis.
Finally, the third broad approach of cynicism encompasses attempts (such as Mirowski’s, see above) to dismiss the movement as a loose group of facetious, naïve, middle-class, apolitical youngsters who didn’t really know what they were doing.2 This attitude reflects a wider political context of cynicism (see Chapter 6 in this volume, also Burgum 2015) and is also indicative of a profound melancholia on behalf of the left, or ‘a certain narcissism with regard to one’s past political attachments and identity that frames all contemporary investments in political mobilisation … a mournful, conservative, backward-looking attachment to feelings, analyses, or relations that have become fetishised and frozen in the heart of the critic’ (Brown 2001: 169–70). For example, while theorists like Roberts (2012) make important points about the lack of cohesive organisation in the Occupy movement, his criticism is nevertheless based upon a rose-tinted contrast with the past, such as ‘in the late 1970s’ when ‘the labour movement would have been the most obvious mechanism for resisting neoliberal policies’ (ibid.: 756). Such comparisons, written while tents were still on the ground, seem to come from a position that expected the movement to fail, suggesting a melancholia among such commentators who are ‘attached more to a particular political analysis or ideal – even to the failure of that ideal – than to seizing possibilities for radical change in the present’ (Brown 1999: 191; emphasis added), revealing a ‘paradox of an intention to mourn that precedes or anticipates the loss of the object’ (Žižek 2008c: 146). The melancholic and cynical left, as I will demonstrate in Chapters 5 and 6, tends to opt for an underdog mentality, seeming more comfortable with not winning power or authority, and instead remaining authentic and powerless; righteous and marginal. Rather than supporting new movements for progressive change, this approach is sympathetic to their politics, but presupposes that they will fail (which undermines their support, reaffirms their distribution as ‘non-sense’, and turns into a self-fulfilling prophecy).
It has been my aim to take a position that fits between these three approaches of abstract empiricism, romanticism, and cynicism. While using empirical data to learn from Occupy (in) London, ground my thinking, and emphasise activist voices, I also aim to be both critical and constructive about the movement, choosing to take the position that there is much to learn from Occupy about the foreclosure of political possibilities and how we might overcome them. What’s more, while Occupy (in) London certainly had limitations which need to be outlined and addressed, they were more often than not criticisms which were expressed by the activists themselves. Following Brown, I intend my research to make ‘visible why particular positions or visions of the future occur to us, and especially to reveal when and where those positions work in the same “political rationality” as that which they purport to criticise’ (2001: 109–10; emphasis added). The Occupy movement in London, as a case study of post-crash resistance and the possibility for change, needs to be understood within the context of the financial crisis and the perplexing (or perhaps not) lack of change which took place during that period. Therefore, I will make a series of arguments which seek to clarify how Occupy (in) London was ultimately unable to undermine capitalist realism and neoliberal normativity, elaborating on the foreclosures of possibility faced by the movement, before drawing together some naïve, easier said than done suggestions in the Conclusion as to how movements like Occupy might strategically approach, frame, and organise protest in the future. We will begin, however, with a theoretical discussion of power and resistance, in order to firmly root the argument which follows.
Readers who are not interested in social theory and political philosophy may wish to skip Chapter 1. While this section seeks to justify and ground the approach that I take in later chapters, having a prior knowledge of where such arguments and concepts come from is not a requirement for following (or enjoying) the rest of the volume.
1 As was debated by academics at the Manchester Activism Conference in 2013, does Occupy even ‘count’ as a social movement? Does it fit into our academic definitions?
2 As I overheard an Israeli academic refer to Occupy Tel Aviv at the International Sociological Association conference in 2014, it was just the ‘Jewish Woodstock’.