#OccupyEverywhere as response to economic permafrost and political stagnation
Excerpted from Paul Mason:
“These protests are a powerful signal worldwide. Their mere existence shows that people are determined to “think globally” about routes out of this crisis – at a time when economics is driving politicians down the route of national solutions. However marginalised they are politically – and in some countries, above all America and Greece, they have broken out of marginalisation – it is still a fact: in 1931, as the remnants of Globalisation 1.0 collapsed, there were no mass international protests against austerity. There were plenty of national, and indeed nationalist ones.
The protesters yesterday stuck a spoof street sign saying “Tahrir Square, London, EC4M”. This was not Tahrir – but it obeyed the same impulse to occupy physical space.
The impulse, I believe, is being driven by two things: first it is – as I wrote in the 20 reasons – a meme. It is an effective action that is transmitting itself independent of any democratic structures and party political hierarchies: if you camp somewhere, the press turn up and you can get an instant hit of wellbeing by, however briefly and tenuously, living the dream of a communal, negotiated existence.
Second, because this communal, negotiated, networked life already exists in people’s heads as a result of the rapid adoption of social networks and networked lifestyles. As Manuel Castells, one of the first sociologists of the internet, said: the more autonomous and rebellious a person’s attitudes are, the more they use the internet; the more they use the internet, the more autonomous their lifestyle becomes.
Something has been going on between the left earphone and the right earphone of this generation that represents a profound change in attitude. I am still struggling to get my own head around it (I’m trying to write a book about it but the events keep happening too fast).
What is absolutely clear however, is what they are determined to do: it’s much bigger than any single-issue campaign or cause. They mean to limit the power of finance capital and build a more equal society, while rejecting the hierarchical methods of the parties that once claimed to do so. In this sense the movement is a kind of replacement social democracy; a mirror image of the besuited young people who populate the think tanks of Labour, the SPD, the US Democrats etc.
Occupy Everywhere, then, is the kind of movement you get when people start to believe mainstream politicians have lost their principles, or are trapped by vested interests, or are all crooked.
That’s the answer to the question “what”. The answer to why now? Basically we are in danger of a global stagnation – it was HSBC’s economics team that described it as a permafrost. It poses the question “who pays for the banking crisis” very acutely. And large numbers of people are now realising it is going to be them, and more painfully, their children. As in Greece, in that circumstance, for every protester camped in the freezing dawn there may be many more quietly fuming in their living rooms who feel the same way.”
