Occupy the lawn!

With the eviction last night of the "Occupy Wall Street" camp, I am left asking myself what, exactly, the "Occupy" movement has achieved so far. I have been thinking about this for a while now, in fact, but as ever, events have prompted me to get off my metaphorical arse and write about it.

First, I want to write about the eviction itself. It is clear to me that the purpose of the eviction of protesters from Zuccotti Park has been conducted in the manner calculated to cause the maximum distress for the protesters. It is a clear and unambiguous act of harassment and an attempt to discourage protesters from future action.

Mayor Bloomberg (also, the eviction notice) has told people that the purpose was to remove health, safety and fire hazards, that were supposedly impinging on the protesters and people in the surrounding community. He argues, strangely, that these concerns trump the US Constitution's provision of free speech rights. He added that, "Unfortunately, the park was becoming a place where people came not to protest, but rather to break laws, and in some cases, to harm others," and "We could not wait for someone to get killed." Be that as it may, the main aim, and the aim cited on the eviction notice handed out at 1am local time, was "sanitation" and health and safety.

So, I thought about what the rational thing to do if my aims were, as Mayor Bloomberg says, "guaranteeing public health and safety, and guaranteeing the protesters' First Amendment rights." I would think that the best option would be to give plenty of notice, probably 24 hours at least, at a time when people are capable of taking it in coherently (i.e. not the middle of the night). This notice would explain the exact concerns that justified the need for sanitation action, and would allow provision for those willing to vacate the space temporarily to do so without confrontation. It would also allow the possibility that the occupiers might correct the issues themselves.

Here's what Bloomberg says about the reasons for the timing:

This action was taken at this time of day to reduce the risk of confrontation in the park, and to minimize disruption to the surrounding neighbourhood.

From the sound of the reports of the aftermath of the eviction, the second aim spectacularly failed and perhaps an orderly clean-up of the style I envisaged would have been better at avoiding disruption! They also did not avoid confrontation, because a core group of protesters resisted the eviction anyway, which is probably what would have happened whatever time of day the eviction took place.

Bloomberg's justification only makes sense if you view protesters as an unreasoning mob who must be treated brutally and put back in their place. It is clear from his remarks about lawlessness that this is exactly how Bloomberg views them. The aim is to make protesting seem as unpleasant as possible, so that people with legitimate grievances will not voice them. The media blackout on the event by the police, preventing reporters from witnessing what actually took place during the eviction, also speaks volumes about how they view freedom of speech and information. (Again, health and safety trumps freedom of speech - Bloomberg says it was out of a duty to "protect" reporters...)

So, I am disgusted at the actions of authorities in New York, but hardly surprised.

With the second Occupy Oakland eviction in recent memory, the ongoing stand-off in Occupy LSE, and the fact that winter and cold weather is creeping in (making camping outdoors seem like a bad idea in general), I am left wondering what this has actually achieved beyond a big dose of media attention that, while obviously helpful to get people talking, doesn't actually make anything change for the better.

Ultimately, my frustration is this: when I see a movement called "Occupy", I expect it to bloody well occupy** something. By which, I mean something a bit more significant than a lawn. Alright, a park is a BIG lawn, but it's still basically a lawn: a bunch of grass growing in a patch. If it wasn't a lawn, you'd have a bit more trouble pitching tents there!

When I first heard the name, "Occupy Wall Street", I thought naively that the protesters were actually going to go into the buildings and institutions that make up the centre of capitalist finance and occupy them, preventing them from being used and perhaps even either using their devices to remake the system, or else trashing the joint. That's an occupation. That's occupying. That's a protest that has an impact. Similarly, when you call yourselves "Occupy London Stock Exchange", what I expect you to do is get inside the building and occupy it, denying it to the oppressors. But no! Their highest ambition was to camp outside and when they were told "no", they sat outside St Paul's Cathedral instead.

It may just be a quirk of media reporting on the issue, but I really cannot think of a single concrete change in policy or legislation or behaviour by the governments or private businesses that are the supposed targets of these protests. I have heard a lot of weasel-words from them, but nothing concrete seems to have changed. Indeed, it seems more often that friends of the protesters have been brought down by virtue of their resigning over disagreements with their bosses.

I have argued before on this blog that there is no such thing as peaceful protest, because by-and-large, protesting peacefully doesn't do anything, and more often than not if there's a chance it might, then it gets treated as though it is violent protest anyway. I sat down and thought about the last time that an organised (or even, disorganised) protest actually effected change in government policy in this country. It's now just over 20 years since the last one I can think of: and that was the Poll Tax Riots that led to the toppling of the then-Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher (although her party remained in power, and there is some reason to believe that they may have rigged the 1992 General Election, but that's just conspiracy theory, right?) and the abandonment of the tax. That was not a peaceful protest. I can't even think of a successful peaceful protest that had a significant effect in this country. Wikipedia informs us that "suffragette" is a term that, used correctly, only applies to "those who used violent protest". In general, it seems as though the rule is, if it changed something, then violence (or at least, the credible threat of violence) was involved somewhere.

So, the question arises again: what has the "Occupy" movement actually achieved? What have they done, and what movement have they created? They haven't occupied anything (see footnote again re: North America). They haven't moved anywhere or moved anything either: indeed, the whole thing is a misnomer as far as I can see!

The freedom of speech that is so vaunted in the US, seems to add up to very little at the moment. What is the right of protest, if protest does nothing? It is only this: you have the right to whinge. You have the right to choose a tyrant for the next few years, and then you have the right to complain about that tyrant until you choose the next tyrant. If the tyrant in question owns or runs a multinational corporation, then you only have the right to choose your tyrant if you buy shares in the business. Sure, you can set up your tents, wave your banners, play your drums and whatnot, if it makes you happy. If it clears your conscience to say, "Look, I said I wasn't happy, so you can't blame me for this mess." But if the mess is still there in the morning, then what good did you really achieve?


** I'm approaching this from a more Eurocentric perspective, with the European socialist understanding of occupation; I recognise the contextual inappropriateness of the term in North America due to the occupation of lands belonging to Native groups by European settlers.