Tag Archives: london 2012

An Open Letter to the Occupiers

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Dear Brothers and Sisters,

What makes this movement so special and, from my perspective, so poignant, is that there are no enemies here.

Some of you will have been beaten or arrested by the police.  Non-protesters may have had personal property damaged during the course of these events.  The police may have had abuse or worse hurled at them for what they are doing in seeking to control the direction of these protests.  Those of you who have been hurt have not been hurt by your enemies.  You have been hurt by your brothers, your sisters and those who one day will be your strongest allies.  Why do I see it that way?

The law is such that the police will enforce it as ordered regardless of its substance.  In instances when the police have used heavy-handed tactics, they have done so because they are upholding the law as it has been explained to them and along the lines by which they have been instructed to do so.  This is not a semantic point, but a very important key to our future as social beings on this beautiful planet of ours.  A change in the law will change the behaviour of the police.

The police force is exactly that – it is a force, a tool which does the bidding of the hand which wields it.  I may personally disagree with a great deal of the laws currently on the books, and I may wholeheartedly disagree with the manner in which those laws are sometimes enforced, but the police are not the enemy.  They are our brothers and sisters, born into a way of life they did not build, conducting their life in accordance with the information they have been given over the course of their lifetime.  With whom does the blame lie if they have been given the wrong information, or told to enforce unjust laws?  Is it the fault of a child who has never been taught language that he cannot speak?  In all of this action and rhetoric, the true tragedy is that we are falling prey to the exact divisive strategy which has allowed us to be governed so unjustly for so long.

When the laws are changed to better suit the idea of justice and governance that befits us as an intelligent life form, the police will be on the front line of keeping those laws intact.  The neutrality of the police may be a most incomprehensible thing to those witnessing violence as a result of it, but that neutrality is also to our advantage.

Police men and women who will use baton and pepper spray to subdue those allegedly violating public order will steadfastly turn those weapons on whomever is designated an opponent to public order, no matter how it is defined.  If this is the case, as I believe it to be, then we have no enemy in the police.  They are human beings, just like us, and the structure which they are a part of has convinced them that we must be watched and subdued.

The police in Britain and across Europe have undergone some of the most stringent cutbacks in wages, man-hours and employment numbers.  These protests stand, among other things, for equitable wages in return for fulfilling work.  These police men and women are the people we are fighting for.  They just don’t know it yet, and if they do, they have pressures of their own to account for their silence as they wait patiently for the law to allow them to act in accordance with their beliefs.

Whether or not people should follow orders they disagree with is by the by.  It is both dishonest and unfair to expect them to behave differently to how we think we would in their place, because we are not in their place.  They are not our enemy.  There is no “they”.  There is only “us”.

So this is the crucial aspect of this movement that must be shouted from the rooftops.  Any human of flesh and blood who resides within a society whose laws and financial system bind them is one of us, because that is who we are and that is what we represent.  One who has no enemy also is no enemy.  This is the way in which peace can be built on the foundation of compassion.

This movement is exactly that – a movement.  Like a nuclear chain reaction, movement can become a revolution over time if a critical mass is reached.  If enough of us really begin to see each other for the commonly bound humans that we are rather than the social roles into which we are divided, then the rest falls into place.

The media calling for an agenda, for a plan, misses the necessary process of a movement:

– We become aware of something wrong, so we move towards where we think the answers may be.

– We find over time that we are moving in concert with others like us, and in that shared understanding of seeking answers, we begin to help each other to formulate the right questions.

Looking for answers is not an egotistical activity.  Anybody who can help us in our search is an ally, anyone who hinders us in our search simply has not yet found the drive within themselves to begin looking.  This is how we move together; this is what a social movement is.  This is not about the selfish imposition of a certain preference on others who do not share that preference.  This is about openly stating what can be factually supported, regardless of how much the media choose to leave out or ignore, regardless of how current comforts mollify people into defensive acceptance of the status quo.  Again, they are not the enemy.  They are us, and they will figure it out one day.

True revolution begins in the mind.  If we learn the ways of the oppressors only to replicate those ways when we have replaced them, then we have achieved nothing.  The only true revolution begins with the realisation that we are all one.  Beneath political and social definitions and dynamics, there is no oppressor and oppressed.  There are only vulnerable, fearful people manipulated by deeply rooted buttons which those who wish to retain power know how to push.

I am one of those vulnerable, fearful people, but I am trying my best to awaken my mind, to awaken the wellspring of compassion within me which fears no-one because by fearing, I avoid understanding and empathising.  I try to acknowledge what my buttons are and observe how they are pushed by others, by information, by activity.  Only then can I see how close to everyone else I am, because we are all just as vulnerable and just as fearful as I am, since we are all biologically the same and exist within localised modulations of a single social structure.

Those who currently wield power and influence, who line their pockets, manipulate markets and governments in order to extend their power and undermine opposition – they are also not the enemy.  They too are us, but they are confused.  They have become confused by the very system which they are struggling to maintain as it wheezes and grinds to a halt around them.  They think their power is real.  They think their money is real.  They think that by defending their claim to power, they can hold onto their money, which in an evidently circular manner, is also the fictitious source of their fictitious power.

Any threat to power can be very frightening.  This is why ideas are the commodity most tightly regulated in our cultures.  Our modern global system is built on piles of abstractions and unquestioned assumptions.  To maintain the structure of this ideology, built as it is on quicksand, only a superficial amount of idea variation is tolerated before the protectors of the structure crack down.

People march all the time, for St. Patrick’s Day, Thanksgiving, Gay Pride.  They protest against war, they petition embassies and picket the White House.  But none of these variations comes close to the sea change in structural thinking that this movement can bring about if it is preserved, if it maintains integrity and does not collapse in on itself or become what it offers to replace.

If the purpose of this movement is to simply replace the current way of doing things with a structurally identical but ideologically different way of doing things, this movement will fail because it will find itself fighting against ideas which oppose it, just as revolutionaries have throughout the ages.

We must structurally alter the manner in which we govern and inhabit this planet as a species.  Doing it for Jesus instead of Yahweh, or Allah instead of Jesus, or science instead of religion, or money instead of science – these are all the same thing.  We have always done the same thing, and we all know the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.

In this way, it is not the wealth of a small number of people which is the problem, nor is it the tax avoidance of large companies.  These things are examples of the hypocrisy that our system engenders, but they are not the enemy.  Getting bogged down in this level of discourse automatically plays to the system of averages and financial valuation which has confused so many of us for so long.  Believing that justice is a simple matter of us getting our hands on what other people have is exactly the kind of thinking that got us to this point in the first place.

Capitalism is not the problem.  All economic systems are capitalist systems because capitalism is simply the use and management of capital, most commonly referred to as surplus wealth.  Whoever told you that capitalism is somehow different from other economic systems does not understand economics.

The deeply extractive, materially fixated, morally bankrupt, ecologically and socially destructive number games which are played world wide right now are simply a washed-out perversion of an underlying economic truth which has been lost over time, namely that people require access to goods and services in complex societies and the easiest manner in which to distribute those goods and services is by the use of a common means of exchange which frees the labourer from needing to find a supplier who wants the thing he produces.  I can buy shoes with money instead of trying to find a cobbler who needs cucumbers or hats.  This is a social service which is necessary for any society functioning above a certain threshold of size and complexity.

The fact that money has been turned from a service into a thing, and in so doing has been concentrated in very few hands which seek to perpetuate their control of that money and the system which allocates it does not constitute a proof that money is somehow evil or unnecessary.  Like all gods, money gets a bad rap for what fundamentalists do in its name.

People have the highest degree of learned behaviour of any animal which has been studied, and as such, we respond very quickly and unwittingly to social and structural expectations.  We thank someone for a meal we didn’t enjoy, we get a job at a faceless big box store and begin using the words “we have” to describe the selection of goods on offer.  We identify with structures and social norms, and it is those things which must change if there are to be really meaningful alterations to mankind’s trajectory going forward.

It can no longer be a social norm that goods arrive before us with no provenance and no moral association other than our desire for them.  It can no longer be morally (let alone intellectually) justifiable to bang on about economic growth in the OECD nations when the major purpose of growth is to support the growing debts we accumulate through a persistence in allowing money to be created as a debt-bearing thing rather than circulated as a debt-free service.

The strict extractive system which is currently in place in the OECD nations, centred on taxing the people in order to service debt generated wilfully, will never resolve inequity either at home or abroad.  The emphasis placed on work (particularly non-productive work) is a by-product of a system which requires work in order to meet the basic needs of life.

From birth, we are told we live on someone else’s property, eating someone else’s food, wearing someone else’s clothes.  There is no birthright for the modern citizen.  We were told that democracy meant no taxation without representation, but what we have is no representation without taxation.

Brothers and sisters, in the streets and squares, in the offices and apartments, in the banks and agencies, in the police and military, we have a lot of hard work to do.  We can only succeed if we do it together, with compassion for one another.  With the world’s population hitting 7 billion at the end of this month, there has never been a clearer sign that we sink or swim together on this pale blue dot.  The immaturity of ego, which wants for itself and cares nothing for external consequences, must grow to a mature and compassionate understanding of our responsibilities to each other and to the planet.

Asking for what the wealthy have is irrelevant.  We should have something far greater in our sights: a real birthright for every living thing on this planet, in balance, understanding and peace.

Shopocalypse Now

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So it has come to this. Outside, sirens doppler back and forth every few minutes. My street is one of the quiet ones. The looting is restricted to areas with high street brands.

The irony here is so thick it could cure anaemia. London is overrun by looters, smashing in windows, tearing open shutters and making off into the night with armfuls of tracksuit bottoms, DVD players and flatscreen televisions. The streets are strewn with hangers.

The purported flashpoint of this widespread disorder? The shooting of a young man in Tottenham, north London named Mark Duggan. He was shot by the police in what can generously be described as an opaque incident involving an exchange of fire that may or may not have involved the police accidentally shooting each other and blaming it on him. The people smashing into sports shops and electronics stores probably don’t even know his name. They’re too busy, in the words of this girl, “getting [their] taxes back”. With Duggan’s death fresh enough to be bandied about as a cause, the rioting could be somehow explained as a form of protest, an eruption of vitriol from the disaffected youth inhabiting the poorer districts of this city, struggling to find a role in society that won’t involve performing oral sex on disused railway platforms or stacking shelves at Tesco.

How is this anti-establishment sentiment made manifest? By what can only be described as violent shopping. Rampaging through the communities they grew up in, they take out their frustration at a lack of occupation or engagement on the shops and businesses that provide employment in their area, they smash-and-grab the luxury items which are supposedly the fruit of all the social climbing, work and effort our society enshrines. Their generation’s grand gesture of disobedience is straight-up Western-style consumer-capitalism, pure and uncut, direct from the amygdala. Take whatever you can get your hands on for yourself and trash the commons with impunity. They are not inhuman, they are not confused, they are not wrong – they’re us, except they’re doing it here and with no sense of irony. Protest 2.0, London-style.

In Cairo, during the uprising, it was the Egyptian youth who linked arms to protect the Museum of Antiquities, the cultural heritage of their long and respected history. Here in London, if any of these kids have been to a museum, it was after being dragged there by force during a field trip (if their school still had the budget or in fact a subject which included things you’d find in a museum). While there, they glumly trudged the halls, occasionally looking over the dusty artefacts of the past with dull eyes. After all, with a smartphone that has wi-fi and full colour interactive gaming, with Twitter, with Facebook, with Bebo, Myspace, Blackberry Messenger and YouTube, how the hell is a museum supposed to hold a young person’s attention unless they’ve been taught to respect and cherish a slow offering up of knowledge and beauty directly proportionate to the attention one pays? These people have been marketed at since birth. They have been groomed in a manner more insidious than the tactics of the most hungry-eyed paedophile. Their sense of self, their very existence, has been mediated by the economy into which they have been prepped for entry.

From personalised ringtones to Celebrity Big Brother, every possible act of engagement or empowerment has been a commercial transaction for them. Every sub-culture becomes an economic sector. Anything they were taught was only on the syllabus because of its utility in the “knowledge economy”. Who needs to know history or facts when there’s Wikipedia? Who needs maths when there’s a calculator? Who needs handwriting and spelling when there’s Microsoft Office and spell check? Who needs music or art classes when there’s no demand in the marketplace for those skills? Or should I say skillz?

They have been raised as consumers, not as citizens. Consumers have gadgets. Consumers have the respect of business and government because their jealously guarded (and coveted) money is the closest thing they will ever possess to the keys to the kingdom. Even the university education which their parents received for free or for £1000 a year will now cost them £9000 a year if they can get into a university with what little useful knowledge the state allows them to have for their parents’ taxes. After all, don’t we need competition to deliver the best results to the consumer?

Given the opportunity to take to the streets, they come out in force as consumers, not citizens. Their protest is against their lack of spending power, their lack of a flatscreen television, the meddlesome need of government to extract taxation from them for services from which (if they reach their dotage) they will never benefit. They are the purest incarnation of our free market, consumer ideology. They are competing against the law for the best results a consumer can ever hope for, which is something for nothing. And they are winning.

While pundits are onscreen in the coming weeks for the mandatory hand-wringing, while Parliament is debating the inevitable emergency police powers which will bring water cannons and maybe even rubber bullets onto the streets of London, these consumers will be at home watching it all on their new televisions, comfortably toasty in their new tracksuits. They will be re-absorbing the narrative of their activity through the mediated world we created for them, a world which still does not contain a sense of genuine community, of productive work, of social justice, fairness or equality.

Our government decries the violence on the streets of Brixton, Tottenham, Lewisham, Camden, Woolwich, Croydon and Birmingham while levying taxes for wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya. Our deputy mayor is disgusted by the looting of electronics from Curry’s, electronics that have been made for slave wages in a Chinese factory rife with worker suicide and abuse, because that kind of throughput is more “efficient” (read “cheap”) than producing things ourselves using well-compensated labour. How dare they smash their way into a Tesco supermarket and steal food, while Tesco itself runs an approximate £2 billion profit margin annually while purposefully opening up “express” shops next to successful neighbourhood grocery stores, driving them out of business with tactics designed to bypass local objections? How can they set pubs on fire? How malicious is that? Those pubs sell beer from upstanding brands who buy barley from countries wracked by famine while our government bleats about food aid. Whence cometh such cannibalism? Where indeed could these misguided looting fools have gotten these kinds of ideas?

Did these evil thoughts filter into their minds by osmosis? Are they possessed by the Devil? Or did they grow up in single-parent homes on sink estates, surrounded by the remains that “wealth creation” leaves behind, dreaming of a way out? Did the debt-ridden financial system of this country drive both their parents into working long shifts with irregular hours to suit our 24-hour culture, leaving their children in the hands of everyone’s favourite babysitter and pacifier, the television? When Mummy’s hours were cut by Tesco after they put in self-checkout machines, did Mummy have to take a second job to make up the wages she lost?

However did these young people acquire such a bizarre combination of hatred and brand loyalty? How indeed.

As for where this unexpected outpouring of violence came from, the establishment need only cast an eye over the recent past. The dissenters in this country has tried every possible way of reclaiming power. We marched against the invasion of Iraq in our millions. We marched, petitioned and protested against war, against spending cuts, against privatisation, against crony capitalism, against bank bailouts, against globalisation, against corporate tax cuts, against job losses, against pretty much everything we wanted stopped. Did it change a damn thing? Did it stop our government from doing whatever the hell they wanted? Hell no. We even voted against all the major parties in the last election and ended up getting two of them in power instead of none.

In response to the latest raft of austerity measures, students came out and protested for a cause, en masse. It got messy, but hey, nothing like this. Response? Jowly outrage and zero engagement with the demands of the vox populi.

So now, after every avenue has been explored by the public consciousness of this country in an effort to make itself heard, it has come to this. Every one of these thieving magpies on the streets of London tonight is carrying with them a piece of our collective humanity. The frustration at not being listened to, which is even worse than not being heard. The anger at a system that functions in isolation, unaccountable, unresponsive and fundamentally undemocratic. The loneliness of having no community, of families working ceaselessly to meet their obligations as the rising tide drowns everyone without a yacht. The cognitive dissonance of having a millionaire Prime Minister tell us we’re all in it together before flying off to an arms fair in the Arab Emirates as a sales rep for UK Plc, only to now come home early from his family holiday to decry violence.

This is simply the newest manifestation of a festering sore as old as the hills, as untended as a gangrenous limb. There will be other manifestations, make no mistake. If the response of the power structure is to entrench itself, to bring in draconian public order measures and to ignore the underlying root of the problem, this will happen again, only worse and worse as time goes on.

If the individuals in a given society can be considered as parts of an over-arching holistic consciousness expressing itself above the level of personal human awareness, then the collective id of Great Britain just had a serious outburst.

It has been said that violence is the sign language of the inarticulate. If that is true, as I believe it to be, then how much more pronounced are the violent linguistics of the forcibly muted? That this violence turned inward towards the ranks from which it swelled is akin to the self-hatred of the alcoholic, beating himself up about being a drunk instead of laying off the sauce.

By what metric can we judge the behaviour of these people once the nature of our society is taken into account? What transgression can we hang on them which does not originate with our own behaviour, negligence or neglect? Having no sense of community? Having no moral compass? Wanting what they haven’t earned? Taking what does not belong to them? Exploiting the weakness of others through violence? Opportunism? Gluttony? Ignorance? Hypocrisy? Madness? Where can we draw a line that distinguishes their actions here from our collective behaviour as a society both here and in countless, far-flung places?

Whatever the conscious motives or underlying machinations, the metaphor of these riots is the real message, a message which we ignore or underplay at our peril.

 

Postscript: The word “shopocalypse” was coined by my friend George Arton and, in keeping with recent events, I looted it mercilessly.  Shout-out to The West Londoner for keeping the news feed going all night.

UPDATE: August 14th, 2011 – It has been brought to my attention by my diligent commenters that George may have overstepped the mark when he claimed ownership of the word “shopocalypse”.  It appears to have been in circulation since at least 2007.  Any confusion is between him and the true coiner of the word.  I am staying well out of this one.