Why It's Still Kicking Off Everywhere (37 page)

The agenda of women's liberation—not just women's rights, but an actual route to sexual and economic equality—had to be imposed onto the early workers' movement by—guess who?—Marxist men with beards. Written in 1879, August Bebel's book
Woman and
Socialism
became required reading for working-class men who wanted to be activists in the German socialist party, the SPD. It pledges that the woman of the future will be ‘entirely independent, both socially and economically. She will not be subjected to even a trace of domination and exploitation, but will be free and man's equal, and mistress of her own lot … In the choice of love she is as free and unhampered as man.'
⁶

But what the male lathe-turners of nineteenth-century Germany took for granted—the goal of economic liberation for the poorest and most downtrodden women—late twentieth-century mainstream feminism could not dare to imagine. It had become embattled by a sexual counter-revolution, detached from the politics of poverty and class, trapped in academic language.

So horizontalism in Europe and America, or the secular activists in the Middle East, often failed to successfully organize working-class and low-income women. Where it did so—as with the Spanish
indignado
movement once it moved out of the tent camps and immersed itself in everyday life—you find women, again and again, at the forefront of the resulting actions. The Coralla Utopia squat in Seville, where evicted working-class families took over a deserted apartment block, was run by a core of poverty-stricken women in their forties and fifties.

In the debates outlined below, about how the social movements of 2011–12 might break out of their isolation, the ability of feminism to see beyond the ‘personal' into issues of economic freedom and a redesigned society will probably be decisive.

However, the scale of the sexual counter-revolution in some countries means women are not going to wait for the social movements to get their act together. Mitt Romney's stunning defeat among women voters in the November 2012 US presidential elections can be seen as the direct result of the Republicans' obsession with attacking abortion and contraception rights. The GOP's state-level war on abortion rights in particular during 2011–12 mobilized tens of thousands of women in local campaigns, not to mention the overwhelmingly female and minority workforce of the abortion clinics themselves. Nevertheless, their most effective defensive act in all this was to vote, and to vote in that most hierarchical of competitions: the race for the White House.

6. Horizontalism has become endemic because technology makes it easy: it kills vertical hierarchies spontaneously, whereas before
—
and
the quintessential experience of the twentieth century
—
was the killing
of dissent within movements, the channelling of movements, and their
bureaucratization

With hindsight, late 2011 was the moment the sheen on horizontalism faded. In Egypt, the atmosphere of networked tolerance that had prevailed during the initial Tahrir Square occupation dulled as real, hierarchical forces emerged. In Spain, the leading voices within the
indignado
movement became frustrated as the obsession with ‘process', the tyranny of consensus and the refusal to advocate political demands sucked away its momentum. With Occupy Wall Street, critics point to an emergent self-obsession, which the philosopher Slavoj Žižek warned about when he spoke in Zuccotti in October: ‘There is a danger. Don't fall in love with yourselves. We have a nice time here. But remember, carnivals come cheap. What matters is the day after, when we will have to return to normal lives. Will there be any changes then?'
⁷

The journalist Thomas Frank excoriated Occupy for its self-obsession, its refusal to express demands, comparing its minimal achievements with those of the Tea Party, which abandoned horizontalism and moved into the hierarchies of the Republican Party—gaining heavy representation in Congress, state legislatures and their own man on the ticket for vice-president.

‘It is as clear to me today as it was last year', Frank wrote, ‘that the conservative era will be brought to a close only through some kind of mass social movement on the left. But what kind of movement might succeed? Well, for one thing, a movement whose core values arise not from an abstract hostility to the state or from the need for protesters to find their voice, but rather from the everyday lives of working people.'
⁸

However, both in the USA and Spain, the occupiers did—once their ability to capture physical space was suppressed—attempt to move towards ‘everyday' or ‘normal' life. By mid 2012, wherever you went in Spain you could find movements of the working class and poor that had become infused with a maybe 5 per cent dose of horizontalist activism. The landless labourers I found occupying and working a deserted farm in Andalusia had attracted a small band of itinerant
indignados:
they slept on the concrete floors of the abandoned farm and tended the sheep in their Che Guevara t-shirts. Likewise it was 15M activists who acted as a kind of facilitation service for the mainly working-class occupiers at Coralla Utopia in Seville. Castells writes of the Spanish
indignados:

The movement did not disappear; rather it spread out into the social fabric, with neighbourhood assemblies, defensive actions against injustices, such as opposition to evictions of families, and the spreading of alternative economic practices such as consumer cooperatives, ethical banking, exchange networks and many other such forms of living differently so as to live with meaning.
⁹

In the USA, though the Occupy movement had been reduced to a smaller bunch of activists by mid 2012, you began to see, around the edges of their attempts to infest Union Square on a nightly basis, small clusters of activists from what Zizek might have called ‘normal life': Orthodox Jewish youth complaining of being oppressed by their community's internal security force; African American kids—from projects, not colleges—who'd mobilized in their thousands in the wake of the shooting of Trayvon Martin. When Superstorm Sandy devastated parts of New York and New Jersey in November 2012, overwhelming the federal emergency response services, Occupy activists surged into the breach, organizing food kitchens, rigging emergency power supplies, setting up informal car ferry schemes and emergency shelters. Soon the hashtag #OccupySandy was trending.

So, if you look hard enough, the Occupy protests did leave an imprint on ‘normal life'—and of course they made a massive imprint on intellectual and cultural life. But to those who know the history of radical politics, the pattern of ‘reaching out' as facilitators towards the struggles of the severely dispossessed bears a fatal resemblance to the actions of the Russian ‘Narodniks' of the 1870s.

The student Narodniks, or Populists, left Moscow and St Petersburg in their thousands in what became known as the ‘mad summer of 1874'. Dressed as labourers or peasants, they sought jobs alongside the recently emancipated serfs, whose village communes they believed to be the basis of a future economic system that could bypass industrial capitalism. Equally important to the Narodniks was the perfection of the self: revolutionaries ought to be ‘fully rounded characters who opposed the crushing of individuals under the wheels of a runaway historical tractor'.
¹⁰

Though their work was later derided by Marxists, and after it failed some became terrorists, it was not a total waste of effort. Over its forty-year arc of development, Russian Populism would produce numerous activists who eventually concluded that it was better to spread radical politics among the workers rather than the peasants, because the route to social justice lay through seizing hold of capitalist industry, and indeed government—not in the attempt to avoiding a capitalist stage of development. Some became reformist social democrats, others, leaders of the Bolshevik Party: the phrase quoted in the paragraph above was flung by Leon Trotsky, then a teenage Narodnik, at his Marxist girlfriend at a clandestine meeting in the 1890s.

But the route away from horizontalism to more traditional structured politics looks blocked today: blocked by consciousness of how entrapped activists become when they enter structures like the trades unions, the US Democrats, social democracy and even the major NGOs. Though many activists do live parallel lives—working for a union by day, for example, mobilizing for occupation protests by night—it is rare to find horizontalist practices imported into unions and official parties. It is far more common to find social movement activists complaining that their time is wasted working for the union bureaucracy. Castells argues that this is logical, and that the turn to ‘alternative economic practices'—by choice among the activists and by necessity among the poor—is where the movement goes next, along with the spread of anti-establishment consciousness.

But a changed consciousness is not enough. It does not resist austerity, stop fascism, or liberate women from drudgery and sexual violence. Though they have developed in fertile directions via communes, land occupations and hurricane relief work in 2012, the social movements have not yet found a tactic that can dictate the agenda on the scale it did during the occupation of symbolic space in mid-to-late 2011.

7. Memes: ‘A meme acts as a unit for carrying cultural ideas, symbols
or practices, which can be transmitted from one mind to another through
writing, speech, gestures, rituals or other
imitable
phenomena.
Supporters of the concept regard memes as cultural analogues to genes,
in that they self-replicate, mutate and respond to selective pressures'
(Wikipedia). So what happens is that ideas arise, are very quickly
‘market tested' and either take off, bubble under, insinuate themselves or, if no good, they disappear. Ideas self-replicate like genes. Prior to the internet this theory (see Richard Dawkins, 1976) seemed an
overstatement, but you can now clearly trace the evolution of memes.

When the history of this crisis is written, one of the most fascinating tasks will be to comprehensively document the memes that flowed throughout it. It will not be easy: the digital human consciousness is playful. Thousands of jokes are made each day on Twitter consisting, for example, of fake book titles on some iconoclastic theme. It will not be enough to document what they were, but who made them—the speed at which the irony flowed; were people at work when they retweeted, or added their own contribution? Did the meme stay local, or did it go global?

And not all memes were digital. The ‘V for Vendetta' mask associated with the Anonymous hacker collective was physical: it was worn on faces, and spray-canned on the bent shutters of the posh hotels in Syntagma Square, by people with no links whatsoever to Anonymous.

There is the global phenomenon of holding up verbose, personalized hand-drawn placards, whose clear subtext is defiance of the pithy, uniform, printed ones supplied by trade unions and leftist groups. ‘We want everyone to wake up to the beauty we can create', read one I spotted on the first day of the Occupy protest at St Paul's in London. ‘This is not a violent riot. This is a human awakening,' said another.

Then there is the chant—
‘Ash'ab nurid izqat al-nizam'
(the people demand the fall of the regime)—which spread from Tunisia, Bahrain and Egypt to Libya and Syria without textually morphing at all. Journalist Suby Raman has produced a ‘deconstruction' of the slogan for non-Arabic speakers that reveals fascinatingly significant choices in the words themselves: the term for ‘the people' is the most radical, most secular on offer; the term for ‘the fall of is not radical at all—signifying more ‘the cutting down to size'. The term for ‘regime' means more than just government: ‘Instead, it refers to a sociopolitical order that the people are trying to bring down, an entire mechanism of terror and discipline that they have broken free of.'
¹¹
This, in turn, allowed the slogan's meaning to morph from literal to metaphorical, as noted early on in the process by the Middle East scholar Rashid Khalidi: ‘They are not only referring to their corrupt governments; they also mean the old regime that has prevailed for decades in the entire Arab world, from the Atlantic to the Gulf.'
¹²

The most important thing about these slogans, images and gestures is not what they said in isolation but what they expressed cumulatively, as they interacted: the woman who walked naked through the riot in Plaza Neptuno, outside the Spanish parliament, holding a sign saying ‘peace'; the video of Loukanikos, the Greek riot dog, which went globally viral in the summer of 2011; the very name of the band Pussy Riot, which newsreaders in some Catholic countries were ordered to avoid saying on air, even as their jail sentences were reported.

What did it all mean? These were first of all signifiers of rejection: scorn not just for the elite world of yachts, diamond watches and bodyguards from which the 99% are excluded, but for the world of corporate conformity. Scorn for the charade played out in the workplace: for discipline, hierarchy, targets achieved, the cheap business suit, the insincere smile, the dead language of corporate communications. Through these signs and symbols, large parts of humanity were signalling their solidarity to one another; their belief that a kinder, more human system is possible; and that it would be born out of the chaotic, ironic, playful qualities of human life—not by pitting one cruel hierarchy against another.

8. They all seem to know each other: not only is the network more powerful than the hierarchy
—
but the ad-hoc network has become
easier to form. So if you follow' somebody from the UCL occupation
on Twitter, as I have done, you can easily run into a radical blogger
from Egypt or a lecturer in peaceful resistance in California who mainly does work on Burma, so then there are the Burmese tweets to
follow. During the early twentieth century, people would ride hanging
on the undersides of train carriages across borders, just to make links like these.