One morning in November 2011, I interrupted a daily commute through Canon Street with a walk up to St Paul’s. I wanted to take a look at the Occupy LSX camp which had found itself on the steps of St Paul’s Cathedral, having been successfully blocked from establishing itself in Paternoster Square a month before.
Occupy LSX’s narrative, it’s fair to say, had got a bit mangled in the mainstream media – much more about how the Chapter of St Paul’s would respond their presence than what anybody working on the Stock Exchange thought. The campers were evicted in February, sharing the fate of all of similar protests worldwide. Nobody has much talked about Occupy since, though it continues to be active across the world (and engaged in some genuinely interesting campaigning – a ‘Rolling Jubilee’, for example, buying and cancelling defaulted debt).
Surprising then, to read a book that identifies explaining Occupy’s success as its first task. David Graeber, author, anthropologist, activist and anarchist (I’m not sure in what order) played an important role in the Occupy Wall Street action in Zuccotti Park, perhaps even coming up with the slogan ‘We are the 99%’. An Occupy ‘leader’? No – the movement is ‘horizontalist’, rejecting all structures of hierarchical authority. He pitches himself as an anti-capitalist and radical protest movement veteran, and wonders why Occupy succeeded where so many previous actions did not.
This is initially puzzling – in the words of the former Archbishop of Canterbury, quoting Father Ted, Occupy was generally thought to be maddeningly vague about what it was seeking to achieve: “Down with this sort of thing!”. Graeber’s book is a rejoinder to that kind of complaint. In fact, a lack of specificity was a necessary part of its success. For him, the US political system has from the days of the Founding Father’s been explicitly non-democratic, looking to Rome’s Republic as its prototype, fearing and despising the idea of plebeian self government. To seek political change through the existing system would be to affirm its legitimacy. Instead, for Graeber and the other anarchists, the true task is one of ‘prefigurative politics’, building a new a genuinely democratic society in the husk of the old. The very existence of these camps – operated by horizontal organisations through processed of reasonable consensus – was evidence that this is possible, and capable of commanding attention and, indeed, a broader base of support than the community of apparently globally nomadic anti-capitalist protestors.
The book is too powerful in its critique of the now fairly obviously corrupt US political system to be lightly dismissed. Refreshingly, it’s not only the Republicans that get it in the neck – both conservative and liberal political cliques are in hock to moneyed power groups, and serve their interests against that of the working and (increasingly) middle class. There is surely an element of truth in this, given the amount of money even a bog standard senator has top raise to run a campaign.
But Graeber too often makes his argument mockable. ‘Real’ democracies are egalitarian communities that develop on the edges of formal states’ influence – pirate crews, and frontier colonies influenced by native Americans. Look – people are capable of genuine self government! So it takes on an air of naivety. As one reviewer has already noted, the problem with this is that most people aren’t anarchists, anthropologists or activists. Slavoj Zizek, in his leftist-tribute to Margaret Thatcher, argued that the false hope here is that, unhappy and angry as they may be, people actually want self government: “The large majority – me included –wants to be passive and rely on an efficient state apparatus to guarantee the smooth running of the entire social edifice, so that I can pursue my work in peace.”
Graeber is right: democracy is not a fact of our political system or the natural position of any state. It can’t be assumed. It is a cause. It has to be constantly built, defended, and justified. We are apathetic, but democracy requires our energy and investment. It is a liturgia – a work of the people. If we were, as a nation, to decide to tend and revive our democracy, what would we do? Following Zizek, I think ‘we’ – the 99% - have acquiesced to its removal.
On my own brief visit to the Occupy camp at St Paul’s, what struck me most was the signage about the place: a well-made mock up of a London street sign reading ‘Tahrir Square, EC4M’ (see flickr) and a pink tape on the pavement, marking the boundaries of the camp. On it were printed the words, ‘Another World is Possible’ – this, a slogan used at different times by combinations of anti-capitalist protesters and anarchists. Like all utopian movements, it feels like Occupy is haunted by Christian eschatology. This makes the clash between St Paul’s and Occupy LSX all the more ironic, since the Church is engaged in precisely the same imaginative task of convincing the world that the reality which we are normally presented with is not ultimate or final.
When Christians say that another world is possible – indeed, inevitable – we don’t mean the same thing. Nor do we do the same kind of things in response – as Barth said, our first act of uprising against the disorder of the world is not to protest, but to clasp our hands in prayer. But we have more common cause with Occupy than we have realised.
Paul Bickley is Director of Political Programme at Theos
The Democracy Project: A History, A Crisis, A Movement by David Graeber is published by Allen Lane.
This review was first published in Third Way Magazine
Image by The Eyes of New York
