Occupy London – there are valuable lessons

“Minds are not changed by singular actions, however singular. They are changed when society comes to regard these singular actions as the rule rather than the exception, when common sense shifts on to the side of the erstwhile heretic.” Conor Gearty, LSE.

I wonder what picture formulates in your head when someone talks about the Occupy London movement. I know that in spite of my better instincts, I can’t help but conjure up an image of stoned hippies, dreadlocks, a few bohemian older people and ‘alternative’ parents insisting on camping out with their children who are too young to know what on earth is going on. And then I take a step back and realise the ludicrousness of that image, mainly because it is actually probably quite accurate. Has our apathy become so acute that the task of democratic exercise has been left to a few clichéd activists?

As I’m sure most people are probably aware, on Monday night the Occupy London camp was finally evicted from St Paul’s cathedral. Now we are left with two questions: have they actually achieved anything? And, what next?

To critics and skeptics, Occupy is an aimless movement, too indulged in the act of resisting and protesting to formulate a coherent and realistic set of goals. The rhetoric is populist and anti-government, and it is arguably all too easy to find support and validation amidst our current ‘crisis of capitalism.’ The recession is bad. Everyone hates the banks and discontent with the government has not been so rife since the ‘80s. The Occupy movement is a response to the discontent, but it is ultimately fruitless and inconsequential, isn’t it?

Well, no. It really doesn’t have to be. In this movement there is a chance for us to reclaim the democracy we so fervently champion as we fly its flag all over the world. This was the real aim of Occupy London; for us, the people, the ’99 percent’, to take matters back into our own hands. The only way this aim is going to be realised is if we get up off our butts and do something about it.

Democracy entails more than just turning out to vote once every five years (or even not, if the queue at the polling station is too long.) It’s a fight, it’s a struggle, and this is what the occupy movement recognized and represented.

The extent of its misrepresentation and the warped perception of its aims was highlighted in the ridiculous comment made by the Conservative MP Louise Mensch on Have I got News for You a few weeks ago. In reference to the protesters shocking tendency to buy coffee every day, she said, ‘if they prop up a corporate titan like Starbucks they’ve got to ask themselves how much of capitalism they really don’t like.’ I found the remark quite staggering. But she is obviously not alone in identifying the protesters as a bunch of crazy communists who are breaching their lofty ideals by entering a chain coffee shop.

The reality is that the protesters (a few exceptions permitted) aren’t suggesting utopian Marxist alternatives of a world without profit or business. They are simply highlighting the staggering inequalities that exist in out society today and are resolving to try to do something about it. The aim is one of democracy, justice and greater equality – not the entire overthrow of the capitalist system.

We all need to be more vigorous in our assertion of what we think is right and wrong, we have a duty to be. Occupy London won’t see tangible results in terms of economic justice for a long, long time, and if you’re skeptical, you’ll deem it a failure now. And if everyone deems it a failure now, then there may not ever be tangible results, because it requires more than a handful of extremely dedicated (and sometimes annoying) activists camped outside a church for a few weeks.

It takes absolutely everyone who thinks there is something wrong with the world we live in to try to do something about, to express unhappiness and discontent through more than just a cross in a box at a general election. The Occupy movement in London has come to end, there is nothing surprising in that – it was always going to. But the reasons for its existence and the values it has attempted to promote are more rife and more alive than ever. The future of it is in our hands, if only we believe it to be.

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