Occupy

This book, an edited selection* of material by Noam Chomsky concerning the movement Occupy Wall Street (which soon sprawled to many major cities across the world** and ended up seeping into the general global left-activist consciousness), is an insightful and heartening peek inside what was probably the most important popular movement in the west this millennium so far.

   The general thrust of Occupy was extremely broad - people taking part cited concerns ranging from climate change to mental healthcare to western foreign policy to institutionalised racism - but at the core of it was the classic Marxian struggle: the disempowered working masses against an entrenched established elite.*** Neoliberalism has accelerated this inegalitarian conflict to enormous levels; our whole societies are increasingly structured so as to benefit economic growth, which disproportionately benefits a tiny clique of investment-holders and financiers at the top, whose control and influence over economy, media, policymaking, and more, is high enough to pretty much maintain their position so long as the people don't realise what's happening, remember they live in a democratic society, and kick off. The first rule of Anarchist Club is you don't talk about Anarchist Club always question power structures to determine whether their authority can be legitimately purported to be for the public good and can be held accountable to be so. Democratic societies, in principle, make this easy; but neoliberalism knows this, and has spent several decades feeding the idols of careerism and consumerism that make people feel autonomous while they're being exploited, without them clocking onto the system that is funneling power that should ostensibly be democratised upwards as wealth concentrates it in ever smaller pockets of control. Unless primary political decision-making power is in the hands of the general public, then issues like institutionalised racism and climate change and everything else will only be tackled when it is either cheap, easy, or politically unavoidable to do so - unfortunately, solving these kinds of issues is rarely cheap or easy, but given the sheer capitalism-induced apathy of much of the western public and the outright irrelevant spectacle of the actual political system, these things are often extremely politically avoidable to boot. Which is why Occupy scared the shit out of the establishment - and of course, the police were sent in, and peaceful groups of people congregating in public spaces to hold constructive discussions about tackling our societies' biggest problems were arrested in large numbers. The 2008 crisis was the beginning of the end for neoliberalism: it became clear that it was a highly unstable system, and one that people are starting more and more to wake up to as having not served the public interest at all. Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn are now serious prominent political figures, showing that the public has rediscovered its capacity to think past the establishment-preferred disgust/hate/fear reaction to 'socialism' and are seeing how thoroughly congruent with the ideals of democratic society these notions are - not to mention that higher equality helps support progress in a wide range of other socioeconomic issues.

   Occupy, while only really supported by leftish activists at the time, was big enough and loud enough to propel the idea of the 99% and the 1% into wider awareness - and that has had enormous sociopolitical repercussions and hopefully will continue to do so. Things change. Often for the worse, often surprisingly, sometimes for the better - more often if large numbers of people group together, organise, mobilise, and make themselves heard. That is the essence of democracy, and of progressive activism. I am proud to have been a participant (an extremely minor one - see **) this historic movement, and this book by the inimitable indefatigable Noam Chomsky was like an adrenalin-boost to my gusto for activisting**** - and if you're of similar ilk to me it would probably work for you too. So yeh, I'd recommend this book chiefly to lefties, as a potent encouraging reminder of what movements can achieve by bringing people together - even if tangible change is not immediately achieved, it always has longer-term deeper impacts by setting off ripple effects that start provoking conversation that can help to change the general consciousness.

* The selected bits include transcripts of a lecture, a Q&A, an interview, another interview, and a short passage in remembrance of Noam's late fellow radical Howard Zinn, and how the values he espoused in academia and activism were being rekindled.

** Including, at the peak of its spread, a small gathering outside Sheffield Cathedral, which I (only eighteen at the time, and nowhere near as actively political as I am today) tentatively visited for half an hour and had a really interesting conversation with a guy who looked like a cartoon punk brought to life about co-operatives (he recommended Peter Kropotkin's The Conquest of Bread to me and I read it on a family holiday - my first anarchist book!) and another with a friendly hippy-type about windfarms. 

*** Occupy's biggest achievement, other than rebooting western leftist activism with a massive surge of cross-pollinating ideas and methods for organisation, and (arguably) spawning anarcho-hacker collective Anonymous, was reframing this class conflict in terminology that made the reality of inequality far more accessible to the generally depoliticised (and often highly suspicious of people who talk like Marxists) public; out with the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, in with the 99% and the 1% - and then presumably out with the 1% as their obscenely excessive privileges are curbed and redistributed.

**** Which admittedly is why I read it - as you're probably aware, there is a general election coming up soon, and the Tories are probably going to win big, and it's hard to cling to constructive optimism in the face of all the present's turbulent perversions of systematic social and political reasonableness.

[edit - June 9th: ahahahahahahahahahaha! Oh, what a night to be the underdog. Jeremy, go and have yourself a well-deserved day off at the allotment.]