May Day's lessons for the rootless
Let's face it, the street theatre in London was a bit of a McProtest Naomi Klein
The idea of turning London into a life-sized Monopoly board on May Day sounded like a great idea to me. The most familiar criticism lobbed at modern protesters is that they lack focus and clear goals such as "Save the trees", or "Drop the debt". And yet these protests are a response to the limitations of single-issue politics. Tired of treating the symptoms of an economic model - under-funded hospitals, homelessness, widening disparity, exploding prisons, climate change - there is now a clear attempt to "out" the system behind the symptoms. But how do you hold a protest against abstract economic ideas without sounding either hideously strident or all over the map?
How about using the board game that has taught generations of kids about land ownership? The organisers of yesterday's Mayday Monopoly protest issued annotated maps of London featuring such familiar sites as Regent Street, Pall Mall and Trafalgar Square, encouraging participants to situate their May Day actions on the Monopoly board. Want to protest against privatisation? Go to a railway station. Industrial agriculture? McDonald's. Fossil fuels? The electric company. And always carry your "Get out of jail free" card.
The problem was that by yesterday afternoon, London didn't look like an ingenious mix of popular education and street theatre. It looked pretty much like every other mass protest these days: demonstrators penned in by riot gear, smashed windows, boarded-up shops, running fights with police. And in the pre-protest media wars, there was more déjà vu. Were protesters planning violence? Would the presence of 6,000 police officers itself provoke violence? Why won't all the protesters condemn violence? Why does everybody always talk about violence?
It seems this is what protests look like today. Let's call it McProtest, because it's becoming the same all over. And of course this here is becoming a kind of McColumn, because I've written about all this before. In fact, almost all my recent columns have been about the right to assembly, security fences, tear gas, and dodgy arrests. Or else they've attempted to dispel wilful representations of the protesters - for instance, that they are "anti-trade", or longing for a pre-agrarian utopia.
It is an article of faith in most activist circles that mass demonstrations are always positive: they build morale, display strength, attract media attention. But what seems to be getting lost is that demonstrations aren't themselves a movement. They are only flashy displays of everyday movements, grounded in schools, workplaces, and neighbourhoods. Or at least they should be.
I keep thinking about the historic day, on March 11, when the Zapatista commanders entered Mexico City. This was an army that led a successful uprising against the state. And yet the residents of Mexico City didn't quake in fear - rather, 200,000 of them came out to greet the Zapatistas, including entire families. Streets were closed to traffic, yet no one seemed even slightly concerned about the inconvenience to commuters. And shopkeepers didn't board up their windows; they held "revolution" sidewalk sales.
Is this because the Zapatistas are less dangerous than a few urban anarchists in white overalls? Hardly. It was because the march on Mexico City was seven years in the making (some would say 500 years, but that's another story). Years of building coalitions with other indigenous groups, with workers in the Maquiladoras, with students, with intellectuals and journalists; years of mass consultations, of open encuentros (meetings) of 6,000 people. The event in Mexico City wasn't the movement; it was only a very public demonstration of all that invisible, daily work.
The most powerful resistance movements are always deeply rooted in community - and are accountable to those communities. However, one of the greatest challenges of living in the high consumer culture that was protested against in London yesterday, is the reality of rootlessness. Few of us know our neighbours, talk about much more than shopping at work, or have time for community politics. How can a movement be accountable when communities are fraying?
Within a context of urban rootlessness, there are clearly moments to demonstrate, but perhaps more importantly, there are moments to build the connections that make demonstration something more than theatre. There are times when radicalism means standing up to the police, but there are many more times when it means talking to your neighbour.
The issues behind Tuesday's demonstrations are no longer marginal. Yet something is gravely wrong when the protests still seem deracinated, cut off from urgent daily concerns. It means that the spectacle of displaying a movement is getting confused with the less glamorous business of building one.