Hello Civil Society, Good to Meet You
A recurring refrain lobbed at us Generation X-ers by our elders and betters (including Forum’s founders over a drink or two, if truth be told), is that we don’t take to the streets enough. We don’t know the meaning of protest. We’re too lazily stuck in front of our touch-screens to actually get out there and do anything. I sort of proved this myself today by finally making it down to the Occupy Wall St protests a good month after they started – well you know, I’ve been busy…
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Having spent one of the years I worked for Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors without Borders) up a hill with no running water in war-torn Sudan, and the rest of the time with them in other forlorn and forgotten places, I’ve sort of personally excused myself from ever having to live in a tent again and given myself a free-pass when it comes to further suffering for my beliefs. It’s pretty lame, but it did spur me on to find this job where I can fight the current form of capitalism from the inside – figuratively, but yes also literally as well.
But I’m admiring of people who are willing to live in a tent in Manhattan, with little in the way of amenities and with winter coming on, to make their point.
Down at Liberty Plaza it’s a pretty interesting scene: very calm when I was there – lots going on, the occasional flurry of noise on the perimeter as someone picks an argument, but mostly people milling around and keeping the place clean, keeping people fed and so on. The systems they’ve got set up – for food, libraries, media tents and so on – are really impressive.
There are some surreal sights too – one side of the square is lined with food vendor trucks (an anti-capitalist protest acting as an entrepreneur magnet), the other by police vans. I saw a young woman in a fur coat wandering through and taking photos: was she just trying to keep warm, or a fantastic example of Generation Y entitlement? There were also a lot of tourists (I should probably include myself) and there was a great moment where I was standing feet away from Michael Moore sounding off to news cameras, when a tour bus slowed past and everyone on the top deck took pictures of him, not the church that their guide was pointing out.
But one of the most heart-warming things is really just that protest isn’t dead. And neither is civil society. Though, credit where credit is due, the most obvious evidence of this has been the rise of the Tea Party in the last couple of years. And there’s a lot that the two groups have in common, as Vice-President Joe Biden has pointed out: “What are the people up there on the other end of the political spectrum saying? The same thing: 'Look guys, the bargain is not on the level anymore.' In the minds of the vast majority of the American – the middle class is being screwed.”
Forum’s work is all about reshaping capitalism to create a sustainable future. You can see what we mean by this throughout our work from Jonathon’s book Capitalism as if the World Matters to our recent report for Aviva Investors Sustainable Economy in 2040. In that piece we set out the conditions for a sustainable economy, one of which is “Civil society plays a strong and active role in raising awareness, and strengthening accountability”.
Civil society playing an active part needn’t mean camping out in downtown NYC (and I don’t just say that to justify my return home each evening), and it can mean strong voices such as the Tea Party that you might not agree with. But strong voices are better than no voices at all. And the more we can all get involved – in whatever way works for us – in our democracy, the better and the more likely we are to shape a future that we want to live in.
Comments
Great blog Helen. But I wish you hadn’t described the protest as “anti-capitalist”. While many of the protesters no doubt are, many are not. And as you go on to point out, one doesn’t have to be anti-capitalist to look at our current economic system as unsustainable and unfair.
I realise the term was probably used simply to enable a quip about the apparent contradiction of the protest attracting entrepreneurs, but the labelling of the protestors as anti-capitalist – which the media has done en masse – makes them sound like leftie loonies, rather than justifiably concerned/angry citizenry. And it takes the focus away from the real issues of inequality and power that should be the focus of coverage around the various protests. Instead, we’re currently being treated to a full media press in the UK as to whether or not the protestors are going home at night, rather than on how our economic system continues to reward the very richest.
Besides, having locally-owned, independent food entrepreneurs turn up to feed the protestors might actually be illustrative of exactly the sort of economy they are calling for…
Fair point. I did think hard about using that term and it was probably the wrong one - I meant it as a short-hand, rather than as a quip.
In fact what also struck me when I was there was how this has become a magnet for all sorts of protests - there are anti-fracking people down there, some "9/11 truth"-ers, the core that are talking about the 99% vs the 1% and then various others...
It was too complicated to go into here, because I think that's a whole different blog - so the debate about how useful it is that those others have turned up. Some think fair enough it's all about civil protest and the more the merrier, personally I think that does dilute the key message which as you say isn't anti-capitalist per se, but anti this form of capitalism (which we would agree with as I mention further down).
Wikipedia has a good collection of survey data about what people's views there are towards capitalism: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occupy_Wall_St. The right wing press is definitely presenting it as a very radical agenda, but the survey data suggests otherwise.
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