There was one report from the recent City of London protests against the G20 summit that really struck me.
As the crowds brandished "Hang the Bankers" posters, shouted that "Nature doesn't do bailouts", and paraded their raggle-taggle Four Horsemen of the Eco-calypse, the financial workers decided to respond in
kind:
Slogan of the day, accordingly, must be awarded to the sign reportedly glimpsed in a bank window: "While you are here protesting, we are repossessing your homes." We also liked the four cricket bats - a fitting choice - lined up by the door at the Bishopsgate restaurant L'Amina in a bid to deter any rough stuff, though it's just possible this was not meant as a joke.
An honourable mention, however, to the bankers spotted by the Associated Press waving tenners at the protesters from their upper windows - who could tire of that old joke? (Though you can tell we're in the midst of a credit crunch surely they used to be £50s?) The crowd, in response, shouted "Jump!" How festive.
How festive indeed. Even though the "kettling" of the crowd by the Met Police resulted in its inevitable frustrations and violence, reports like the above are trying to characterise the essentially "good-humoured nature" of the tension between protestors and their targets (as the man from the Financial Times, of all organs, was at pains to point out).
As my last post highlighted, it's a matter of principle for many of these protestors that their occupation of public space has a playful element. As Barbara Ehrenreich notes in her history of collective joy, Dancing In The Streets, this is a tradition stretching from medievality to modernity – the lords and ladies of misrule doing their turns in the crowd, tipping the conventions of the world upside down to make collective action feel even more transformative and charged. (Though carnival can also be a yearly or seasonal safety-valve, a ritualised letting-go of social frustration from below).
But I also liked the comments from Richard Seymour of Lenin's Tomb, scratching his head a little (from his hard-left position) at the point of it all:
I'm still not clear on what the strategy is behind these mini-spectacles. It's great to see thousands of people turn out to protest against capitalism, despite all the media hysteria and off-putting threats from the police. We need far bigger protests in the future, ideally coinciding with a general strike or something. But it seems as if the idea at the moment is to have a carnivalesque parade, wind up in one spot and get penned in only to have the police mess with you if you try to have a drink or some weed. I don't want to be a negative nelly, but that's not reclaiming the streets, it's getting owned by the cops.
In terms of anti-capitalist direct action (if that's what you're looking for), Seymour is surely right that the current European (and American) wave of factory occupations is way more effective than some diddy hurling a projectile through a Royal Bank of Scotland window.
But there's something about the conviviality and creativity of these protests (which the Climate Camp maintained honourably in Bishopgate, until being rather brutally swept away by the riot police) that I think is worth preserving and developing. I kept thinking of the iconic images of sixties protest – the hippie inserting a flower in the barrel of a gun. Or even more effectively, Abbie Hoffman (the Yippie) scattering money over the trading floor of the NY stock exchange, and watching them scramble for the notes.
Short of a state of sheer totalitarianism, there is a point where authorities are vulnerable to collective ridicule and derision. Remember the experience in the Velvet Revolution of Czecheslovakia, where (as Ivan Klima recalled) the appearance of satirical cartoons and slogans in the windows of houses and shop-fronts became completely ubiquitous, subtly infusing the streets of Prague with civic confidence.
If the tools of humour and wit are prominent in a social struggle, might change come more profoundly and elementally – the possibility of change appearing more everyday and accessible, if "reality is taken lightly" (the nutshell definition of play that I've been using for some years now)? The Italian thinker Paulo Virno has elaborated this in his recent book on wit and innovation: the linguistic explosions of humour constantly remind us that we can play around with the rules of social existence. (Which explains my obession with Bill Hicks, I guess – and why comedians can often be so scary-thrilling).
Compared to the testosteronal anger that often marks labour-movement militancy, the carnivaleers against capitalism are trying to reimagine the spaces and places where intransigent power often feels at its most settled and complacent: a nuclear power plant, the building of an airport runway, the tidy streets of a financial district.
If you look at those images of the Climate Camp, and its little micropolis of tents (and doubtless passionate discussions within them), you can see them using the "tools of conviviality" to change how we might think of public space. The City of London can be more than an orderly space for carbon-burning, money-circulating business as usual – but an opportunity to demonstrate a flavour of the cooperative lifestyle changes that might be required in order to stave off eco-catastrophe.
I don't think that creative anarchism (or "expressive democracy") like this is in any way a leading edge of change. If anything, our clear and present eco-danger reinforces the need for national and international governance. But it's incredibly important that this grass-roots passion and commitment exists. As the Americans say, someone needs to "hold Obama's feet to the fire".
And yes, the grand irony of all of this? That a few miles away, the Community-Organiser-in-Chief himself was gladhanding and cajoling a set of bristling, well-padded leaders into the minimum set of regulations and investments required to keep their capitalist (or now, Keynesian) show on the road. Did the Barry Obama who hung around with socialists and Chicago radicals as a community organiser twenty years ago cock an ear to the street protestors? While the Climate Campers try to seed the City, Obama and his family dig up the White House lawn to grow designer herbs for their chef.
There are some strange parallelisms at work on the stage of world politics at the moment. And although I may be the man with the hammer who can only see nails to be bashed, the ethics of play does always seem to me to be hovering around the scene.
