Occupy New Zealand: Less Than Beloved

The Casual Brutality Of The State: This astounding image of a Californian campus policeman casually pepper-spraying passive student occupiers quickly became a symbol of the US authorities' fear-driven hostility towards the ideas of the Occupy Movement. Old-timers recalled earlier struggles for human rights, and the solidarity of the protesters grew. The New Zealand Occupy Movement seemed tame and non-threatening by comparison. By the end of 2011 it had all but fizzled out.

“THE BELOVED COMMUNITY” was how Dr Martin Luther King described the civil rights movement of the early 1960s. The relationships forged between participants in that brutal, often deadly, struggle were intense and enduring. Like war buddies, the lunch-counter desegregators, protest marchers and freedom riders look back on their experiences as both the worst and the best moments of their lives.

It is significant, therefore, to hear participants in the American Occupy Movement describe themselves as something akin to Dr King’s “beloved community”. Clearly, they see the occupations playing a role analogous to those first, defiant acts of passive resistance against the “separate but equal”, “Jim Crow” regimes of the Old South. Equally clearly, the Occupy Movement seeks to align itself with progressive America’s proud tradition of moral and physical resistance to injustice and oppression.

Can New Zealand’s Occupy Movement lay claim to such lofty credentials? Have our occupiers even come close to forming themselves into a “beloved community”?

Sadly, the answer must be: “No.”

There are many reasons for this, but the most obvious is the vast experiential gulf between those at the sharp end of inequality in the United States, and the New Zealand poor. Even in the 1950s and 60s, at the height of the post-war boom, the living standards and quality of life of the average American were much more precarious than those of the average Kiwi. The USA was able to construct only the rudiments of a functioning welfare state. New Zealand’s welfare provision, by contrast, was second only to the Scandinavians’. When the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) struck the USA in 2008, such safety nets as still remained beneath the ordinary American family were threadbare and full of holes. When put to the same test, our own proved to be in a much better state of repair.

It is also true that New Zealand’s “one-percenters” have a lot less to answer for than the one percent of Americans who control more than 20 percent of that country’s wealth. In particular, our (Australian controlled) financial system – most crucially its banks – weathered the GFC without the need for colossal bail-outs from the public purse. The spectacle most responsible for sharpening the social divisions of the USA was that of a reckless and bloated Wall Street being rescued from its own greed and folly, while an innocent and suffering Main Street was left to go to the Devil.

The contrast, captured for posterity by (of all networks) Russian Television, of New York City’s financial elite, on a balcony high above Wall Street, sipping Champagne from crystal flutes and peering down with amused condescension at the ragged “occupiers” waving their hand-lettered cardboard signs on the pavement, many floors below, could hardly have been more incendiary.

Rather than this gilded social contempt, New Zealand’s experience in 2011 was one of social solidarity and collective exhilaration. The devastating Christchurch earthquake which killed 181 people on 22 February 2011 drew New Zealanders much closer together and mobilised the very best qualities of the Kiwi character. While the sheer joy than enveloped the country when the All Blacks won the Rugby World Cup made it especially hard for those hoping to expose the nation’s shortcomings to win a hearing.

In this context, the Occupy Movement’s New Zealand off-shoots never really managed to rise above their one-off novelty value, nor to overcome the unflattering comparisons between their own tatterdemalion derivativeness and the heroism of the American original. While the Kiwi occupiers did battle in provincial courtrooms with bemused and increasingly frustrated mayors, Occupy Oakland was laid waste by multiple police agencies hurling stun grenades and firing tear gas canisters into the terrified protesters tents.

And nowhere, among the Kiwi Occupiers’ interminable “General Assembly” attempts to reach an ontologically impossible “consensus” between anarchism and socialism, was there ever a mobilising image to match that of the burly University of California campus cop nonchalantly pepper-spraying the faces of kneeling, non-violent student occupiers.

New Zealand’s Occupy Movement has fizzled for all of the above reasons, and more, but its single greatest failure has been its refusal to transform its manifestly untrue claim to represent 99 percent of the New Zealand public into anything resembling reality. When even New Zealand’s conservative prime minister confesses that most Kiwis are socialists at heart, an appeal for greater equality should have been the easiest of sells. But aside from the excitement of the initial occupations, and the potent resonances of the borrowed American slogans, this never eventuated. Afraid of soiling their ideological purity through contact with the unenlightened majority, the New Zealand occupiers, like a collection of Antipodean Achilles, refused to come out of their tents.

Beloved communities arise out of the open and collective struggle for a better world, not from muddy encampments, or the ineffectual fluttering of consensual hands.

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 3 January 2012.

Encountering Resistance

Offering Resistance: At the tender age of 26, I learned the hard way that mass support should never be assumed, or demanded. It has to be earned. "Resistance" was modelled on the Polish "Solidarity" (can't ya tell!). In theory a "movement of movements" seemed like a fine idea. Putting it into practice turned out to be a little more difficult.

HAVE YOU EVER HEARD of Resistance? No, not The Resistance, which fought the Germans in occupied France during World War II, but Resistance – as in the single word – like Solidarity? Don’t worry. Unless you lived in Dunedin in 1982, and have a very good memory, there’s no reason why “Resistance” should mean anything to you at all.

The only reason I remember it, is because I set it up.

Radicalised by the Springbok Tour protests of the year before; despairing of formal electoral politics following the narrow return of Rob Muldoon’s National Government; and inspired by the exploits of Poland’s free trade union, Solidarnosc (Solidarity), I was hoping to set up, right here in New Zealand, a similar extra-parliamentary people’s movement, broad enough to encompass all of the big issues of the day.

The movement was to be launched at what I called, with youthful grandiloquence, “The Dunedin People’s Congress”. Invitations went out to interest groups of all kinds: unions, students associations, environmental organisations.

It was a flop. Only a handful of people turned up. And, at the tender age of 26, I learned a bitter – but immensely valuable – lesson about political agitation. Mass support cannot be assumed, or demanded. It must be earned.

The then President of the Labour Party, Jim Anderton, summed it up for me a few months later, when he advised the radical core of Labour Youth’s Dunedin branch to: “Always build your footpaths where the people walk.”

Today, nearly thirty years on, the “Occupy Wall Street” (OWS) movement, and its multitude of emulators in the USA and around the world, are inspiring a new generation of activists – just as Solidarity inspired activists in the early-Eighties. In Auckland and Dunedin, small encampments have been erected in the city-centre by “occupiers” eager to assert the OWS slogan “We are the 99 Percent!” Occupy Auckland has even borrowed OWS’s ultra-democratic, consensus-based, decision-making process: setting up its own “General Assembly” to govern the occupation.

I simply couldn’t avoid a wry grin of recognition when I saw the big “General Assembly” banner unfurled in Aotea Square. “Dunedin People’s Congress” anyone?

The central question that Occupy Auckland and Occupy Dunedin now have to answer, after six days of occupation, is whether or not “the people” are walking on the “footpaths” these groups have, with such enthusiasm (and not a little self-importance) constructed? Or, like the doomed “Dunedin People’s Congress”, is their General Assembly only attracting the most idealistic and/or naïve of the Radical Left?

Earlier this week, a friend of mine e-mailed me the link to a YouTube clip of the 15 October demonstration in Madrid. The Spanish capital’s most central public square – La Puerta del Sol – and the broad avenues leading into it were filled with demonstrators. There must have been at least 100,000 of them; an angry swarm of “indignant” Spanish citizens. The sort of crowd that, here in New Zealand, only great sporting events like the Rugby World Cup can assemble.

When Occupy Auckland and Occupy Dunedin are able gather support on a similar, massive, scale, their claim to speak for “the 99 percent” of the population which cannot boast great wealth, nor wield great power, will acquire a measure of credibility.

But that day is, I fear, far away.

New Zealand is not Spain. We do not face an unemployment rate of 20 percent. Our government has not unleashed the sort of savage austerity measures that have so incensed the Spanish people. At time of writing, Police have yet to pepper-spray, tear-gas or baton-charge any of the non-violent occupiers camped-out in Aotea Square or the Octagon. And, if for some reason (the MV Rena sinks, for example) people do become indignant enough to fill those public spaces, the radical Left will soon discover just how conservative most ordinary people really are. Broad agreement is possible on economic issues – but on precious little else.

I speak from experience. Because, you see, I did end up at a Dunedin “people’s congress” – of sorts. It was called the Otago Trades Council, and its 100-plus delegates represented more than 25,000 unionised workers throughout the province. You dared not take these ordinary New Zealanders for granted. Their trust was a precious commodity – and you had to work hard for it. But when you’d earned it: when it was given; resistance was guaranteed.

This essay was originally published in The Timaru Herald, The Taranaki Daily News, The Otago Daily Times, The Greymouth Star and The Waikato Times of Friday, 21 October 2011.

They're Only 0.1 Percent - But It's A Good Start!

A Good Beginning: One-thousand-plus "Occupy Auckland" protesters gathered in Aotea Square on 15 October and constituted themselves as a "General Assembly" of Aucklanders. But, if it really wishes to speak for 99 percent of its fellow Aucklanders, the General Assembly must turn a good beginning into something much, much bigger.

IT’S NOT OFTEN that old age and treachery are bested by youth and idealism, but it happened on Saturday. The “Occupy Auckland” organisers gave themselves just one week to add New Zealand’s largest city to the growing list of “occupied” cities around the world. Too little time, I said. People aren’t angry enough, I said. Can’t be done, I said.

Well, I was wrong.

I had expected less than 300 people to show up. But it was clear from the moment I arrived at QEII square on Saturday afternoon that there were many more people than that. Between them, Facebook and the wreck of the Rena had assembled a reasonably respectable protest march. As an estimate, two thousand would have been too generous, and one thousand too stingy. But if you’d said around 1,400 protesters set off up Queen Street for Aotea Square, you wouldn’t have been far off the mark.

I like that number because it represents exactly 0.1 percent of Auckland’s 1.4 million citizens. In other words, the “Occupy Auckland” protesters numbered just one tenth of the 1 percent of fat-cat capitalist greedsters they were marching against. I’m not making this point to be snarky, merely offering it as a hopefully useful corrective to some of the over-ambitious claims being made by the protest leaders.

Because the people who have set up camp in Aotea Square are very obviously NOT representative of 99 percent of Aucklanders. They are far too young, far too white, and far too unencumbered by the burdens of job, mortgage and family to be anything like the twenty-thousand-plus ordinary Aucklanders who celebrated the All-Blacks victory over the Wallabies throughout the central city the following night.

But they do represent something. There was a pile of youthful energy and a playful sense of creativity permeating the Aotea Square “campsite” on Saturday afternoon. Even I, a staunch opponent of “consensus-based decision-making” for more than 30 years, felt my frown lines disappearing and a smile slowly spreading across my face as the “facilitators” (don’t, whatever you do, call them “leaders”) explained to the thousand-strong “General Assembly” the four basic hand-signals indicating Agreement, Disagreement, Point of Process and Block.

Here on the green lawns of Aotea Square, under a bright spring sky, I was witnessing something new under the sun – and I hadn’t witnessed anything new in left-wing political practice for a very long time. Suddenly, I was laughing at the speakers’ lame jokes. And, when the various “working-groups” who’d made the day’s events possible were introduced to the General Assembly, I found myself joining-in the crowd's very big round of applause.

I was, however, very glad the plan to literally “Occupy Queen Street” had been abandoned. Worried that there might still be some who refused to accept the decision to shift the focus of the protest to Aotea Square, I moved ahead of the march and took up a position overlooking the big Wellesley Street intersection. If there was going to be a street-based occupation, this is where it would happen.

The Police agreed. From a side street, 24 constables, led by a burly Police Sergeant, formed up into what was clearly a snatch-squad. They were decked out in stab-vests, hand-cuffs and appeared to be carrying batons. Further up Wellesley Street, three large “Paddy Wagons” stood ready to receive the constables’ “catch”.

I watched the protest march approach the intersection, saw it pause, gather mass, pause again, and then move on up Queen Street. The back-end of the march did the same: pause, gather mass, pause. A haka was performed – and then the last of the marchers followed their comrades up Queen Street to the Square. The Police snatch-squad about-turned and marched away.

Aotea Square was always the obvious occupation site. In the popular imagination, if not in strictly legal terms, it is Auckland’s most important public space – a city square – just like the city squares of Cairo and Athens, Barcelona and Madrid. Wall Street is a potent political symbol: Queen Street, for most people, is just a carriageway.

But now the rules of the General Assembly are agreed, and the tents pitched – what happens next? The weather is predicted to turn bad for most of the next week, and heavy rain will quickly turn Aotea Square’s green lawns into muddy wallows. A General Assembly of one thousand merry protesters is an impressive sight. An assembly reduced to 100 bedraggled campers will not look so good.

The question of how to build the protest: of how to reach out to the 99.9 percent of Aucklanders who are yet to involve themselves in this bold political experiment; must be answered. Only when “Occupy Auckland” can gather together in one place as many enthusiastic citizens as the organisers of the Rugby World Cup, will their calls for change acquire genuine political heft. (And when the General Assembly numbers 20,000 - instead of 1,000 - I suspect its calls for change will turn out to be a lot less radical than Saturday's revolutionary speeches.)

The organisers of “Occupy Auckland” have made a good beginning – better than I thought possible. But, in the words of All-Black coach, Graham Henry: “The job hasn't been done yet.”

This posting is exclusive to the Bowalley Road blogsite.

Occupy Queen Street? Not Yet.

The Message Is Spreading: The political virus implanted by the "Occupy Wall Street" protesters has become highly contagious, with similar "occupations" speading rapidly across the United States. But are Aucklanders ready to "Occupy Queen Street"? The answer, almost certainly, is: "Not yet."

LAST NIGHT I sat in a roomful of people inspired by the “Occupy Wall Street” movement. Some were young, brim-full of idealism. Others, older, wore the scars of numerous victories and defeats. Uniting them all was the belief that “a better world is possible”.

I have long been wary of the New Zealand Left’s propensity for jumping on to other people’s bandwagons. What’s happening in the United States and Europe, and what has already happened along the Mediterranean Coast of North Africa – the so-called “Arab Spring” – are products of those particular countries’ recent (and not-so-recent) histories. I am very doubtful that events occurring there can be replicated here quickly, easily and without significant modification.

The kids who moved in on Wall Street over a month ago may have been anarchists, but I strongly suspect that a great deal of organisation followed their decision to set the fires of rebellion in the very belly of the global capitalist beast. My roomful of people had come to organise an occupation of Queen Street, but they’d given themselves just eight days to do it.

Several months ago Spain’s anti-austerity movement, the so-called “Indignants”, designated October 15 as a day of international action against global finance’s determination to make 99 percent of the planet’s people pay for the economic crisis precipitated by its wealthiest 1 percent. Auckland’s radical leftists are determined to do their bit on that day.

Frankly, I don’t believe 8 days is anything like long enough to get something like this organised. But, even if the “Occupy Queen Street” organisers had given themselves six months to plan a full-scale occupation of Auckland’s main street, I doubt if they could pull it off.

The brutal truth of the matter is that, in comparison to the Tunisians, Egyptians, Libyans, Syrians, Bahrainis and Yemenis, New Zealanders live in a blessed realm. And even if we limit our comparison to the peoples of Europe and the USA, the hard fact remains that New Zealanders have had what might be called an “easy” recession.

Our rate of unemployment is comparatively low, and our government has shied away from the sorts of ruthless austerity measures implemented in the United Kingdom, Ireland, Greece and in many of the individual states of the USA. Our economy’s powerful linkages with the booming economies of Australia and China have spared us the worst effects of the Global Financial Crisis and the deep recession which it spawned. Our great trials (Pike River, the Christchurch earthquakes) have been of the sort that bring people together, not the sort that drives them apart.

The other thing that brings New Zealanders together is, of course, Rugby. One more reason, perhaps, for allowing the Spanish-set “International Day of Action” to go unmarked in Godzone. It is difficult to think of a worse time to ask ordinary Kiwis to focus on the building of a better world than in the week its All Black heroes are closing in on their first Rugby World Cup victory in 24 years. For these folk, a RWC win represents the best of all possible worlds!

The RWC offers another quite serious impediment to any form of prolonged protest action – especially action planned for the main street of the biggest host city.

One of the main reasons Peter Marshall was appointed Commissioner of Police is, I imagine, because of his long experience in providing police protection for large international events. I first encountered him in 1995, when he was placed in charge of policing the annual meeting of the Asian Development Bank in Auckland. Recalling the firmness with which he dealt with protesters on that occasion, I can only assume that Commissioner Marshall will respond to any group attempting to engage in prolonged protest action (on or around streets potentially overflowing with RWC revellers) with considerable force.

Indeed, I would be very surprised if any attempt to block streets or set up camp anywhere in the CBD lasts any longer than a few minutes. Nor would I be astonished if the number of constables on hand in Queen Elizabeth Square at 3:00pm on Saturday, 15 October, is greater than the turnout of protesters. In strategic terms, the Police will want to be able to re-deploy their forces in plenty of time for the RWC semi-final match scheduled to take place at Eden Park that evening. The Police Commissioner simply cannot afford to keep a large cordon of police officers on watch over a protest on Downtown Auckland’s main thoroughfare.

Quite apart from anything else, the Police will be worried about the likely outcome of a very large number of pumped-up Rugby supporters, many of them intoxicated, coming into contact with a small number of protesters. The social mores and political attitudes of the former are almost certain to clash with those of the latter. Things could get very ugly, very quickly.

Of course, vivid images of police brutality are wonderful recruiters for any sort of protest movement. On Wall Street, it was the images of a New York cop pepper-spraying a defenceless and non-violent protester in the face that lifted the occupation from a minor piece of street theatre to a genuine political event. The same thing could happen here.

But, I am doubtful. In my opinion both the timing and the venue are all wrong. October 15 is too soon, and Queen Street is simply too critical to the smooth movement of traffic (and revellers) through Central Auckland, for a successful occupation on that date to be successful.

If anything can be read from the overseas experience it is this. Successful occupations take place in the context of major and genuine affronts to the public’s values and welfare; and their venues typically resonate with symbolic power. Egypt’s Tahrir (Liberation) Square, for example, was the site of revolutionary uprisings in both 1919 and 1952. Wall Street is, of course, synonymous with the power of global finance capital. The policies of President Hosni Mubarak’s government had imposed extreme hardship on the Egyptian people. Wall Street’s looting of “Main Street” has placed millions of Americans under intense economic pressure.

Auckland’s Queen Street possesses its own symbolic power. It was the site of the largest and most destructive of the unemployment riots of 1932. But these occurred in the depths of the Great Depression when close to a quarter of the New Zealand workforce were unemployed and thousands of families quite literally starving. The “Queen Street Riot” was an explosion of rage and despair from working people at the very end of their tether.

Have we reached that point again? Are enough of us that angry with our government and the economic system it oversees?

Something in me says: “Not yet.”

This posting is exclusive to the Bowalley Road blogsite.