The Occupations of 2011 Proceed Greater Resistance

From Athens to Lisbon, Madrid to London, Frankfurt to New York, a much delayed popular response to the 2008 financial crash took shape in 2011. Assurances by politicians of a much promised recovery rang hollow, and a recovery in the stock markets left almost all of society behind, provoking enormous crowds to fill squares and plazas and to occupy them for weeks in continuous protest. This year, we saw the victims turn to the streets and to each other to struggle against their precarious situation, disregarding the old politics insisting on an age of austerity amid boundless wealth held by the one percent.

It would be easy for one to immediately question what this year of protest has achieved. No neoliberal governments were brought down to be replaced by a government willing to ask the weakest to sacrifice last, not first. Rather, across Europe, governments are composed almost exclusively by center-right parties enacting austerity at an escalating pace. The assumption could easily be made that ground was lost, not gained by the movements challenging the neoliberal model.

The assumption would be critically wrong on two fronts. First, the neoliberal economic model is more entrenched, far different from being at its greatest strength. Unable to realise the reigning economic model doesn’t work, the consensus in circles of power is that the model hasn’t been implemented militantly enough; an extremist lurch to inject fresh energy into their ideology. But it is a model making its last stand, a last defence in which it has shed any trace of democratic legitimacy. Where it hasn’t effectively suspended representative democracy like it has in Greece and Italy, it has won elections by abandoning any sort of concept of a political mandate. In the U.K. and Portugal, centre right governments have simply radicalised their neoliberal policies once in power, after concealing their intentions from the public during elections.

The assumption breaks down on a second front where it underestimates the impact and legacy of the occupations. It was never to be a movement of steadfast occupation, eviction, and continuous escalation. It was, instead, the construction of a more permanent movement, and its constituent ideas, that we entirely lacked in 2008 when the only plans laying around were to recapitalize the banks at the expense of the victims of the crisis. For months, the expressions of fear by politicians and bankers of another “Lehman Moment” have been audible. But what may not be audible to them is the social movement capable of responding to such a moment and to block a repeat performance of the hurried passage of bailouts under threats of calamity.

Another flashpoint and a greater conflagration between the system and the indignant masses awaits us. The occupations, the massive protests of Spain and Portugal sprung out of built up frustration following the 2008 crash and the recovery exclusively for the wealthy. Yet, despite no single provocative legislation, hundreds of thousands took to the streets of Portugal back in March, and in similar or greater numbers later in the year in Spain, Greece, and Italy.

These protests, and the occupations in the U.S. and U.K. soon after, have demonstrated the scale of resentment both inside each country and across the developed world. They have left physical organisations of activists in large numbers who themselves are connected to broader movements that have an ever increasing following on social media. This activist infrastructure, both the physical general assemblies as well as the online networking, are the means by which a mobilisation of equal or greater scale will be deployed on shorter notice when they attempt the next bank bailout or the next austerity program of privatizations and benefit cuts.

In this period between mass mobilisations, the movement is proving its worth to some of the few people it needs approval from. The occupations of abandoned homes, the defence of families facing eviction, is the movement’s frontline at the point of greatest friction between the financial system and its immediate victims. It is the act of reducing the crisis one house, block, and neighbourhood at a time.

Openly confronting the crisis exposes it not as some natural cataclysm, but as the functional choice of market forces that each day repeatedly make the decision to evict and foreclose on people. This demonstration, of resisting physically the choices inherit in the market economy must and will be repeated into 2012. It is the process of containing, even in small isolated ways, the effect the markets are having on communities.

The hegemonic neoliberal program is being cornered by foreclosure resistance, general assemblies, occupied media and by its own perpetual escalation of crisis. In this state, it will continue to lash out, most imminently on Spain and Italy. 2011 won’t stand out as an anomaly, as a brief fight back against an encumbering tide. But 2012 can’t be the year when the alternative remains in waiting. It can no longer be delayed. More importantly, the families facing foreclosure can no longer wait on it, nor can the Greeks and Portuguese wait through more structural adjustment programs demanded by creditors. The escalating protests and outrage set for 2012 must align with an alternative ready to displace neoliberalism.

By David Ferreria