Why There Cannot be Stakeholders in Occupy

Consider the following scenario in Dnalgne. Dnalgne is not a country, but a name I have invented for the purposes of this piece. It is a developing country in South-East Asia, a recipient of foreign aid, and in dire need of foreign investment. A large corporation has recently pitched a bid to the government to start logging rubber trees, and the government is considering giving them entry to the country. This assessment requires them to consider the various ‘stakeholders’, including local farmers, citizens of nearby cities, and small bands of hunter-gatherers that live in the midst of the proposed logging area. It is thought that the first group will not suffer much. The second group, it is assumed, will benefit from the investment. Workers and lorries will leave money and give locals a chance to engage in market relations and sell their goods – a potential benefit also for those of the farms that produce a surplus of goods.

The third group is a bigger problem, which presents two choices: to relocate them, or to leave them be. The logging zone is huge, and it seems that both strategies will be needed, depending on which area of the country they live in. The problem is that the government has no exact record of where they live, what areas they use, or how to relocate them. They are ‘stakeholders’, but with no real input. Some spokesmen are consulted, but have little influence over the outcome. Economic interest in a despairing country seems more important than the habitat of a few hundred people.

The deal is signed. And that’s the end for the government. Cities grow. Some farms prosper – others disappear. No one hears from the hunter-gatherers, apart from a few activists and anthropologists who make it their mission to fight for the tribes in the area. They run campaigns and ask for international solidarity. They stand on roads to block trucks. They get arrested. They are set free. They write articles filled with indignation. And they fight on behalf of ‘stakeholders’ who were previously no part of the discourse that made their displacement possible.

They make some progress. They slow the process down. They raise awareness. But ultimately, they are powerless against the big corporations and the government who signed the contract. The hunter-gatherers were the smallest group of stakeholders. Ruthless business concealed as utilitarianism – claiming to provide jobs and boost the economy – prevailed.

The notion of ‘stakeholder’, then, transforms wider concerns and human beings into entities and groups that can be ‘managed’: controlled, shifted, sold or disposed of. Assigning groups with these labels makes it possible for words on paper and decisions in offices to have effects without the decision-makers feeling directly responsible. It is not their worlds that are disrupted, and having successfully transformed other human beings into inhabitants of other worlds that are declared inferior and disposable, the processes are put into practice.

So where is the link with Occupy? Occupy took to the streets, directly challenging these systems. Beyond civil disobedience, we did not only ‘protest’, but undertook the beginning of a radical transformation of selves and society from the tough position of the boundary between inside and outside, opposition and assimilation. Challenged by the courts, Occupy decided, as an assemblage, to transform into a movement that could be taken to court. The loss of the case had a double effect. On the one hand, it was recognition of what the movement stood for, but it also reconfigured Occupy the London Stock Exchange as a ‘stakeholder’ in the battle for public space at St Paul’s. The movement played by the rules of the big corporations – and it lost. Like the hunter-gatherers in Dnalgne, the camp at St Paul’s became a manageable, recognized group that operates in known waters, never actually challenging the system they operate within.

But the war is not over, even if the battle is lost. The strength of Occupy has been its resistance to categories, its refusal to be put into a box. A large part of the movement had already moved on from St Paul’s. They were no longer stakeholders, and could not be stopped by eviction. Like nomads, Occupy resisted complete assignment to a category, and as an assemblage of disparate and different individuals and groups, there is no simple way to bring them under control. And this is how it has to stay.

The constant concern by police, government and media to ‘label’ the movement, for it to make ‘demands’, is an attempt to transform it from an assemblage into a group of stakeholders that can be boxed away – another ‘campaign’ for social justice that can be listened to with one ear whilst ignored in the real decision-making process. Whether hunter-gatherers, their activist friends in Dnalgne, or a minority group in England, these groups are vulnerable because they are recognized. They hold stakes, but because they ‘hold’ them, they can be listened to – or ignored.

Occupy, however, has operated differently. The stakes they highlighted cannot be assigned to groups. We do not ‘hold’ them in common interest groups, small islands of separate causes, but rather we share them all in a sea of uproar. And as preparations for May are underway, the waves are ready to hit the shores of clear-cut categories. The outcome depends on the movement’s ability to maintain its heterogeneous core of stakes without stakeholders and demands without five-year management plans.

Islands can be managed, but the power of the sea cannot be stopped. The stakes are there, whether we acknowledge them or not. They do not belong to groups of ‘stakeholders’ that we can choose to listen to – or sweep aside. They concern our future, and they are shared by us all.