Warriors at the Edge of Time

Much of the history of protest in my lifetime has concerned the enforced occupation of physical space, from the perimeter fence of Greenham Common Airbase to tunnels beneath the A30 extension in Devon, to the Occupy Movement’s own encampments in Wall Street and The City, to a grocer’s in Hastings I refused to leave for twenty minutes in 2008 because they wouldn’t accept a Scottish fiver despite it being legal tender.

The reason public opposition to global capitalism hasn’t yet reached a tipping point is precisely because its real crimes don’t conclude in physical space itself, but in a virtual world of virtual money and virtual profit. It’s hard for many people to feel especially strongly about the effects of something they can’t really see, though this didn’t stop the Church of England from tying itself in knots about what God would think of there being a load of tents outside St Paul’s Cathedral. (One assumes He’d have been delighted. There are exactly 48 mentions of tents in the King James Bible, and if He doesn’t like them, why did He keep putting them in the Bible so much, seeing as how He wrote it.)

The Occupy Movement is occupying space and time. Well done. In doing so, it has thus far changed the news agenda, shown how random groups of people can co-operate to noble ends, and made the plastic-headed Tory MP Louise Mensch look like an out-of-touch dilettante. Again.

But Global Capitalism has moved beyond space and time into a theoretical abstract region unfettered by the laws of either physics or common decency, and where there isn’t so much as a paving slab to pitch your tent on, let alone a Starbucks where you can recharge your mobiles and irritate Louise Mensch.

I admire Occupy’s commitment no end, and were I not busy satirising capitalism for hard cash in the world of light entertainment, I’d be camped out too. But, in the words of David Essex in Geoff Wayne’s 1976 prog rock concept album War Of The Worlds, given that the Occupy Movement’s foot soldiers are real physical beings made of meat and water, and Global Capitalism is an invisible Lovecraftian entity from another dimension, maybe it’s a case of “bows and arrows against the lightning.”

I’m not trying to piss in anyone’s chips. But look at the facts. In 1649 at St George’s Hill, a ragged band they called The Diggers tore down the enclosures to reclaim ancient Common Land. In 1811, the Luddites attempted to protect the work force by smashing wide-framed automated looms.  They had physical targets to attack. And while it certainly was fun to put supa-glue in a bank door lock in the 1990s, Global Capitalism is now too slippery an entity to be inconvenienced by commercially available solvents.

Let’s pin this to a recent news meme. We all know that the comedian Jimmy Carr, for example, and the pop star Gary Barlow have concealed millions of pounds of tax, within tentatively legal loopholes. But where is the cash? Did it ever exist? At no point did a boat containing their joint millions in tightly tied bundles with pound signs on them cross the sea by night to Jersey, with Carr at the prow, squinting towards land, and Barlow tugging lugubriously at the oars, whilst singing Take That B-sides to keep time. Where might a protester have intercepted this transfer? The money never existed. The abstract idea of it was simply suddenly double clicked from one non-existent space to another.

And asking anyone to understand the exact procedures behind Barclays fixing of interest rates is unreasonable. Pictured in its simplest terms, we know Bob Diamond has essentially run off with a big wheelbarrow containing the bare essentials of the poor, and the aspirational hopes and dreams of the squeezed middle. But in reality we know that some guys who call each other ‘dude’ and go surfing together in Cornwall for bonding weekends somehow manipulated some figures relating to notional ideas of value in a virtual conceptual marketplace, and now no-one in East London can afford breakfast cereal and teachers are sneaking the kids apples.

How can non-theoretical visible protesters strike blows against the manipulation of theoretical invisible money? Whilst Occupying the squares and streets of finance districts has no doubt been hugely effective, to deliver the killer blow, Occupy’s agitators need to move beyond the physical realm and do battle with the concept of unfairly distributed wealth on the astral plane of non-corporeal fiscal matter. These rebel forces need a Yoda to train them to meet the evil Empire on a whole other level.

Step forward Dr Giles Fraser, the former Canon Chancellor of St Paul’s, who stepped down after a moral dilemma during the Occupy protests. The philosopher priest, able to interrogate language and meaning using Wittgensteinian techniques, whilst simultaneously having the ear of the liberal media, is found in the liminal zone between Heaven and Earth beloved by Anglican mystics, for whom even God Himself is more conceptual notion than actual entity. Could Fraser, on some level a friend of Occupy, teach the troops how to pray themselves into a virtual state, whereby disconnected versions of their physical selves could somehow take invisible wings and stop the transparent flow of Jimmy Carr and Gary Barlow’s tax cash, and of Barclay’s falsely manufactured profits, between equally non-existent spatial safe havens.

Once they had become Fraser-formed avatars of their own ideals, could Occupy protesters coagulate into gas clouds of rage, smothering the non-corporeal growth of Global Capitalism? Could we all join hands and levitate Jersey into outer space, where lack of gravity would render it as weightless as the virtual money stored in its virtual vaults?  Its money market men threaten independence from the UK. Cut them adrift, literally, and see how they like it. And Bob Diamond himself may not even exist. I suspect he is some kind of skin-bag, full of virtual pound coins, manipulated by the formless energy of notional wealth, a collection of transactions that have somehow coalesced into a malign energy swarm, almost, but not quite, physically real.

Sadly, Giles Fraser, like some part-time Gandalf, remains at his new post in Elephant and Castle, selfishly refusing to use his spiritual powers to shape the Occupy Movement into a trans-dimensional ethical police force, unencumbered by mass or shape; psychedelic warlords, ready to disappear in smoke.

Instead, Occupy protesters remain on duty, solidly and nobly embodying a literal notion of political presence. Meanwhile, the air around us hums with unknowable communiqués as vast sums disappear in clouds of transparent data, assets transfer and liquidise in the reverse land grab of the system’s gradual collapse, and you reach for them, like children swiping at wasps, who have licked up the sugar and scarpered in the face of the rolled up newspaper of public condemnation. Buzz. Thwack! Bzz….ugh.

By Stewart Lee (writer/clown) www.stewartlee.co.uk