404 – Interview

An Italian blog, 404: File Not Found contacted one of our editorial team for an interview. We’ve published the English version of the interview here.

Viola Caon (404): Occupy LSX’ eviction happened almost one year ago. What’s left of the movement?

Michael Richmond (OT): That really depends on who you ask… From my perspective, Occupy in London peaked long before the eviction – many involved were actually desperate for the occupation to end as the environment and behaviours on site had grown destructive. In retrospect, it perhaps wasn’t a movement but more a single tactic (and a common outcry) that initially had a very big impact (though not big enough). The experience post-eviction showed that there was little to hold the genuinely varied array of people who had been drawn to take and hold that space at St Paul’s once the space itself had been lost. Besides, momentum and ideas were lost long before the court case that eventually saw the camp removed.

There are a small core of people who still self-identify as Occupy London but most never liked that name anyway (more preferred the original Occupy LSX) and most of those involved at different times along the way have moved on to other things. The online platforms/social media are still used but it’s clear that there’s very little of merit coming out of what remains.  One recent success for them (but more importantly for the local community who became actively involved) was their helping to prevent a library from being closed – achieved through a sustained occupation/squatting of the library. However, above all, it is people who became attached to the brand of “Occupy” that still reflexively fetishise an increasingly ineffective tactic and an almost religious connection to Occupy’s supposed exceptional status among social movements.  The best that can be said is that they are amplifying and supporting other campaigns by using what little remains of their mainstream media profile. Some would say they’re more latching onto the ideas and causes of others because they ran out of ideas long ago. What is clear is that the initial, significantly radical, act of occupying public space in the middle of the world’s most powerful financial district was never followed up. A focus on PR, and the always doomed attempt to be ‘all things to all people’ came out on top as people with a more radical, and in my view more accurate, analysis of the crisis and of society were sidelined and eventually left.

That’s not to say that it was all a waste of time or that nothing of worth remains. It’s often the intangible outcomes that are of most value. Occupy LSX was a vibrant and exciting place in its first two or three months and the experience of spending time there, the conversations and debates had, the talks attended and the skills learned do not suddenly disappear into nothingness because the movement itself did. Numerous contacts were made and networks built which will have already led to the formation of new initiatives or collaborations. Many people, of different ages and backgrounds, have been politicised/radicalised by a fusion of Occupy, the crisis that spawned it and the severity of the police/state crackdown that was a shock to particularly many of the white, middle class people involved. Some will have been turned off political activism or have simply burnt out, others will have moved onto other campaigns or started things up in their own communities.

VC: The Occupied Times, the newspaper of the movement, seems to be growing significantly. Why? And what direction is it taking?

MR: I can only ever speak for myself not those I have worked with. There’s no doubting that the OT, the first few issues of which were conceived of, produced and folded all on the camps of St Paul’s and Finsbury Square, was the newspaper of the movement (though it was always fiercely independent and critical, never a mouthpiece.) However it has evolved and grown since October 2011. We don’t deny our history, nor are we ashamed of it, but the editorial team has decided we no longer feel any attachment to Occupy London. Rather, we believe the paper stands for many of the values and causes that the global Occupy movement was founded on. We are a movement paper that has lost its movement. But never mind losing one small movement (historically speaking), we are much more concerned with *the* movement i.e the ongoing struggle against capitalism.
We cover issues both global and local, we have stories from writers across the left spectrum from social democratic Keynesians to varying shades of Marxist and anarchist. We still maintain a strong focus on activism, covering direct actions in the Eurozone, the US, campaigns in the UK and other parts of the world. I see one of the newspaper’s key roles as being a link between theory and praxis.

We have just published our 20th edition in which our main focus was on debates and activism around the issue of gender. This edition included an interview with Noam Chomsky. We have also had interviews with the likes of Mark Fisher, Nawal El Saadawi, John Holloway and Alan Moore over the months which we’re able to print alongside articles by young, unknown writers and people with first hand perspective of what’s happening on the ground in different parts of the world. We have a growing online presence and were one of the collectives who helped to organise the Up The Anti conference at the end of last year. We’ve recently had another design revamp and our incredible designers have been nominated for a national award.

We like to think we’re growing and improving because we’re producing something of value to people: Serious analysis, that link between discussion and action but also doing so with aesthetically attractive design and illustrations and some more irreverent and satirical pieces. We hope this means that reading the OT is different from reading most other socialist and anarchist publications.
Producing a newspaper funded solely by individual donations, and where nobody has ever been paid is, in a sense, a direct action. It’s a production process that avoids the profit motive and is trying not to play into or reproduce the “logic of capitalism.” This means that each time we produce an issue there is a sense of achievement, even victory. Our cycle is clearly defined and we know what we have to do. In this way making a radical publication is unlike the far more difficult proposition of mounting a broader challenge to an incredibly powerful social/political/economic system. We’re aware that our form of direct action is easier than others, that’s why we feel it’s so important to have close ties to movements on the ground. To be a part of them as well.

VC: In one of the newspaper’s last issues, you talked about the Strike Debt movement in New York. Can you explain in plain words what’s it about?

MR: Strike Debt is a movement that arose out of a number of horizontal conversations between Occupy Wall Street (OWS) activists and others in Washington Square Park last May. It was during a lull following both the eviction of their camp in November 2011 and Mayday protests in the Spring of 2012 and some activists began discussing the all-important question: What next?
Discussions kept coming back to one thing: Debt. Everyone there (and the majority of us all) was and is drowning in debt: Student debt, credit card debt, mortgage debt, medical debt, personal debt on unsecured, high-interest loans. Not to mention discussions of national and public debts or debt as a social and power relation being at the very heart of neoliberal capitalism and therefore affecting us all.
Strike Debt emerged as a repudiation of the morality of debt. It is a critique of the entire system, an attempt to awaken the ‘debtor subject’ in all of us and a call for us to take collective action against a system that holds us all in chains.

It is by no means the first time that people have organised around the issue of debt. In the last two decades, popular debt resistance movements have had some success in Latin American countries including Mexico, Brazil, Argentina and Ecuador. And if you were to read the anarchist anthropologist David Graeber’s seminal book, Debt: The First Five Thousand Years, you’d see that ever since the first recorded debt system in the Sumer civilisation in 3,500 BC, debt has been at the heart of social, economic and political relations and many of the key uprisings throughout history.

VC: The Strike Debt idea comes from the States, where debts have actually ruined an entire generation. To what extent do you think debt is a core issue for Europeans too?

MR: Debts haven’t just ruined a generation – which suggests that it may be just the young who suffer. Debt is the basis for the entire system, it underlies our everyday social relations and defines those who have power and those who do not. Household debt (that held by individuals in the form of mortgages, credit card bills, etc.) and public/sovereign debt are devastating millions of people across Europe. The Strike Debt rationale would be: Why should the majority of people suffer the fallout of a popped debt bubble when it was inflated with nihilistic hedonism by a minority of financial institutions who now go on looking for the next bubble? The vast majority of household debt isn’t the result of greed or profligacy, it isn’t down to personal responsibility. The system needs it. Capital is accumulated through it.  So much of the ‘value’ created by the modern capitalist economy is dependent more on our debt than our labour as it is our debts that are used as leverage for gambling in the surreal world of the global derivatives market which is ‘worth’ more than ten times the entire world’s GDP. This ‘value’ is fictional, notional promises of future credit, debt and exchange but it has a bearing on the power relations of today.

In the last forty years wages have stagnated but credit has been let loose by those who control the economic levers of power. This has led to many people using credit and debt to finance basic needs like buying food and, in the US and now countries like Greece, paying for medical treatment. Things like education and housing, aspects of human society that should never be commodified, have been turned into products for us to consume on a market. We all know that toxic mortgage derivatives like CDOs were central to the 2008 crash. Well, student debt could be the next big bubble. It’s already reached $1trillion dollars in the US and with the UK’s higher education policy becoming more and more like America’s over the last two decades this financialisation trend looks to be firmly entrenched.

Europe as a whole faces the spectre of debt every day as countries like Greece, Ireland and Portugal have the screws of austerity tightened ever harder on them by their puppet governments, forced to do so by the Troika. And why? Because the bond markets, credit ratings agencies etc., accountable to no one, decide whether countries (people) stand or fall, live or die. This has to be challenged. And not in some supplicant manner where we beg forgiveness for our debts, but by repudiating the very basis of the debt economy. By saying “This debt is illegitimate. Why should I pay?” And the debts run up by a crony government? Surely these are “Odious debts” like those of many dictatorial regimes of the past. Why should an entire population be held responsible for debts run up by a government like the Greek one before the crisis who were practically controlled by Goldman Sachs for a decade leading up to the crash?

VC: The OT’s article on the Strike Debt movement promotes an anti-debt culture, arguing that “this morality of debt that says paying one’s debts is more important than anything else” is not actually a morality. You therefore suggest not to pay the debt back at all. Do you think that this is a concrete and possible counter-policy to put forward?

MR: I wouldn’t say it was concrete or that it was a “counter-policy”. Is it possible? Who knows? One of our biggest problems was summed up by Fredric Jameson when he said: “It is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism.” This is something we all have to break through.

The idea of striking on debt cannot claim to be concrete because it is a proposition dependent on mobilising a huge global mass of people to (eventually) refuse to pay their debts. That is an incredibly difficult thing to do, especially when you consider all of the forces ranged against your attempts to do such a thing and the potential consequences/reprisals for those involved. However, it’s not impossible. Examples like the Poll Tax riots in Britain, the aforementioned El Barzon movement in Mexico, the refusal to pay the Household Tax in Ireland and the public sector workers in Spain and Greece who are refusing to carry out the moral imperatives of state and capital on ordinary indebted people all point towards “the possible”.

The reason I say it’s not a counter-policy is because Strike Debt isn’t discussing so much the institutional party politics of the nation-state, it is challenging, as you say, the morality of debt and how deeply that morality pervades every aspect of the global economic system and human life as we know it. It is a debt resistance movement that proposes the possibility that human beings can find a way to live without the boot of the debt system standing on our necks.

One of the best writers in this area is one of your countrymen, Maurizio Lazzarato, who wrote The Making of the Indebted Man. Lazzarato writes of the morality of debt: ‘The “moral” concepts of good and bad, trust and distrust here translate into solvency and insolvency. The “moral” categories by which we take the “measure” of man and his actions are a measure of (the) economic reason (of debt). In capitalism, then, solvency serves as the measure of the “morality” of man.’ We are so much more than our individual credit rating. We owe nothing to the creditors who have defrauded us all. It is only the fact that they own politics that means we are coerced into paying them.

VC: Does the Strike Debt movement refer to any alternative economic theories that are not being taken into consideration by governments? If so, would you mention them?

MR: The movement is about raising awareness of the role debt plays in society, encouraging people to resist this and building towards a collective fightback and so, as such, the people involved do not have a single economic or political ideology. Many Strike Debtors hail from the anarchist tradition, as do many of the concepts that the movement espouses. A particularly prominent one of these is mutual aid i.e networks of solidarity and exchange which operate for the mutual benefit of those involved, outside of the functions of either capital or the state. Policies such as a debt jubilee and a massive reduction in working hours have been floated as ideas or transitional demands, especially by David Graeber. One direct action that Strike Debt have taken in New York has been the “Rolling Jubilee” in which they’ve crowd-sourced over half a million dollars (at the time of writing) and used it to buy up and erase strangers’ medical debts on the secondary debt market. As debts can be purchased for five cents on the dollar (ordinarily by private debt collectors looking to make a killing) Strike Debt have been able to cancel over $11m worth of personal debt. The reason it’s called a “rolling” jubilee is that the hope is that it will continue with a momentum of its own, where those whose debts were cancelled will then kick back in out of solidarity. No-one has or could claim that this direct action is any challenge to the overall debt system but it is nevertheless both a significant act of propaganda and a practical show of solidarity to several people being suffocated by debt. Undoubtedly, the Rolling Jubilee has been contentious and is the cause of much debate among those on the radical left.

VC: Finally, where do you see the Occupy movement going? In England as well as in the rest of the world?

MR: I see long-term occupations of public space becoming less prevalent, more cracked down upon by the state and also less effective – because the longer they go on, the less politically vital they become. Occupying is a tactic, not a strategy or a social club or a brand. As a tactic it has been used long before the Occupy movement and will continue to be in the future. It can be effective but at other times isn’t often depending on the context and how it’s applied on the ground.

From spending time at Occupy London, visiting Occupy Wall Street and having communications with people from various other countries and cities, I can see that the encampment trend of the last couple of years has manifested differently in every city and country it has appeared in, despite there being many similarities. What I saw in New York gives me more hope than what I saw in London, for this I believe there are many reasons. However, I really don’t care about the Occupy movement’s future or whether it succeeds. I care about the reasons behind it. The priority should be the causes you fight for and the unjust system you fight against, not the banner you hold at a protest or the badge that you wear.

The Italian Version of this interview was originally published on 404: File not Found. Interviewed by Viola Caon.