The Cohort

In retrospect, the journal entry I wrote the night before Occupy Melbourne was evicted seems pretty funny, but only sort of. In short, I thought the lack of an identified enemy, economic/political pressure and the sharp ideological differences between pre-established groups would result in a bit of a fizzle. A lot of the organisers are from parties (Socialist Alternative, Socialist Alliance, Green Left etc) and I couldn’t see them maintaining interest, especially since the General Assembly remains unwilling to call the struggle ‘class warfare’. Obviously after we were attacked by the police things changed, more people are interested and the thing has had a fair public hearing over the weekend. Still, as far as the long term future of the Occupy Together movement goes, I’ve got hesitancies. But I hadn’t seen the attack coming at all.

We have a police liaison working group, and they managed to maintain quite a civil relationship with city council and the police. Because, to me, letting it live out it’s course seemed like the best option (again, the dialectical situation in Australia is what I’m basing my prediction of future disinterest on), it still strikes me as a poor option. The idea of the movement is to exist, so breaking up the site was never going to be a solution. If Doyle had had a brief browse of the website, he could have understood that easily! So now we’re in the odd position of waiting to see if they’ll let us stay in Treasury Gardens for more than a few hours on Saturday. My guess is they won’t.

This is premature, by the way. We are having a General Assembly at 6pm on the lawn on the State Library tomorrow. If you’re reading this, I encourage you to get down there and have a gander. It won’t look much like Friday, unless Doyle is actually trying to implement Fascism. To shut down a meeting, that would really be too far. The Melbourne public is, by majority, already on our side. Anyway I suppose all I mean is, if I were in his position, it wouldn’t be my first instinct. But the GAs are worth seeing and worth participating in, especially when there’s a bit of kick in them. The Saturday one was roaring, and magnificent to participate in.

The week that we spent in City Square was bizzare for me. Personally, my emotions were all over the place, more on account of my chemical composition than the nature of the Occupation. OM was beautiful. Ask Rabid Cloud Wolf, he probably got more out of it than any of us. To share the space with the other Occupiers, with people who came in off the street for a look around and to ask questions, to share our tent with strangers, smoking joints at midday on the Yarra, it was completely foreign. I was lucky enough to moderate one of the GAs, on the Thursday I think. We’d had quite a tense GA the day before (the question of vilification of the ‘1%’ was thrown quite abruptly into the GAs face by the ‘dissenting woman’, who was never heard from again) so I think everyone was happy to cruise through without too much hassle. That was lovely. 

I don’t enjoy the lack of tension though. I didn’t get involved to experience communal life. That was brilliant, but I’m interested in class politics. I’m interested in Revolution, and it isn’t on the cards for Australia. I can’t be sure how numbers are in the other Occupations, but things seem a little quieter. The markets are stabilising (for the time being). Neo-liberalism may be discredited intellectually and in practise, but it’s rolling on anyway. I don’t like the idea of violent revolution that much, but it may be that it has to get that bad before the entire 99% are willing to stop work, get off their smart-phones and use their physical bodies to demand change. They’re doing it in Greece (SOLIDARITY!), but aside from the PIIGS, not a lot looks volatile. In summary, I’m completely unsure. I feel intellectually dis-armed, and I suspect that may be a good thing. 

-Peter The Great