[Campaignforrealdemocracy] The Times Onslaught

[marknbarrett at googlemail.com]

+1 !!! 
-----Original Message-----
From: Virginia Lopez Calvo <virginialopezcalvo at googlemail.com>
Sender: strikersassembly at googlegroups.com
Date: Sat, 22 Oct 2011 11:44:15 
To: <strikersassembly at googlegroups.com>
Reply-To: strikersassembly at googlegroups.com
Cc: <noii-uk at lists.riseup.net>; <diggers350 at yahoogroups.com>; <democracyvillage at googlegroups.com>; <campaignforrealdemocracy at lists.aktivix.org>; <project2012 at googlegroups.com>; <peopleincommon at lists.riseup.net>; <trafalgar-square-assembly at googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: The Times Onslaught

Hi everybody,

I think these articles have a point. Our Tent City claims to be
anti-capitalist, or so the banner at the entrance say, when this issue has
not been discussed democratically in the general assembly. It was once in
the agenda of the day, on Wednesday, but instead of a dialogue where
opinions from across the board can be heard and there is space for debate,
we only dedicated 10 minutes to the issue during which, rather than
exploring it and trying to come up with a common message, a few of those who
are not scared of public speaking grabbed the mike, gave the usual
ideological speech, a few cheered, a few booed and the discussion was over.

I think we should bring this (again) to the attention of the general
assembly and have a truly democratic assembly where space of debate exist,
where people can learn from each other, where there is an attitude for
consensus, rather than a battle of ideas, and where the outcome can be said
to be 'the voice of the camp'. And most importantly, we wouldn't be
alienating millions who, like me, haven't made up their minds yet on whether
they want capitalism or not, and what model they want if they do. If we are
about real democracy we should get discussing this topic and until then
convey clearly to media that we are not an anti-capitalist movement (at
least just yet).


Virginia.

On Sat, Oct 22, 2011 at 6:25 AM, Mark Barrett
<marknbarrett at googlemail.com>wrote:

> See below for more info.
>
> Suffice to say it is galvanising a response from the Occupy LSX Media team.
> Hopefully we can turn this into a full blown statement of in tent (sic).
>
> Real Democracy Now!
>
> Love and Solidarity
>
> Mark
>
> *Phillip Collins 21/10 Editorial (FYI Collins is also a Times Leader
> writer) *
> Keep your new Jerusalem. I’ll take capitalism*Philip Collins*
>
> The Dale Farm and St Paul’s protesters are deluded. Law and commerce have
> made Britain a much more pleasant land
> ‘Here ye. This is Rooster Byron, telling all you Kennet  and Avon, South
> Wiltshire bandits and Salisbury white wigs. Bang your  gavels. Issue your
> warrants. You can’t make the wind blow ... Take your  leaflets and your
> borstal and your beatings and your health and [naughty  word] safety and
> pack your whole poxy, sham-faced plot and get.”
>
> This is the dissenting defiance of the exuberant fabulist of Jez
> Butterworth’s remarkable play, *Jerusalem.*  Rooster Byron is a Romany
> squatter fighting the intention of the  authorities to evict him from his
> mobile home in the forest. Where is  the beauty, he wails, of the F99
> enforcement notice under the terms of  the Pollution Control and Local
> Government Order 1974 set against the  cherubs and elves of English
> folklore? As the new-build estate creeps  closer, Byron breathes fire
> against the paradise he is losing and  asserts the right of every free-born
> Englishman to have a party on his  green and pleasant land.
>
> *Jerusalem* is too subtle a play to  be agitprop and Byron too complex a
> character to be a cipher for a crude  philosophy. But he does speak for an
> idyll of the common wealth in  which occupation is the law of the land. And
> he does call up a mythical  past that we are invited to believe has been
> degraded by modernity. As  the police stormed Dale Farm in Basildon in a
> violent struggle, and as  protesters camped outside St Paul’s Cathedral, it
> was impossible not to  hear echoes of Byron’s monologues.
> In claiming Dale Farm, where  they have lived without permission since
> 2001, the travellers are making  the very moral demand that defines Rooster
> Byron. The land, they say,  is part of the ancient common wealth of the
> nation. It is the property  of all, a gift of the landscape we all share.
> The police force that  confronts them upholds the law in a way that they,
> along with Rooster  Byron, dismiss as officious and unfeeling.
>
> Travellers can live  however they like for all I care, but the judgment
> from the High Court  was unanswerable: the desire to live in caravans does
> not license a  breach of the criminal law. It is frivolous to pretend, as
> Byron and the  travellers both do, that an illegal encampment has any
> superior moral  force.
> It is also odd to behold a group of travellers who will do  anything to
> make sure they don’t have to travel. And when they are  urinating on the
> police from 40ft-high scaffolding (remarkably there is a  similar scene in
> *Jerusalem*), it is clear that they will do  anything. William Blake once
> said that “the road of excess leads to the  palace of wisdom”. As usual, he
> was wrong. It doesn’t. The road of  excess leads to excess. Both Byron’s
> forest and Dale Farm are policed by  the threat of violence rather than the
> law. It is not fair to say that  Tony Ball, the leader of Basildon Council,
> has been the small-minded  enemy of the common wealth. He has, in fact, been
> the brave and  reasonable spokesman of the common law.
>
> Meanwhile, outside St  Paul’s Cathedral, anti-capitalist protesters have
> begun a vigil under  tarpaulin to dramatise their case that the avarice of
> investment bankers  has ruined the global economy. There is no need to
> minimise our  economic problems to make a mockery of this. There was —
> indeed is — a  crisis in banking. Credit was too freely available and
> regulation was  too crude for the complexity of today’s financial products.
> But that’s  not pithy enough to make a slogan. So, instead, the banner that
> stands  above the tent village announces baldly that “capitalism is crisis”.
>
> It  is notable that more than one British newspaper has solemnly declared
> that, though the protesters may be a ragged bunch, they do have a point.  To
> which it needs to be retorted: no, they don’t. Or rather, yes they  do, but
> they’re hopelessly wrong. The notion that we should look back  before the
> time of capitalism for a gentler era in which machines had  not turned men
> into commodities — the shared vision of Rooster Byron,  the Dale Farm
> travellers and the happy campers of St Paul’s — is  dangerous rubbish. We
> can’t all live, like Byron does, off the proceeds  of selling our rare
> blood. Some of us have to work.
>
> It needs to be  said that the era of capitalist accumulation, to adopt
> their lingo, has  been the most prosperous time in the history of humankind.
> In the 800  years before 1820, income per head across the world was static
> and so  was life expectancy. Life wasn’t much more than a matter of
> choosing  which noxious disease to die from. In the 200 years of industrial
> capitalism, income per head has risen by 800 per cent. Life expectancy  has
> tripled and back- breaking work has declined, especially for  children, who
> now do something unheard of in both the medieval era and *Jerusalem,*namely go to school.
> It  is therefore silly to suppose that something called “capitalism” or
> some malign mechanisms known as “markets” failed in 2008. There was a
> serious failure in one part of the banking sector and, because the
> wholesale lending market ties banks together, an obvious risk of  contagion.
> It was hugely serious and it’s not over yet. But none of this  justifies the
> egregious, almost incomprehensible claim from the St  Paul’s protest that
> global commerce is “our global Assad, our global  Gaddafi”. To use one of
> Blake’s better phrases, thoughts like these are  “reptiles of the mind”.
>
> The thing to remember about the new  Jerusalem is that we will never get
> there. Rooster Byron is an engaging  charlatan. “Who cares about asses like
> Blake or bores like Byron?” wrote  Philip Larkin. There is no idyll in the
> forest and the better world  won’t be the stuff of great drama. The prosaic
> truth is that the  solution to bad capitalism is better capitalism. If we
> want to build  Jerusalem in England’s green and pleasant land, we’ll need
> some builders  and they’ll need to turn a decent profit.
> As long as he lived,  Blake struggled to hold an audience. It is only later
> generations,  yearning for the comfort of a golden past, who have fallen for
> his  euphonious silliness. When we are tempted to declare the natural
> common  wealth of all men, in an age before property rights, and when we
> find  ourselves lamenting the loss of a prior paradise, we are always,
> without  exception, talking mystical Blake-guff.
>
> Evict the travellers and  ignore the protesters. Capitalism under the rule
> of law will never take  us to the garden of earthly delights, but it is as
> close as we will ever  get. “You can see, then,” said W.H. Auden in *
> Vespers*, “why, between my Eden and his New Jerusalem, no treaty is
> negotiable.”
>
> *Times Saturday 22/10 Leader  ( my highlights ) *
> The protesters camped outside St Paul’s for the last week are vague about
> what  they are for. But given what we know they are against, we could assume
> that  in the age-old contest between God and Mammon such avowed
> anti-capitalists  might favour the spiritual over the material.
>
> Yet in seeking to shut down a stock exchange, these would-be
> revolutionaries  have instead shut down a cathedral. As attempts to topple
> the global  financial system go, turning a war against the supposedly evil
> pinstripe  into a conflict with the saintly cassock is a pretty hopeless
> outcome.
>
> With no little presumption, the protesters have renamed the piazza Tahrir
> Square. Drawing further spurious parallels with the Arab Spring, the few
> hundred occupants seek to characterise themselves as the true voice of the
> people. They are not “the people”, however, but quite a small group of
> people, just as those who toil in the Stock Exchange, or worship at St
> Paul’s, or come to appreciate its architectural glory, or trade from
> premises in the area, or navigate their way through the added traffic
> congestion, are also groups of people. Rather larger groups of people,
> indeed.
>
> The freedom to protest is a vital part of our democracy. But so is the
> freedom  to religious assembly in the place of one’s choosing and the
> freedom to go  unhindered about one’s daily business. *The protesters
> should reflect on  these competing freedoms, one of which they are abusing,
> the others  curtailing.  *
> *Having so reflected, if they are the passionate democrats they claim to
> be*,  they should leave St Paul’s in peace, and instead devote such energy
> and  talent as they possess towards improving the world in more practical
> ways.
>
> *Times Leader  Oct 18*
>
> *Profits and Protest *
>
> Critics of capitalism misjudge the causes of the financial crisis and the
>  recuperative power and potential of markets
>
> The global economy remains in a crisis sparked by the collapse of the
>  Western banking system three years ago. A movement has arisen that
> believes
>  it has the answers, or at least the right diagnosis. The problem, it
>  maintains, is corporate greed, the bankers and government austerity
>  programmes. This protest is wrong-headed and there is little purpose in
>  being polite about it.
>
> Protesters gathered in more than 900 cities in America, Europe and Asia
> this
>  weekend. Their inspiration was a protest that started in New York a month
>  ago under the name Occupy Wall Street. Among the rallies was one in
> London.
>  Several hundred demonstrators have now set up camp outside St Paul’s
>  Cathedral. It is unclear when they might leave. The ground immediately
>  outside the building is owned by the cathedral, whose staff have been
>  cautiously sympathetic to the protesters while requiring that worshippers
>  and tourists be able to pass freely.
>
> The right of assembly is integral to a free society, but on the evidence
> of
>  recent history there is little danger of its being overlooked. Protection
> of
>  that liberty has recently made Parliament Square a semi-permanent and
>  squalid place of protest. St Paul’s should not become another.
>
> There are two weaknesses in the demands of the anti-capitalist protesters:
>  their analysis of what has gone wrong and their recommendation of how to
> put
>  it right. Bankers have not helped their case with some grievously
>  insensitive public relations, but it is flatly wrong to explain the
>  financial collapse as a tale simply about avarice.
>
> The crisis happened, first, because monetary policy was too loose for too
>  long, which fuelled a bubble in credit, and, second, because of a
>  misconceived shift to financial deregulation. Banks are not like other
>  industries: they have wider obligations than to their shareholders alone.
>  They have responsibilities to their depositors and to the stability of
> the
>  financial system. They failed in both respects, not only because bankers
>  themselves wanted quick ways to make lots of money, but also owing to a
>  perverse system of incentives in which it made sense to take on debt and
>  deplete capital reserves to boost shareholder returns.
>
> The errors were catastrophic. Reforms in regulation and in the mandate of
>  central bankers are essential. This demonstrates not the immorality of
> the
>  system but the inherent cyclical instability of a complex economy. There
> is
>  always a risk of financial contagion because banks are tied to each other
> in
>  the wholesale lending market. But great economic gains are achieved
> through
>  a system that allocates capital to businesses that can make profitable
> use
>  of it. Britain’s economy is closely tied to the fortunes of the financial
>  services sector, and it makes no sense to hamper this.
>
> What makes even less sense is the programme of the protesters. It takes
> not
>  only a lack of proportion but a lack of moral seriousness to maintain
> that
>  global commerce is “our global Assad, our global Gaddafi”. The movement’s
>  supporters would do well to consider John Maynard Keynes’s maxim that it
> is
>  better a man should tyrannise over his bank balance than over his fellow
>  citizens.
>
> In reality, such supranational bodies as the World Trade Organisation and
>  the IMF are fallible but important means of creating a system of rules
> that
>  limit arbitrary power and serve popular needs. The expansion of trade and
>  economic integration enable poor nations to better themselves. Gains in
>  productivity allow growth in wages and economic development. That is how
>  scores of millions of peasants in China have been lifted out of poverty in
> a
>  generation. The protesters think that they are standing up for the little
>  guy; in fact their mish-mash of proposals makes for a muddled charter of
>  stagnation in which he would suffer most. The fact is that economic
> liberty
>  enables the little guy to stand up for himself.
>

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