Photo: Stacy Lanyon
I was watching what was happening in Wall Street in
September. Then, it happened in London
in solidarity in October. I was watching it from home, and I was recovering
from long term depression. I was already of leftist politics, but I wasn’t
brave enough to go and stay down there. Because I was already a writer, I
decided to submit articles to the newspaper that was set up in the London camp called The
Occupied Times. Luckily, they decided to publish a couple of my articles. Then,
they eventually just asked me to join the editorial team, so I’ve been doing
that for the last few months. I was drawn to it because it filled a need that I
think that there is in politics and public discourse where everything is so
broken, so corrupt. There doesn’t seem to be any sort of vehicle within
the mainstream that can actually make the radical change that I think is
necessary to deal with the huge problems that we are facing in our times, and I
think that Occupy has been the best answer to that I’ve seen so far. I found it
kind of inspiring to get involved.
I think it’s as important as anything can be in terms of
what it’s actually trying to do. I don’t know whether Occupy itself, in its
current incarnation, is necessarily going to be the eventual thing that makes
the break, that changes the paradigm that we’re in. Then again, I don’t think
that’s what Occupy is about. It doesn’t need the victory itself. It’s about the
problems rather than the glory of solving them. I think it’s so important
mainly because of the environmental side of what everyone is facing. Capitalism
is, I believe, unsustainable. It’s focus on perpetual growth, year on year, to keep
on feeding itself and to keep on powering the cogs is just going to completely
degrade the planet to the point that, in the next one hundred years, it’s going
to be unrecognizable.
People in the poorer parts of the world are already
suffering from climate change in ways that most of us can’t really imagine
anyway. Even if it’s just to change the discourse to start to subvert what
people think is common sense, the neo-liberalism or the free market that the
main stream propagandizes is the only way. There’s an alternative. Even if
it’s just to subvert that kind of really damaging, demoralizing state of
affairs that’s happened for my entire life, then I think it’s really important
and really worth laying it all on the line for. The longer I’ve
been involved with it, I’ve found myself becoming more dedicated to those
causes and more willing to risk personal gains or personal welfare for more
collective ideals. I think a lot of people I’ve met have been the same.
I think that there’s a lot of idealism, which I think is
needed from some people, but I don’t think that’s really where I come at things
from because I think that people’s pure political and economic theory
never actually is what comes out in practice. The idea of neo-liberalism is
that it sort of minimizes the state to the smallest possible thing and just
lets the private sector go in. But actually in practice, there’s a huge public sector,
and it’s the military, and it’s the police force. It’s doing everything that it
can to make the 1% richer. On the flip side of it, I don’t think that things
like pure anarchism or pure socialism as you would read it in their theories
are necessarily going to actually, in my opinion, solve some of the larger
problems that we have, like the environmental problems or the things that have
come about from the fact that the world is so globalized now.
I would like to
see a globalization that’s not based on profit, that’s not based on trade, but
that’s based on interrelation, that’s based on equality and sharing things. I would like to see an economy that’s based not on growth but on environmental
and human good, an economy where the unborn generations of the
future are actually valued as much if not more than the people of the present,
which I think is totally absent from the status quo. No thought of any kind
of economic or political policy, none of it is ever predicated on any care
about what’s going to happen to their grandchildren’s generation. At the
moment, the debt that we are being left ourselves is going to be left to the
people who aren’t born yet. It’s just a crime against humanity.
Michael is on the editorial team for The Occupied Times of London, http://theoccupiedtimes.co.uk/.
Interview by Stacy Lanyon
http://buildingcompassionthroughaction.blogspot.com/
https://www.facebook.com/stacylanyon
https://instagram.com/stacylanyon/
https://twitter.com/StacyLanyon
http://stacylanyon.com/
Michael is on the editorial team for The Occupied Times of London, http://theoccupiedtimes.co.uk/.
Interview by Stacy Lanyon
http://buildingcompassionthroughaction.blogspot.com/
https://www.facebook.com/stacylanyon
https://instagram.com/stacylanyon/
https://twitter.com/StacyLanyon
http://stacylanyon.com/