In an unplanned, spontaneous moment of mass action and collective exuberance, East Berliners had grasped the opportunity to secure their freedom. The street parties that erupted across the city had all the hallmarks of a raucous and hedonistic medieval carnival. The events that night were infused with the spirit of carpe diem.
Yet the apparent spontaneity of the crowd was something of an illusion. In fact, it was a deeply prepared spontaneity, rooted in years of organising by opposition movements going back at least to the early 1980s. This was not just the case in Berlin, but in other cities where protest erupted in 1989, such as Prague and Budapest. Their carpe diem energy didn’t suddenly come out of nowhere – they had been primed for such a moment. ‘The throngs that appeared on the streets,’ writes historian Padraic Kenney, ‘emerged onto a stage already prepared for them and by them.’6 It is only when we take this longer-term perspective that we can truly recognise how much carpe diem politics shaped the downfall of the East German regime, and others across Eastern and Central Europe between 1989 and 1991.
The East German opposition movement, mainly based in the city of Leipzig, organised at least thirty-five anti-regime public protests in the two years prior to the events at Bornholmer Street. In June 1989, inspired by street demonstrations in Poland and Czechoslovakia, and sensing that the government leadership was in disarray, they did something new, holding an illegal music festival with bands, dancers and street theatre, which led to eighty-four arrests.7 Then a demonstration organised for October 9th drew an unexpectedly massive crowd of nearly 100,000 people and was too big for the police to stop. This was the tipping point: the opposition had taken the initiative and the ruling elite was on the back foot. In response to the Leipzig events, a wave of colossal protests swept across the country. In East Berlin, rock musicians held a public concert calling for democracy while the Stasi looked on in dismay. On November 4th a theatre group called for another mass street protest.8 By the night of November 9th, public opposition to the regime was already supercharged. The breach of the wall was not a freak occurrence; East Berliners were ready and waiting to seize the moment.9
The carpe diem flavour of public protest was even more pronounced in other countries than in East Germany. In the Polish city of Wrocław, the opposition movement – led by the guerrilla street-theatre collective Orange Alternative – explicitly drew on the spontaneity and hedonism of the carnival tradition to taunt the ruling regime. One typical event that took place on Tuesday, February 16th, 1988 – Mardi Gras or ‘Fat Tuesday’, the eve of Lent – was a ‘ProletaRIO Carnival’ (Karnawal RIObotniczy), described by its organisers as ‘socialist surrealism’ and attended by thousands of people. The crowds were entertained with children’s ditties and Stalinist songs. A parade of playful characters caroused around the streets, including people dressed as skeletons, Smurfs, a Red Riding Hood arm-in-arm with a wolf, a bear carrying a machine gun, and a group of Ku Klux Klansmen waving a sign reading ‘Open the borders, we’ll run to Calgary!’ The crowd chanted ‘Hocus pocus!’ and ‘The police party with us!’ When the police grabbed a reveller, the boisterous crowd immediately rushed in to free them: the authorities had never been properly trained to deal with Smurfs. In a similarly surreal event in Prague in August 1989, The Society for a Merrier Present held a silent march called ‘A Fruitless Action’, where they paraded up and down the Charles Bridge wearing helmets made from watermelons and holding up blank banners.10
These kinds of left-field cultural events – frequently organised by theatre groups, musicians, peace activists and ecological campaigners – which took place throughout the region between 1986 and 1989, might have looked frivolous, but were far from being so. They kept ruling regimes off balance, and created new social spaces for the expression of public dissent. Gradually they grew into larger opposition movements – the very movements that took to the streets in Prague, East Berlin, Krakow, Budapest and other cities in the crucial year of 1989. As Padraic Kenney concludes, ‘What started as just a carnival became a revolution.’11
Looking at the big picture, the demise of state socialism in East Germany and elsewhere is revealing about the potency of carpe diem politics. It is certainly true that other factors played a critical role in events, including Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms that encouraged political dissent, the economic failures of the communist system itself, and a catalogue of miscalculations by state socialist leaders.12 But there is no doubt that seize-the-day movements were a vital and necessary element of what turned out to be one of the major political transformations of the twentieth century. The story of 1989 cannot be told without them. In the absence of carpe diem activism, the political possibilities would have remained small cracks rather than the grand openings they became, and the opportunities they offered may never have been seized with such vigour. Seizing the day is not just a philosophy of everyday life; it is the stuff of history itself.
We also learn an important lesson about one specific carpe diem trait, namely spontaneity. Although a potentially powerful ingredient of effective mass mobilisation, it is not a magical one that can be conjured out of nowhere. It might take years of nurturing before it is ready to erupt on the political scene. Just as spontaneity in the creative arts may be a matter of practise, practise, practise, so spontaneity in the political arts may be a product of organise, organise, organise. Social movements looking to draw on the energy and force of carpe diem must recognise that spontaneity is like a cherry tree: its blossom may burst open in a day, but its buds are the fruit of a year.
HOW HORACE INSPIRED A NEW AGE OF DISSENT
The events in Eastern and Central Europe were not a one-off, flash-in-the-pan instance of carpe diem taking centre stage in politics. The wave of social movements that emerged in the West in the 1960s and 1970s – including the movements for gay rights, women’s rights and the peace movement – were equally suffused with Horace’s spirit, as were the carnivalesque demonstrations of the Global Justice Movement. Now I can report that his spirit is back: over the past decade an extraordinary upsurge of popular mobilisation has emerged across dozens of countries, much of it fuelled by the fire of carpe diem politics. So where does it come from, and what does it look like?
The recent outbreak of grass-roots rebellion has its origins in a growing dissatisfaction with governments that have failed to deal successfully with a series of major global crises, ranging from the influx of refugees and international terrorism, to climate change and – perhaps most importantly – a worldwide economic recession since 2008 that has had a devastating effect on jobs, housing and the provision of public services. It is also because of a growing sense that governments no longer represent their citizens, and are much more effective at representing the corporate interests to which they are beholden, from big banks to Big Oil. Trust and confidence in governments has plummeted as a result.13
In such circumstances, it is no surprise that ‘anti-system’ political candidates are on the rise, offering to break with the traditional party politics of the past: witness the election of Donald Trump. But just as important has been the arrival of a new generation of social movements attempting to change politics from the ground up. Most – but by no means all – of them are broadly on the political left, or anti-authoritarian in character. I’m thinking, for example, of the anti-austerity Indignados movement that ignited the streets of Spain in May 2011, whose main slogans were ‘They Do Not Represent Us’ and ‘Real Democracy Now’.14 A few months later came the Occupy Movement – inspired by the Indignados and the Arab Spring – which rapidly spread from Wall Street to 951 cities in eighty-two countries, prompting Time magazine to declare ‘The Protester’ as its Person of the Year in 2011.15 Since then waves of mass protest have erupted everywhere from Rio and Istanbul to Kuala Lumpur and Hong Kong.
There has simultaneously been the rise of new global issue-based movements that bear little resemblance to conventional political parties, such as the climate change campaigning organisation 350.org. We have
also seen the emergence of web movements like Avaaz, which mobilises its international brigade of 40 million members to protest on matters ranging from human rights and ecological destruction to animal welfare and wealth inequality, focusing its efforts on ‘tipping point moments of crisis and opportunity’.16 While such organisations often concentrate on online campaigning, they are also active offline: if you had been at the 50,000-strong London march to pressure the Paris Climate Change talks in November 2015, you might have seen the Avaaz truck pumping out disco classics from its loudspeakers – and my seven-year-old daughter holding a homemade placard and dancing down the streets next to it.
Put all these movements together and it becomes clear that we are experiencing one of the most dynamic periods of public protest action ever recorded, on a par with momentous periods such as the 1960s. Although we may not necessarily detect it as we go about our daily lives, the evidence is overwhelming. A recent study of over 800 protests in more than eighty countries revealed a steady rise in the number of mass demonstrations and other forms of protest since 2006, with the majority focusing on economic justice and anti-austerity issues, and failures of democratic representation and corporate influence in politics. Some have been amongst the largest protests ever known: thirty-seven of them – in countries such as France, India and Chile – gathered crowds of over a million people.17 Another study showed that the frequency of public protest in the UK has been escalating since 2008, reaching a peak of 206 recorded protest events such as marches and strikes in 2015 – the highest level since the 1970s.18 One of the most important developments is the changing profile of who turns out on the streets: along with traditional protesters from the labour movement, there are an increasing number of students, middle-class professionals, housing activists and minority groups. We are witnessing a new age of dissent, and it’s happening on a global scale.
Number of protests worldwide by main grievance/demand, 2006–2013.19
But the really fascinating part of it all – at least for anyone with Horace on their mind – is that these movements are hotbeds of carpe diem activism. One of the world’s most influential thinkers on this new wave of protest, the sociologist Manuel Castells, calls them ‘networked social movements’. Like all social movements through history – such as the anti-nuclear and feminist movements in the 1970s – they primarily aim to influence politics from outside the formal sphere of elections and political parties. So what makes the latest wave so novel?
For a start, the movements operate in ‘hybrid public space’: you will find them not only occupying physical urban spaces like the Puerta del Sol in Madrid or Tahrir Square in Cairo, but digital public space created by networking platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr, which authorities find difficult to control. They are relatively ‘horizontalist’ in their organisation, favouring democratic consensus decision-making over more hierarchical structures with easily identifiable leaders. This, according to Castells, is a reflection of the horizontal and leaderless nature of internet networks themselves. They are also ‘largely spontaneous in their origin’, using social media to bring people almost instantaneously onto the streets, creating a flash-mob style of politics with a viral quality that can spread rapidly and take advantage of new political openings.
A further trait is that they often build temporary camps or communities where supporters sleep, eat, learn and make new friendships and alliances. In doing so, says Castells, they enable people to step outside their normal lives to ‘live in the moment in terms of their experience’. At their core is an existentialist vision to create a ‘utopia of the autonomy of the subject vis-à-vis the institutions of society’, where the priority is ‘exploring the meaning of life rather than seizing the state’.20 In other words, they are typically not just about achieving political objectives, but about creating new spaces for the expression of personal freedom and agency.
This all sounds to me remarkably close to a recipe for carpe diem politics. What Castells is really telling us – without quite realising it – is that we are seeing the rise of a new generation of social movements whose chief characteristics are not simply their digital flavour or egalitarian ethic, but that they embody features of the centuries-old carpe diem tradition. It’s as if Horace has been their secret political advisor, whispering into their ears.
The majority of movements identified by Castells and other analysts tend to have progressive, social justice agendas that we might associate with the left. What about movements on the right? Are they too listening to the wisdom of Horace? While there has been a significant surge in right-wing populism in many countries, especially in Europe and the United States, Castells points out that it is generally expressed in the form of political parties that operate mostly within the sphere of conventional electoral politics. Examples include Britain’s anti-European UKIP, Marine Le Pen’s Front National in France, and the quasi-Nazi True Finns party in Finland. These parties do hold rallies and other mass gatherings, but it is not their primary operational mode. There are, however, some exceptions, such as the explicitly Neo-Nazi Golden Dawn organisation in Greece, which styles itself as a social movement as much as a political party.21 There is another exception that deserves special mention, since it has so clearly brought a carpe diem quality to its campaigning: the Tea Party movement in the United States.
The Tea Party emerged in early 2009, just weeks into the Obama presidency. Its agenda, which the political scientists Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson describe as ‘right-wing conservatism’, has included issues such as radical cuts in public spending, lower taxes, gun rights and tougher immigration rules, summed up in patriotic slogans like ‘I Want My Country Back!’22 Backed by plutocratic financiers such as the Koch brothers and conservative news channels like Fox News, it quickly developed into a social movement that could mobilise thousands of people onto the streets.23
The Tea Party’s larger demonstrations have had a distinct carpe diem character. In April 2009 it organised ‘Tax Day’ protests in more than 750 locations across the country as a response to the Obama administration’s $800 billion stimulus package. Amongst the crowds were people dressed up in colonial garb – a reference to the 1773 Boston Tea Party – and others wearing hats with tea bags hanging off them, waving the Stars and Stripes. In September that year, at least 60,000 Tea Party activists marched on Washington DC in the biggest public protest since Obama had taken office. Again there were the flags and costumes, the defamatory banners, the singing of patriotic hymns, folk music and pipe bands, all alongside rousing political speeches denouncing Obama’s health care plan as ‘socialism’. As the New York Times reported, ‘While there was no shortage of vitriol amongst protesters, there was also an air of festivity.’24 This was seize-the-day politics in action, bringing elements of the carnival tradition together with the ideology of the Republican far-right. Whether the Tea Party will continue to use carpe diem strategies, and indeed how long it will manage to survive in the post-Obama era (especially given the rise of the ‘alt-right’), are open questions. But it is evident that seizing the day, in its various forms, has contributed to the story of its success.25
While some organisations on the right have drawn on the power of carpe diem politics, they have not hijacked it for themselves. Its real heartland is the new landscape of networked social movements fired by the ideals of social justice, democratic values and progressive change. They recognise that if you want to mobilise people, excite them, and maintain their allegiance and involvement, then you could do with a little help from Horace. To really understand how seizing the day functions in modern politics, and assess its prospects for bringing about substantive change, we now need to put one of these movements under the microscope. The most obvious contender, which more than any other captures the carpe diem spirit, is the Occupy Movement.
THE BALLERINA ON THE BULL
The Occupy Movement was born online. On July 13th, 2011, the Vancouver-based anti-consumer magazine Adbusters issued a call to
#OCCUPYWALLSTREET on its blog and Facebook page. The instructions were simple: ‘Are you ready for a Tahrir moment? On Sept 17, flood into lower Manhattan, set up tents, kitchens, peaceful barricades and occupy Wall Street.’ The poster showed a dancer poised calmly in an arabesque pose on the Charging Bull statue near Wall Street, surrounded by riot police. It was a serious image, but also a creative one that represented a supreme depiction of carpe diem freedom – opportunity, spontaneity, presence and hedonism all wrapped into one.
The timing of the action was all about seizing a perfect political opportunity. It wasn’t just that September 17th was the anniversary of the signing of the US constitution. It also built on the momentum of public protests in Spain and Egypt, and a brewing summer of discontent, with growing public rage about the inequalities and corporate greed at the heart of American society, especially in the wake of the financial crisis. This anger could be found amongst people who had lost their homes and jobs, pensioners whose retirement savings had been decimated, and especially amongst an army of young graduates who were fed up with using their expensive educations to become baristas and draw love hearts on cappuccinos, with little prospect of paying off their student debts with a decent job (or any job at all). The 99% were becoming indignant, and Adbusters knew it.
Then came the spontaneity. By ‘spontaneity’ I don’t mean that Occupy Wall Street was unplanned. In reality, a committed group of New York anarchists and other direct action radicals worked hard at strategic planning leading up to September 17th, some of them drawing on what they had learned through taking part in the Global Justice Movement ten years earlier. The spontaneity that occurred was much more in the form of the agile nature of the movement and its unexpectedly rapid expansion. On the day itself people started gathering at the bull statue in Bowling Green Park. The original intention was to head for Chase Plaza, but the police had received word and fenced it off overnight. As the crowd reached around 1,000 people, a snap decision had to be made. Out of the five alternative destinations up their sleeve, the organisers chose Zuccotti Park.26
Carpe Diem Regained Page 20