Carpe Diem Regained

by Roman Krznaric

  Nobody could have predicted what happened next: a potentially one-off protest turned into a global movement for non-violent change. Thousands of people turned up to Zuccotti Park over the following weeks to pitch their tents and take part in Occupy’s trademark General Assemblies, as well as to participate in mass demonstrations against the rampant police bullying and arrests. But the real surprise was that within a month Occupy had expanded from Wall Street to over 600 US communities and dozens of countries. There were Occupies taking place not only in politically vibrant cities like Seattle and Oakland, but in tiny towns in North Dakota and Oregon. At the same time, Occupy tents were popping up everywhere from Dublin and Brussels to Buenos Aires and Seoul. The ‘We Are the 99%’ slogan was a cultural meme that spread virally with the help of social media. During November there was an average of around 120,000 Occupy-related tweets per day, peaking at over 500,000 during the police raid on Zuccotti Park on November 15th.27

  While there was plenty of spontaneity and grasping of opportunities, the Occupy Movement had another seize-the-day trait woven into it: presence. A strong sense of being in the here and now emerged because many Occupy zones were, as one participant described them, ‘twenty-four-hour-a-day experiments in egalitarian living’.28 Along with the daily assemblies, there was communally organised food distribution, sleeping arrangements, laundry and education facilities. It would be wrong to say that the camps were utopian idylls: there were frequent internal disagreements, and problems with those who didn’t pull their weight. Still, camp culture embodied a temporary lifestyle shift with a novelty and freshness that gave people a feeling of being immersed in a different present, allowing them to step out of the daily grind of dead-end jobs and paying the rent. As Castells puts it, they entered a kind of ‘timeless time’, where they refused ‘the subservient clock time imposed by the chronometers of their existence’.29

  And what about the final carpe diem element of hedonism? According to the anthropologist David Graeber, one of the organisers behind Occupy Wall Street, the great mobilisations of the Global Justice Movement between 1999 and 2003 ‘were essentially parties’, full of bands, radical clowns and ‘Pink Blocs’ of protesters in tutus armed with feather dusters to tickle the police. Occupy, in contrast, ‘is not a party, it’s a community. And it’s less about fun, or not so much primarily about fun, as it is about caring’.30 When I turned up to the Occupy encampment near St Paul’s Cathedral in London, there was hardly an atmosphere of Bacchanalian carnival: everyone was on edge, ready for a police raid.

  Yet many Occupies around the world made an effort to generate a festive feeling, with mass singalongs, street musicians and dancing flashmobs, which all helped to create a strong sense of community.31 It seems that even when the stakes are high, carpe diem activists want to bring a little hedonism into their lives. As Barbara Ehrenreich notes, ‘Almost every demonstration I have been on over the years – anti-war, feminist, or for economic justice – has featured some element of the carnivalesque: costumes, music, impromptu dancing, the sharing of food and drink… the urge to transform one’s appearance, to dance outdoors, to mock the powerful and embrace perfect strangers is not easy to suppress.’32 Moreover, an element of carnival can be a smart tactic, as a troop of riot police brandishing tasers doesn’t usually know how to react to a bunch of activists in tutus taunting them with feather dusters – just as Eastern European police in the 1980s didn’t know how to deal with protesting Smurfs.33

  Looking back at the emergence of the Occupy Movement, it seemed almost too good to be true: carpe diem politics was making waves on a planetary scale that – at least in terms of sheer numbers and geographical spread – rivalled the global revolts of 1968.34 When the anarchist band Seize the Day played for the Occupy protesters in the English town of Sheffield, they were, in effect, also celebrating the hidden power of that old line from Horace, carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero. Seize the day, and leave as little as possible for tomorrow.

  Yet within a few months it looked like it was all over: the music was no longer playing and the ballerina had fallen from the Charging Bull. Most of the Occupy camps had been shut down by the police, over 7,000 people had been arrested in the US alone, and the energy that marked the beginning of the protests had disappeared. Wall Street was still standing, capitalism hadn’t collapsed, and the mainstream media was declaring Occupy a dead and buried force that had failed to achieve any significant results. While East Berliners had managed to tear down their wall in 1989, what had the Occupiers of 2011 to show for all their efforts? Yes, it was undoubtedly a fine example of carpe diem politics in action, but doesn’t it ultimately show that seizing the day – even on a global scale and powered by digital technology – has no serious future as a force for political change?

  THE HIDDEN POWER OF CARPE DIEM POLITICS

  I have to admit that I was initially on the side of the sceptics, doubting the practical impact of Occupy and similar seize-the-day movements. But after considering the main critiques – discussed below – I have gradually come to a different conclusion, or at least a more nuanced one: for all their drawbacks, these movements are not just playing an increasingly prominent role on the political stage, but are more effective than at first meets the eye. Horace is making a serious mark on contemporary political life.

  The major criticism levelled at Occupy is that it failed to achieve anything substantial because it refused to issue any concrete demands, for example radical tax reforms or new rules limiting corporate funding in politics, a position captured in the slogan ‘Occupy Everything, Demand Nothing’.35 Yet from another angle, Occupy was a resounding success as it catapulted the issue of economic inequality onto the public agenda and changed the terms of political debate. Largely as a result of the protests, media coverage of inequality issues in the US increased five-fold, even more than a year after Occupy Wall Street was shut down.36 The movement also played a vital role in creating the space for the emergence of radical anti-austerity politicians, such as Bernie Sanders running for the Democratic Presidential nomination in the US and Jeremy Corbyn’s surprise victory to become leader of the UK’s Labour Party. Moreover, without Occupy, powerful books on inequality like Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century, published in 2013, would never have had such global resonance. In the language of the cognitive linguist George Lakoff, Occupy changed the ‘frame’ of economic discourse, using the ‘We Are the 99%’ slogan to help erode the dominance of neoliberal ideology.37 And that’s no small achievement.38

  A second critique of movements like Occupy is that too much of their activism is taking place in the digital sphere. It is now relatively easy to get tens of thousands of people to support your cause online through ‘liking’ your Facebook page, following you on Twitter or signing an electronic petition: within just a month Occupy Wall Street was the proud recipient of 400,000 Facebook ‘likes’.39 But this might be best termed ‘slacktivism’ – political action that requires little thought, effort or sacrifice beyond clicking a mouse or sharing a video, and which generates only weak ties between supporters and similarly weak levels of commitment.40

  It is true that slacktivism will not be a panacea for our social and political ills. But what is notable about the movements I have been discussing, such as Occupy, the Indignados, Hong Kong’s ‘Umbrella Revolution’, and earlier examples like the Global Justice Movement, is that they have been incredibly successful at getting their online supporters to step away from their screens and onto the streets. Technology has been used mainly as a means, not as an end in itself. When Adbusters issued the call to #OCCUPYWALLSTREET it was not asking people to click on a ‘donate’ button or sign a petition: it was urging them to take part in face-to-face carpe diem activism. And they did, not just turning up for a few hours of banner waving, but marching in the face of riot police, getting arrested and braving all weathers to set up camps where they lived for days and sometimes weeks. People have been drawn to these movements by the very fact
that they offer an embodied, social experience rather than just another shallow virtual encounter. If the slacktivist contingent are right, we should have seen a decline in active social protests on the streets since the dawn of the internet age. But just the opposite has occurred. They are more vibrant and prevalent than ever, and are helping to challenge our culture of digital distraction.

  A final criticism is that the most striking carpe diem feature of the new wave of social movements – their capacity for spontaneous mobilisation – is in fact one of their fatal weaknesses. Movements such as Occupy may be extremely adept at using social media to bring huge crowds onto the streets with little notice, but this burst of energy might be short-lived and serve little purpose if there is no clear planning behind it. As the journalist Paul Mason observes, ‘horizontalism can stage a great demo, but does not know what it wants’.41 The problem, any worldly-wise activist will tell you, is that spontaneous action is not enough: you also need a highly strategic vanguard group to provide direction, unity and leadership, and to organise the movement’s support base. Angela Davis, a veteran of the US civil rights movement, is worried about where political activism is currently heading:

  It seems to me that mobilization has displaced organization, so that in the contemporary moment, when we think about organizing movements, we think about bringing masses of people onto the street… The Internet is an incredible tool, but it may also encourage us to think that we can produce instantaneous movements, movements modelled after fast food delivery.42

  So have we succumbed to fast food politics? I agree with the critics that if we understand ‘spontaneity’ as unplanned mass action, then this in and of itself will rarely be sufficient for achieving fundamental change. But the spontaneity of many new social movements is less ephemeral and undirected than at first appears, and more clearly resembles the ‘prepared spontaneity’ of artists and musicians I have discussed earlier, which is based on extensive practice and dedicated training. The most prominent movements have often been highly organised, with deep historical roots. Spain’s Indignados (also known as the 15-M Movement) may have brought massive crowds into the plazas, but its ability to manage deliberative assemblies of up to 5,000 people was based on three decades of autonomous neighbourhood organising in Madrid and other cities, as well as what had been learned during the Global Justice Movement. Similarly, Occupy Wall Street didn’t simply spring from an Adbusters post on Facebook: organisers spent the summer of 2011 planning the action at the 16 Beaver Street art space in Manhattan.43 Amongst their ranks were many experienced activists who were schooled in the art of prepared spontaneity. That’s why, for instance, when the numbers that turned up were larger than expected, making the assembly proceedings hard to manage, they began using a ‘people’s mic’ method where the crowd passed back each speaker’s words to people behind them, sentence by sentence, so everyone could hear what was happening and feel involved.44 It was precisely this kind of practised spontaneity that was so much in evidence in Eastern and Central Europe in 1989: in Leipzig, the opposition movement was able to respond swiftly and deftly to new political openings by organising a succession of street protests at short notice (and back then they didn’t have any help from Twitter).

  Prepared spontaneity is an essential prerequisite of successful social movements today, which must learn to harness the energy of the impromptu public protests that have become increasingly frequent due to the rise of digital mass communications. The trick is to develop an organisational nimbleness and dexterity to take advantage of sudden outbreaks of mobilisation before the fire dies or chaos breaks out. When a political opportunity arises, they must be ready to pounce and seize it, being spontaneous in the sense of agile. As any Scout who knows their Horace will tell you: Be Prepared, or You’ll Miss the Chance to Seize the Day.

  ‘Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,’ proclaimed Robert Herrick in his seventeenth-century carpe diem poem. Fine advice. But this does not mean we should wear rose-tinted spectacles when assessing the impact of social movement action that has taken place worldwide over the past decade. Many of the movements of the Arab Spring were failures, beset by internal divisions and unable to bring down authoritarian leaders backed by powerful militaries. In my personal view, Occupy could have been more successful if it had adopted a few clear policy aims like the feminist movement that arose in the 1970s, which campaigned on specific issues such as equal pay and reproductive rights. Maybe it should even have transformed itself into a progressive political party with a strong grass-roots support base, similar to Podemos in Spain or Syriza in Greece: although electoral politics hasn’t always been easy for them, both have made a difference by engaging more directly with the state.45

  These are, however, speculations. What we do know is that despite possessing weaknesses, many social movements such as Occupy have been extremely influential, especially in putting issues like inequality onto the public agenda. Moreover, much of their success has been due to drawing on the power of carpe diem politics. By combining opportunism, presence, hedonism and spontaneity they have been able to create an explosive cocktail of social action and political transformation.

  SEIZING THE VITA ACTIVA

  This new wave of social movement action rarely dominates the mainstream political news, which tends to get caught up in the immediacy of upcoming elections, political scandals and party infighting. But in a world where governments are struggling to deal with endemic problems such as economic recession, immigration, terrorism and global warming, and where traditional parties are losing public trust, these movements are unlikely to go away soon. Indeed, there is a strong possibility that mass protest on the ground – from both the left and right – will play a significant role in shaping the political future and be an important forum for citizen engagement in public life, together with more conventional participation at the ballot box.46 As I write these words, 50,000 people are on the streets of London protesting against the recent EU referendum result and proclaiming ‘We Are The 48%!’ – an echo of the slogan that galvanised the Occupy Movement.47 Such protests may well transform themselves into a broad-based citizens’ movement for progressive change.

  In her recent book This Changes Everything, Naomi Klein argues that tackling one of the greatest issues of our day – climate change – cannot be done without forging these kinds of mass movements.48 I agree. Technological fixes will not be enough. Vague global agreements between political leaders will not be enough. Market solutions will not be enough. There is no doubt that we will need the power and pressure of social movements like 350.org and Rising Tide to shake the politicians and fossil fuel companies out of complacency, and to help create the cultural change and economic alternatives that a sustainable, thriving, clean energy future requires.

  But here’s the real point: the examples of Eastern Europe in 1989 and Occupy in 2011 tell us that such movements will boost their possibilities of success if they can tap into the potential of carpe diem activism. They will need to be strategically savvy about seizing opportunities, they must learn to harness the spontaneity created by digital contagion and cultivate their own ‘prepared spontaneity’, they should strive to build communities that immerse people in the present, and they would be wise to inject some carnivalesque hedonism that keeps everyone’s spirits high in the face of the daunting challenge. It’s time they placed their hope in Horace.

  Apart from its role as a strategy for social movements, why does carpe diem politics matter? Because it helps expand our conception of the good life. It enriches Horace’s Ode XI, suggesting that the adventure of being fully human and grasping the most from life goes beyond ‘just do it’ to ‘just do it together’. Alongside the singular injunction ‘carpe diem’ we need the plural ‘carpamus diem’ – the idea of seizing the day with others – as a way of overcoming the excessive individualism of contemporary life and expressing our collective selves.49 As I learned at the J18 protest that drew me out of the British Library back in the summer of 1999
, it is about valuing what the philosopher Hannah Arendt called the vita activa, by which she meant a life where we actively engage as citizens in the public arena, as opposed to the vita contemplativa, a much more introspective, self-oriented and private mode of living.50 It calls on us to embrace the existential challenge to nurture both ‘me’ and ‘we’.

  Notes

  1 Notes from Nowhere 2003, 173–195; Flesher Fominaya 2014, 50–80.

  2 Castells 2015, 12; Scott 2012, xviii–xix; Klein 2014, 459. I have discussed the place of social movement mobilisation in relation to other forms of political change in Krznaric (2007, 6–15).

  3 Zinn 1995, 380–383.

  4 Scott 2012, 141.

  5 Sarotte 2015, 26–27, 52, 91–93, 107–110, 115–118, 127, 134–141, 145–146.

  6 Kenney 2002, 3.

  7 Kenney 2002, 277.

  8 Sarotte 2015, 95.

  9 Sarotte 2015, 180.

  10 Kenney 2002, 1, 267.

  11 Kenney 2002, 15.

  12 Kenney 2002, 7, 9; Hobsbawm 2003, 279; Hobsbawm 1995, 479; Sarotte 2015, xx–xxi, 180; http://www.faz.net/aktuell/politik/15-jahre-danach-wer-zu-spaet-kommt-den-bestraft-das-leben-1191290.html; www.fed.cuhk.edu.hk/history/history2001/berlinandcoldwar.doc

  13 Castells 2015, 319; http://www.e-ir.info/2012/09/27/why-is-turnout-at-elections-declining-across-the-democratic-world/; http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/europpblog/2013/05/06/decline-in-party-membership-europe-ingrid-van-biezen/