Owen Jones writes of the links that run between today's protest movements globally, from Tahrir Square to the Spanish indignados to Occupy Wall Street and Occupy everywhere, and then goes on:
But there are also echoes of the global anti-capitalist movement that rose to prominence at the turn of the century, and of the millions who marched for peace across the world in 2003 as the Pentagon aimed fire at Iraq... [A]fter Shock and Awe slammed into Baghdad, faith in the power of marching diminished among many of the discontented. Protest had to be made impossible to ignore, or so went the thinking. The drive to occupy and hold public space for political purposes was born out of that.
If he's right that this is the thinking behind Occupy (and you can find similar from Allison Kilkenny at The Nation), it secretes some interesting assumptions: first, that people not only have a right to protest, but they also must not be ignored - as if those who are made aware of the protest are bound to agree with it. As I've said before here, the persistent moaning because the big Iraq war demonstrations didn't win the day bespeaks an ignorance of the principles of representative democracy - in which parliaments and not street protests are the seat of sovereign political decisions - as well as the self-deception that opposition to the war was altogether hegemonic, whereas it is well-known that opinion was radically divided.
However, second, it is impossible to credit that anyone of democratic mind could really think protest just in itself, any protest, demands to be heard and then acted upon, since this would amount to a norm of dictatorship - we (a few hundred or thousand or indeed many thousands) march and what we demand is then obligatory, to be acted upon by everyone else, or at any rate by governments obliging everyone else. Therefore, not crediting it, one must suppose those thinking protest must be 'made impossible to ignore' believe they already represent the democratic will. And how, pray, do they know this? Well, there's the complication; they don't. But they just presume it. Even if the sense many Occupy-ers have that, in Jones's words, 'the overwhelming majority [of people] have divergent interests from those at the top' is accurate, this is a fact about the breakdown of people's interests and not about their political will. If you're committed to democracy, any kind of genuine democracy, you still have to win this - popular opinion, popular will - and to demonstrate that you've won it. Until you've done this you have no basis for claiming that your protest obliges anybody, let alone everybody.
In Tahrir Square the protesters want the institutional means of having their democratic will registered. In many countries where these exist, there are protesters who seem to think such institutional means are of little account.
