Riot cops evict Occupy London camp

Although there are tons of moans you can have about Occupy London, it's sure as hell depressing to see the bile, spite and joy people have been sticking up on blogs and media articles cheering on the eviction. Is it just London or also the rest of England that's become so servile, uncritical and miserable?

What do people want then - to work hard, to kiss the bosses ass and to pay through the nose for every single thing you need to survive because that's the dignity of the great individual doing it for him/herself?

People just seemed to obsess on Occupy costing taxpayers money and that they couldn't understand what it was about because there were no bullet point manifestos. These two things seem like reflections on the simple-minded self really that can't think and speak critically (even if you disagree with Occupy) and wants to hate any bogeyman that seems to take money away from you although you put it as taking money from the vague mass. It's an incredibly infantile mode of being that stamps it's foot and says 'that's my hard earned money' and 'I don't understand it so it must be bad!'.

(As an aside, and this was always gonna be the dismal failing of the 'we are the 99%' strategy. is that it's just so obviously a bad strategy because we are not all a 99% soundbite. We are a much more complex set of communities and individuals and politically we need to organise with this in mind. I have very little in common (apart from the alleged 99% tag) with cops, screws, low-paid but bastard civil servants, middle-class gentrifiers struggling to pay their mortgage in Dalston, TFL ticket inspectors, shitty Housing Officers, community-minded do-gooding artists, buy-to-let working class investors, mean spirited petit-bourgeois shop keepers, liberal reformist University lecturers and so on...)

Capitalism is just so good at masking the fact that it is a society run on just another set of ideas. Seemingly so good that people have forgotten this and so seem a bit closed-minded to anything alternative that could encompass radical changes to people's lives in a way that things were more equal and less disastrous for the planet itself. It was noticeable how when the austerity regime began to kick in (and some people seemed to be begging for it because 'we all did so well out of the previous good times'...blah blah) the then current vogue of greening production and consumption went out of the window!. It's dog eat dog world now, eh?

All of these attitudes would probably explain why the unthinkable happened a long time ago when first Boris Johnson won the Mayor of London post and then Cameron was elected to power. Seems pretty indicative of how people are spineless and crave simple soundbite culture and wacky leaders against a possible more intelligent and common sensical society that could deal and negotiate complexities and foment of ideas and invention.

If we could put the population of London into a time machine and take them back to 1974 for just one day, people would probably have no idea (or even reference points) of how to deal with all the alternative and radical ideas that were floating around in and out of mainstream society re: family, sexuality, waged labour, housing, culture and so on.

If we were to take the population of London from 1974 and whizz them forward to 2012, they would similarly fail to recognise the society they landed in and if told that this was where all their struggles would lead would probably commit mass suicide!

So big up to anyone in London and beyond who isn't like this...and there are a lot of us wading and surviving in the London Pig Shit City, the mecca for the super-rich, over-regulated and dangerously policed and the ever ongoing triumph of the look over the content.

The Rat Race gets tougher everyday. Keep on running til you drop or...Or what? That's up to us to discuss and plan and plot.