Though Cowards Flinch

“The face of Roxeth has changed, it’s lanes, it’s trees, it’s birds have gone. And to compensate for loss of open space [...] its children have electric light, orange juice and cinemas [...] the changes from fields towards slums are called progress. (T.L Bartlett – Birds of Roxeth (1900-1948))”

The Coalition government should be remembered for one thing: the destruction and loss of space.

It’s no surprise, then, that protest against space loss should colour an anti-government movement.

Protests and occupations by students, for example, have highlighted space as a talking point of their struggle.

Anti-cuts movements across the country have bellowed the concern: “save our spaces”.

Demonstrations over library closures have noted the potential lack in learning spaces, otherwise free for use. And the willingness of private providers to capitalise on public spaces gone to tender, in an approach ironically titled big society – no different in ethos to Thatcher’s opinion that there’s no society – gives us a sour flavour of things to come.

At the moment I am in the middle of Trafalgar Square, London, in a demonstration that has become dubbed “an occupation of public space”. It immediately becomes oxymoronic that a public space need be occupied – but this is the reality. Increasingly the space that exists primarily for citizenry is becoming privatised. Though to oppose this development is not a new idea.

In a small pamphlet called “meanwhile”, author John Berger told us that modern civilisation can now, justifiably, be characterised as a prison. The way in which to perceive the world is not as a free person looking into (over-) governed spaces, but as a ‘subject’ trying to look out. The point, therefore, is to try and free up “subversive” spaces as a hub of freedom among the oppression.

The trendy American liberal crowd, Naomi Klein being one example, talk about subverting corporate spaces, and to some extent they have a point.

Though the problem with trying to fight a vacuous government is that it is easy to use vacuous weaponry. Subverting spaces, in and of itself, demonstrates no given demands – and it is a symptom of post-political “resistance” (which might be, as star trek foresaw, futile).

The point, as a point of future policy demand, is not only to subvert space, but to positively subvert everywhere.

The government can crumble, but it won’t give to a group of people unable to agree on a set of positive demands. This is the most important point of all, and should be most important to those who have become part of resistance movements.

How, I ask, can we win, if we don’t yet know what it is we want?