July 20th was the tenth anniversary of the eviction of the tent city
Democracy Village at Parliament Square. But on its significance I had
meant to write something earlier but it proved difficult with local BLM
related meetings in July.
But here it is for anyone interested in that tent occupation experiment:
http://amplife.org/blog/tentXx
"It is futile to analyse Democracy Village in terms of sharp
revolutionary agendas that some had set out because no one agenda could
have fitted its time. With its rag-tag mix of activists and the
homeless, many ex-servicemen returning from war, the village lived on
the solidarity bound by its everyday. Life in a traffic island consumed
the revolution, so life /became/ the revolution.
...."
The key point I make is that it marked the transition point from a world
of activism based on an immediacy of offline relationsto the new social
media based activism that we saw with Occupy in 2011. It was as if we
had gone from Caliban to Ariel if we went with all the platform hype.
But going through my archives in this pandemic time I am trying to
reconcile the now with the then ten years ago. The 81 days of Democracy
Village coincided almost perfectly with the London lockdown (+/- 1 month).
In my nomadic life, I have been involved over 2 years with voluntary PAR
(Participatory Action Research) work in the East End; stranded the last
few months the focus has been on how Covid-19 is affecting the
community. But first we lost half the research team of 25 because they
have no internet access with public libraries closed and can not afford
the equipment. The researchers are based within community not academia;
they reflect the material conditions of community life that even today
lives without the internet in significant sections. The knowledge base
on community relations they produce for the research is based on that;
and that has been even more distorted or silenced. Covid-19 has really
showed up the digital divide in low income families even in 21st century
Europe.
I would be very interested in connecting with researchers with parallel
community experiences in other cities.
What really concerns me is the question of activist agency in post
Covid-19 'new normal' political practices in community and what future
paradigms we project without making the mistakes of the past decade. How
we recover the ground of our own lost materiality and autonomy to live
more equitably with the 'virtual-industrial complex' in the coming years
with an increasing austerity.
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