by Megan Kinch – BASICS Issue #27 (Dec 2011 / Jan 2012)
When said we were heading to the ‘occupy’ protest, the cab driver turned off the meter. He told us he came here from Iran, that he had three degrees, and that he had to drive a cab every single day to make ends meet. “At least I don’t have a family to support,” he said. “Isn’t that sad, that a man is happy he doesn’t have a family…I don’t want you thinking I’m a communist, because I’m not, but this system is not working.” We offered him money for the fare, and he absolutely refused, saying he could never take money from people like us, and that he wished he could be there. I had tears in my eyes as we left the cab and entered the occupation, which hummed with energy and activity.
The ‘Occupy Toronto’ encampment at St. James Park lasted 40 days and 40 nights before being evicted. In its slogans – “99% vs. 1%” – and its class composition, the movement was fairly ‘middle class’. But Occupy does represent an awakening of sorts, and it signifies a widening crack in the alliance of middle class elements (or those with middle class aspirations) from the ruling elites. Over the past 50 years, many working class and poor families placed their faith in the education system and advanced degrees as a means of social mobility, and in these aspirations many lost touch with their class roots and class-consciousness. But many children of the working-class would not be able to obtain the careers that the education system promised them, and even those who ‘made-it’ would be working in increasingly precarious situations. Part of the movement of the 99% is about dropping the façade of success and middle-class respectability and admitting that people can’t pay off their huge student loans with minimum wage jobs and unpaid ‘internships’ that are supposed to build towards a ‘career’ that never comes while living in a basement or on a friend’s couch.
Colleen was on the Food Team at Occupy Toronto, and she said it really different from when she used to work at Loblaws: “[At Occupy] we don’t even have a schedule, but yet there is always someone here. A lot of people talk about how people need money to motivate them to work, but I say that’s bullshit.”
The ‘Occupy’ movement has a long way to go, and the reformism and idealism of the movement has been a barrier to participation for people from more oppressed communities and more exploited sections of the working class, where poverty and police violence is matter of everyday life rather something only encountered in a camping trip in the park. For these sections of the working class, unemployment, grinding poverty, and crushing debt are nothing new, and they’ve been protesting and organizing, in their own ways, for decades.
But still, it’s a start in breakup up the capitalist logic that pervades our society and in raising the idea that another world is possible. Rather than simply watching the resistance in Egypt or Greece on T.V. many people stepped out of their homes and into the streets for the first time, learning important lessons that won’t soon be forgotten and that we can only hope will lead to them away from the illusions of this system and towards a greater unity with more exploited and oppressed communities.
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