Welcome to the Occupation
by James Horrox, james_horrox[at]hotmail.com
As the world hunkers down to face a new century locked into perpetual war, the British government continues to exploit the political capital gained after 9/11 to carry out arguably the most sustained assault on personal freedom ever seen in this country. With individual liberty and autonomy fast disappearing under an avalanche of laws designed to broaden the scope to which the state may “legitimately” interfere in its citizens’ lives, reports released in November last year by Privacy International and the Surveillance Studies Network detail the extent to which surveillance technologies have become a key weapon for use alongside proto-totalitarian legislation in this government’s obsession with complete state-control.
These reports warn that Britain has become, in the words of Information Commissioner Richard Thomas, a “surveillance society”; according to the SSN, monitoring technologies are now “extensively and routinely used to track and record our activities and movements”, the kind of surveillance under which we go about our lives ranging “from US security agencies monitoring telecommunications traffic passing through Britain, to key-stroke information used to gauge work rates and GPS information tracking company vehicles”. Systematic tracking and recording of travel and use of public services, automated use of CCTV and its combination with biometrics, companies analysing our buying habits and financial transactions, and workplace monitoring of telephone calls, email and internet use have all become staples of daily life in Britain. If these trends continue, the SSN projects that within ten years surveillance in this country will be “all-pervasive”.
If the SSN’s report gave the UK food for thought, a similar report released around the same time by human rights group Privacy International went one step further, putting Britain bottom of the entire Western world for the protection of individual privacy. We are the worst-ranking country in the European Union according to their findings, the only EU country in the black category denoting “endemic surveillance”.
But while the many large-scale and overtly proto-totalitarian schemes being implemented by the government are clearly a serious cause for concern (and it is mildly encouraging that they have been recognised as such by Left and Right with near-universal complicity), the real problem here is a perhaps more insidious one. Sure, large scale, state-run surveillance technologies coupled with the tide of supposedly ‘anti-terrorist’ legislation makes it ever easier for the government to incarcerate anyone it chooses to deem a terrorist, placing freedom of speech and association in even greater jeopardy than they have traditionally been in this country – that is obvious; but the way in which institutionalised snooping of the kind seen today extends into the basic fabric of British society actually has ramifications of a more far-reaching and damaging kind. Surveillance on the “endemic” scale we are currently experiencing creates a climate of suspicion, breeding a lack of trust in society from the most fundamental levels which damages the ever-weakening bonds of community upon which the health of a society depends. When parents start using webcams and GPS systems to check on their teenagers’ activities for example, they are saying they do not trust them; when welfare benefits administrators demand evidence of double-dipping or solicit tip-offs on a possible “spouse-in-the-house” they are saying they do not trust their clients; when an employer uses key-stroke information to gauge work rates and GPS systems to track company vehicles, he is saying that he does not trust his employees.
The basic, interpersonal relationships from which society is built depend on trust, and it is not difficult to see how the institutionalisation of surveillance practices like these drives a wedge between individuals, creating an atmosphere of distrust in virtually every sphere of human interaction. Moreover, to single out the example of “the workplace”, in the case of the employer spying on his employees we see how the manner in which such technology has become enmeshed with the capitalist economic system further depersonalises and dehumanises the already inherently antagonistic relationship between capitalist and worker, with surveillance technologies catalysing a rapid acceleration in the breakdown of social relationships by aggravating existing antagonisms built into the capitalist economic model.
Another example is about to be played out in the characteristically obnoxious manner in which the government is proposing to enforce its forthcoming smoking ban. Councils across the country have been given £29.5m of taxpayers’ money to pay for a network of informers to enter premises “undercover”, to sit among drinkers and even to photograph and film people. These informers will be able to hand out on-the-spot fines to individuals violating the ban and are encouraged to bring about court action against premises. In schemes like this we see how the government is now actively encouraging people to go out and spy on each other, thus inevitably stoking the fires of suspicion, resentment and therefore creating fragmentation and division in society, rather than promoting social cohesion. Anarchism’s aim is to bring people together, to strengthen bonds of community and mutual help; with snooping, duplicity and outright backstabbing actively encouraged in such a way it seems clear that anyone promoting the idea of “community” in 21st century Britain is up against an ever more powerful force pulling in the opposite direction.
If we look at this assertion from a slightly different angle though we see that it conceals an even more serious problem for anarchism in 21st century Britain: certain schools of anarchist thought concede that the state itself is a ‘necessary evil’ as long as human beings exist in a certain kind of competitive and mutually hostile relationship which makes it necessary. If this is the case, by fostering suspicion and distrust among the country’s citizens, by actively promoting suspicion and the fragmentation and atomisation of society, the surveillance infrastructure in effect bolsters the position of the state, providing evidence to the public of the validity of its self-professed raison d’être and thus making its inherently authoritarian behaviour even more “defensible”. Here we see how the twin conflicts of “us against the state” and “us against each other”, a solution to the latter being an essential precondition for our successfully resolving the former, are affected by the entrenchment of a surveillance culture. By ripping apart the social fabric of the country and replacing healthy, living social relationships with those of distrust and suspicion, the state makes the attainment of this precondition more difficult, exacerbating the cause of the social ills whose alleged job it is to remedy and in doing so making the argument of those calling for its elimination even more of an uphill struggle than ever.
On the other hand, it means that this argument is one which needs to be heard now more than ever before, for it is clear that no solution to this self-perpetuating cycle will ever be reached while working within the parameters of the state – how could it? All the SSN’s report describes is the logical extension of tendencies inherent in the state and capitalism. It’s easy to complain about recent developments in surveillance and the proto-fascist tendencies of the current government, in seeking a solution we must realise that what we’re talking about is not something that can realistically be separated from the capitalist state.
In other words, all we’re seeing here is the state with the gloves coming off. Those who see a solution to the problem in, for example, placing legally enforceable limits on governmental use of surveillance, are missing the point. In no state under the yoke of government will any amount of “regulatory” legislation ever suffice to prevent its very progenitors consolidating and entrenching their own position – if headway is to be made in rectifying the asymmetry of power inherent in such endemic and intrusive surveillance, it is imperative that we first recognise the utter absurdity in expecting to find a durable and effective solution to the problem by appealing to the antagonist to rectify it for us.