the legal and the legitimate

Last Saturday’s events in London once again raised the question of the legal and the legitimate. The media coverage of the ‘March for the Alternative’ suggests that there were two kinds of protest in the streets of London: the first, including the majority of protesters was legitimate, while the second, actions of a ‘violent minority’, was illegitimate. The latter spoiled it for the former. The violence of the few tainted the peaceful protest of the many. That’s the image projected by bourgeois media.

It’s easier this way: media focus on the violent minority, at once undermining the demands of protesters and misleadingly distinguishing between practices by identifying the legal with the legitimate. What is legal is legitimate, said a Greek cabinet member a couple of years ago. He then had to step down from the government due to allegations of corruption. The division between legitimate and illegitimate protest is based on a technicality, the legal frame in which protest is supposed to occur. Protest can only occur in contained environments, it is a binding contract between the police and the organisers. Anything that falls outside it is technically illegal.

Legitimate protest is (for the media) that which is mediated by the police. however, this mediation in the citizen-state relationship sterilises protest. It renders it ineffective: if protest could be (or is) contained its value is only symbolic – civil society remains a symbolic demand, never a practical aim. Our practices (marching, holding banners and placards, shouting slogans etc.) remain in the realm of the symbolic. We act as if we have a political role. The symbolic and contained parade was the only legitimate ‘March for the Alternative’ last Saturday, according to the media.

But protest is unpredictable, it cannot be contained. Because it is in the streets that people show their anger for their government – it is in the public sphere that the definition of citizenship is negotiated. As Chantal Mouffe suggests, institutions and their function must be constantly renegotiated and redefined. What must always remain is a symbolic space where this negotiation can take place. Legitimate acts of citizenship are those that do not oppose the existence of the symbolic space. Protest, unless it denied the equal participation of all in the symbolic space of politics, cannot be illegitimate. It is an expression of the dialectics of history – a particular event that occurs in a particular place due to particular socio-political conditions. Containment of protest is a containment of democracy.

Last Saturday, UK Uncut protesters staged a protest in Fortnum & Mason’s. They entered the store shouted a few slogans and then wandered around talking to the workers explaining why they were there, etc. They were entirely peaceful (they even cleaned up before they left). Police told them that they had to stay in F&M for their own safety: a crowd had gathered outside and they didn’t want to be ‘wrapped up’ in something that was unrelated to their protest. They were told they would walk out to a ‘place of safety’ (there is footage of this here). When they got out they were arrested, all 150 of them, including a legal observer. They selected F&M to stage their protest because it is one of the major legal tax-dodgers in Britain. This case demonstrates the manipulation of the law in order to legitimise and delegitimize social practices.

All protest is potentially legal or illegal, this simply depends on who has written the laws. The legal does not prescribe the legitimate. And the legitimate does not always agree with the legal. The law is (in actuality) an expression of the ruling classes. Subversive acts can be illegal, but not necessarily illegitimate. But the question is not whether UK Uncut is legitimate or not. The question is why have the police arrested the F&M protesters and not its management. There are all sorts of questions to be asked in regard to last Saturday’s protest, but once again the media focus on the false division between legitimate and illegitimate political practices, without looking at the demand of this protest. The idiot looks at the finger pointing at the moon…