Reclaim the Streets

            The movement Reclaim the Streets, by its liminal nature, easily becomes unfocused and disorganized, defining itself as more of a dispersed carnival and less of an effective protest.  One of the inicial goals of RTS, like any protest, is to raise the conscious level of the classes in power, and cause them to make permanent changes in the system.  After it dissolves into a myriad different voices and expressions, however, the movement loses that capacity because to the classes in power it has become unidentifyable.  Those classes which were targets of the protest in the first place, are now being indirectly accused of everything else that is wrong with the world.  This makes the protesters easily succesptible to ridicule - especially as portrayed by the media;  a fact that, combined with their prone to come in conflict with police authorities, does not contribute to a positive public image.  Their chances of affecting any change in those influencial upper classes, or at least getting them to pubicly announce that change, becomes incredibly slim.
            It is difficult for RTS to state its purpose to begin with, because it exists in many forms and attempts to embrace contrastingly different modes of expression.  All participants are engaged in some form of spectacle which protests the spectacle that is imposed upon them in the first place, one that has taken over their spaces.  The ironic nature of this movement is easily misunderstood.  Grouped together as disruptive, flamboyant and sometimes violent acts of rebellion, these performances bare amongst each other no distinction or even any sense of unison that justifies a clear statement.  To a company executive looking out his window, an otherwise well-conceived and purposeful act of expression may seem like nothing but the usual feminists and environmental activitsts engaged in unusual festivities.
            For a movement with such a powerful motive as the reclamation of public spaces, a more definite means of communicating and organizing their actions would distinguish them from the stereotypical march or riot that the media and the police are used to.  What causes the upper classes to ridicule, the media to dismiss and the police to act violently against the protesters is the liberties which a carnivalesque overtaking of the streets allows them.  A clash of opinions and methods results from the huge diversity of people that congregate for these events, as clearly demonstrated in 30 Frames a Second when some of the protesters take down an American flag from in front of the trade organization while others struggled to put it back up.  A statement made by people fighting and disagreeing amongst each other cannot be made convincingly.
            In No Logo, protesters who blocked Claremont Road and transformed it into a “both beautiful and functional” work of art, still witnessed the destruction of the homes and trees they hoped to have saved. (314)  Even though a powerful statement was made, the reason it did not stop the companies from building the highway is that the entire movement did not pose enough of a threat to the company’s reputation that they would be willing to give up on their enterprise.  To cite an example of a successful strategy, in the film Bowling for Columbine, Michael Moore launches a subtle attack on the composure of the K-Mart corporation in a media-friendly manner.  He attempts to return the bullets lodged inside the surviving victims of the Columbine shootings to the store where they were bought, attracting the attention of the press and threatening the reputation of K-Mart on broadcast television.  As a result, K-Mart withdraws all guns and bullet-related products from their stores across the country, for fear of customer disapproval of their ethics.
            Reclaim the Streets plays with no real threats to the corporations which they protest againts, perhaps being the reason that most of the change affected by their efforts spreads mostly to protesters themselves and the similarly inclined minority of the population, who might study about them and emulate their actions.  From the perspective of the companies, because of their inability to convey a focused, coherent and menacing satement about them to the rest of the population with the press backing them, the only real threat they pose is the annoyance and distraction from the daily workplace of the company executives.

 

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