From Arab Spring to Global Summer: Part One
Occupy Paris, circa 1848
When no less a bellwether of mainstream media opinion than Time Magazine declares “The Protester” to be The Person of The Year, the scale and scope of the global protest movement becomes impossible to ignore–even as the risk of cooptation and trivialization commensurately escalates.
We live in interesting times. The most common comparison is to the social upheavals that crystallized, if only for a moment, across much of the western world in 1968. Truthfully, a better comparison would be 1848, which saw the publication of the Communist Manifesto–and the eruption of revolutions from Brazil to Hungary.And yet even that comparison fails, for this is truly something new. A global movement for change fueled- and ultimately made possible-by the Internet. The people who throng Tahrir Square have far more in common than they do differences from the protesters who took a stand in Zuccotti Park-beginning with the fact that they all have accounts on Facebook and Twitter. Unfortunately, the rubber bullets, tear gas, and flash grenades ultimately used in both cases to suppress them are even less distinguishable.
Occupy Portland. Source: lucaskrech.com via creative commons
This resistance might well be the most potentially important thing on the planet for this reason: even if human ingenuity is equal to the task of averting the global disaster human ingenuity has already set in motion, this can only happen if human ingenuity is free to act, unrestrained by a status quo of vested interests unmotivated to see the human misery beyond their own obscene wealth. An effective resistance to international corporate capitalism and the entrenched oligarchies that serve as its essential partners could provide a window of opportunity to preserve our current global civilization.
7,000,000,000 & counting...something's gotta give. Source: triplefivechina on flickr.com
Something must change. We recently “celebrated” the addition of the seven billionth (more or less) human being to this planet. The vast majority of those seven billions live in profound poverty–and unless things change profoundly, they always will. The “Occupy Wall Street” movement in countries like the U.S., UK, and Canada may rightly describe themselves as the “99 percent” suffering at the hands of the corporatist and oligarchs, but they fail to realize that–from a global perspective– they are themselves, literally, part of the privileged one percent of humanity that gets to live in what is recognizably the 21st century.
Something must change. Providing the levels of comfort and convenience enjoyed by even the poorest in first-world nations to the entire planet would require the resources of at least one more planet that we don’t happen to have. Meanwhile, during the time it would take to provide even 20th century levels of infrastructure in places like sub-Sahara Africa, the explosive population growth in precisely those regions would have provided us with another two or three billion impoverished and miserable humans.
It is not a question of saving the planet, merely ourselves–and the thousands of species we are already taking with us into one of the biggest mass die-offs since a big rock from the sky wiped out the dinosaurs. The planet will survive, as will life itself. It is not even much a question of preserving humanity; very little (short of another rock from the sky) is likely to take out all seven billion and counting of us. No matter how badly we blow it over the remainder of this century, there will be some of us left to marvel at how badly we did blow it.
No, it’s a question of preserving, perhaps even extending the culture and standard of living than anyone who is likely to be reading this website is privileged to enjoy. The purpose of this series of articles is to examine the extent to which the growing worldwide protest movement helps provide an answer to that question. We will be examining protest movements in specific global regions, with an eye to these specific questions:
- What are their goals?
- What are their methods?
- What are their chances of success?
Tahrir Square. Source: magdino20 on flickr.com
We are not going to get into specific policy issues, except as they affect these overall questions. It’s pointless to expect OWS to have policy statements on the succession in North Korea or expect those protesting against Vladimir Putin to have an opinion on the Keystone XL Pipeline. The purpose of these movements is to break up the logjam of power, privilege, and concentrated wealth that stands in the way of solving our problems, not solving all the problems themselves.
I would like to conclude this introduction by referring yet again to historical parallels with 1848. Even though the majority of the 1848 revolutions failed, they sufficiently disrupted the ancient status quo of monarchs and nobility to provide footholds for the advance of technology and industrialism in places where such advances might otherwise impossible. One hundred and fifty years later, the multinational corporations created by the industrial revolution have themselves become an implacable status quo, the corporatist ownership class benefiting from them new princes and aristocracy.
If we are to move past the impasses left in place by previous revolutions, we will need new revolutions and new revolutionaries. Are the occupants of Wall Street and Tahrir architects of a new revolution or a paroxysm of protest against the inevitable? Let’s try to find out.
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