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The New Revolution is coming
The Change is coming
Perhaps you can hear it from where you’re sitting now. Out there, change is coming.
All over the world, there is the spirit of revolution brewing. It’s not a revolution in the sense that the twentieth century has taught us to understand the word: not a massing of red flags this time, not a determination to seize the state, not a gathering of Peoples’ Parties with blueprints for a new Utopia. This is something that is harder to explain at first sight, but no less significant.
It’s clear why it is happening: the world is more unequal than at any time in history. A planet on which 20 percent of us are rolling in 89 percent of the wealth, while the very systems of life itself come under increasing strain from mass over-consumption. This kind of civilization is not built to last. The uprising against it began years ago, and it’s gathering in speed.
What used to be called, inaccurately, the ‘anti-globalization’ movement has become a worldwide web of people and groupings dedicated to reclaiming the power that the cult of the market has stolen from them.
They see how the stealing of that power has affected their communities and environment as a whole, and as they do so, many see what their causes, their battles and their problems have in common with those elsewhere in the world. They have shaped a movement – the first genuine global movement of its kind - which is still growing. Hundreds of thousands of them come together at World Social Forums, WTO meetings and such annually, and they represent the tip of a political iceberg that is tens of millions strong.
Who are they? They are Mexican Zapatistas, still battling after a decade to reclaim their community rights from the corporate stitch-up of NAFTA. They are the South African poor in the townships fighting water privatization. They are landless people all over Latin America, struggling to redefine their position in a corporate farming world. They are local activists in the US and Canada, using the law to drive corporations out of their small towns. They are farmers in India, resisting corporate patents and the market-driven food industry. They are tribal people in New Guinea, resisting the corporate enclosure of their land for mining and oil drilling. They are young Europeans trying to rethink resistance to capitalism in the shadow of so called "communism"’s spectacular failure.
What is new, and gives cause for hope, is the slowly but surely increasing awareness. Few people involved in this new wave of resistance are very interested in seizing the state. They see where that has taken us in the past, and they also see that globalization has undercut the ability of governments to run their own national economies. In almost every country on Earth, political parties of left, right or center now pledge themselves to the gods of the market. What this new wave of revolutionaries wants is the chance to create its own spaces, free of the rules of the global market. If the state can’t deliver that, other ways must be found.
In other words, this is a power struggle. We can talk about NAFTA, about the WTO, about corporate criminals – but at the heart of it all is an age-old human battle over resources, power and the public mind. Money is currently winning that battle. Societies everywhere are becoming markets first and communities second. We become consumers above all, and only then are we given permission to be human.
This movement seeks to make us people first and drive the market back into its cage. It can be seen, perhaps, as a battle for the public over the private mind. Who wins it – movement or market – will determine our future, I believe. It could be our last, best chance to avoid the McWorld that so many of us can see around the corner.
Wherever you live, it’s coming your way and it’s coming fast. As long as the global economy continues to move in its current direction, spreading poverty, inequality, exclusion and environmental destruction in its wake, this rebellion can only grow and I really hope it will.
~ p e a c e ~