Global Movements

On Saturday we attended a unique event: a simultaneous demonstration in dozens of cities around the world against the opacity of the existing forms of government. It’s really a unique social movement, comprised mainly of young people, global in nature, based on social networks across the Internet, such as Twitter and Facebook, and with a clearly defined enemy: The collusion between governments and major corporations — financial and mainly extractive — who they view as guilty for the current crisis and the thousands of unemployed and homeless. It is built around an attitude of indignation and the slogan, “occupy.” Occupy public spaces of power: a form of social action that has been very well described by Bernard Harcourt as political disobedience. He joined the Occupy Wall Street movement manifesting in New York (and from there in other large American cities), the Spanish 15-M movement and protests against unemployment and cuts in social rights, similar movements in Greece, France and England, the protest movements of the Arab Spring against authoritarian governments, the Chilean student movement protests against the commercialization of education and inequality, indigenous movements against the destruction of their habitat in the name of progress, whether roads or open pit mining, in short, dozens of groups on all continents whose common denominator is that they are standing against a form of government that is too far removed from its citizens and an increasingly inequitable economy.

The protests are difficult to visualize in terms of our traditional ideological references: left vs. right, neoliberals vs. socialists;. In fact, they manifest themselves with equal strength against the social democratic governments of Obama and Zapatero, against conservatives like Sarkozy or Cameron, nationalists like Assad and the traditional ally of the U.S., Mubarak, as well as Morales in Bolivia, Correa in our country or Piñera in Chile. It’s just as Harcourt stated in an article published in the New York Times, “Occupy Wall Street’s ‘Political Disobedience.’” It “resists the structure of partisan politics, the demand for policy reforms, the call for party identification, and the very ideologies that dominated the post-War period.”

It is a movement that basically stands as a rejection of what they see as intimately connected sides of the same coin: On one hand, an economy (as national as it is global) that concentrates wealth more than ever before, whatever the political choices of the governed, and a political system known as “gatopardesco” (also global and national), in which everything changes with a new ruler, so that nothing changes and the citizens have no voice. It is set up just to applaud the decisions of those lackeys of the leader, regardless of their ideology. It’s definitely a demand for an economy and a way of doing politics that is closer to the people, but also one that is more moral, if that term even fits.

It is a movement that raises outrage over a problem that challenges us as a society; it does not properly raise policy proposals, it is unwilling to enter into negotiations to solve a given topic, it does not make political calculations of convenience and, for the time being, refuses to play to short-term accommodations. It is a profound social tide that obliges us to redefine ourselves.