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| Assistant editor, Sayda |
By Kamran Nayeri, November 26, 2011
Since
I last wrote to you in early September, the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement
has burst into the U.S. political scene shifting public discourse to issues
that matters to the working people on a scale not seen since the 1970s. The movement spread like wild fire
across the country and has received support from like-minded people in over 80
countries. The initiators of OWS
themselves were inspired by the anti-authoritarian revolt in Egypt and the Arab
Spring as well as anti-austerity protests in Spain, Ireland, England and
Greece.
While
various socioeconomic, demographic and political groups have participated in
these events, what stands out most in my opinion is the leading role of the
youth. It seems to me that we are witnessing the beginning of a new world
youth radicalization that has
already engulfed Middle East and North Africa, parts of Europe and North
America.
I
will return to this in a moment. Let’s now consider causes for the overnight
and outsized success of the OWS movement.
Three
years into the Great Recession that future looks bleak for the working people,
especially the youth. Witness mass
unemployment that official sources admit will become a permanent feature of the
U.S. economy and increasing poverty especially since the “recovery” of spring
2009. At the same time, working
people have witnessed in clear view how Washington readily showers trillions of
dollars of public money to save the “too big to fail” financial and industrial
corporations while devising plans to cutback trillions of dollars from social
programs that working people fought to win in the 1930s and 1960s. Finally, class collaborationist
leadership of mass organizations, such as the trade union bureaucracy, has
refused for decades to wage a serious fight against employers and government
attacks.
This
situation more or less exists in other industrialized capitalist
countries. The spread of the
financial crisis to Europe and even more draconian policy response in the Euro
Zone makes it plain that we area confronting a crisis of the capitalist world
economy. It is true that the Great
Depression began when the financial bubble burst. However, financial bubble burst because long-term economic
stagnation had set in the industrial capitalist countries. Taken as a whole,
the Group of Seven countries have a flat GDP during the past decade.
The
rise of financial capital since the 1970s corresponds to the long-term decline
of manufacturing industry in these countries. Aggregate demand was maintained through Ponzi schemes that
involved consumers, corporations and government. Lacking their own internal
growth motors, countries of capitalist periphery experience the crisis on an
ongoing basis. We are dealing with a systemic capitalist crisis. The crisis in
the Middle East and North Africa is part-and-parcel of this same systemic
crisis.
The
world capitalist economy was firmly established with the English Industrial
Revolution and its spread worldwide.
However, capitalist industrialization and modernity relied on more than
technical innovations fostered by the dynamics of capitalist social relations,
and capitalist market and accumulation supported by a burst in scientific and
technical knowledge. It required
plundering of nature and labor power on an unprecedented scale and scope. Simply recall that industrialization
has relied on massive use of coal and oil. Today, China starts a new coal power
plant every two weeks to meet its continued industrialization needs.
The
current crisis underscores how capitalist civilization has over-reached its
potential as economic crisis and ecological/environmental crisis finally
converge.
If
this is analysis is true in broad outlines then the example set by the Occupy
movement will be followed, spread and deepen, especially by the radicalizing
youth worldwide. It would also
follow that other social agency—those that are enjoy more social weight but are
also more conservative than the youth, such as workers and farmers, will sooner
or later enter the political stage in large numbers. Likewise, sectional
movements will merge with universal movements, as the OWS movement has
demonstrated already. In particular, rejuvenated labor, youth and
environmental/ecological movements will tend to support each other and act for
universal goals.
* * *
Since
my last communication there has been 98 posts (no. 502 to no. 599
inclusive). As usual, a focus has been climate change (8 posts) and
ecocide (11 posts). Three posts on growing human population. Six posts
are on repression and exploitation and eight deal with the capitalist crisis
and imperialism.
Then
there are posts that look at proposed alternatives. These include reform minded intervention (3 on Green
Capitalism). But they are mostly about resistance (11 posts), visions of
ecological socialism (4 posts) and socialism (1 post). There are 4 posts on the Occupy
movement. As usual, Cuban experiment
with socialism got special attention (18 posts). The crisis over the government
attempt to build a much disputed highway in Bolivia was also a focus with 11
posts.
I
should like to restate a standard journalistic policy: all signed articles
represent the views of their author(s). They are posted here because they
relate to a subject of our interest and some from mass media can even represent
current bourgeois thought. Only unsigned articles are the points of view
of Our Place in the World.
* * *
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