Occupy

Friday, 28 October 2011 02:01

Written by Neric Acosta

It always begins with a spark, that turns into a flame, and smolders into a burning fire, and with tinder, spreads into a conflagration. Social movements of the like we see now sweeping across the Arab world, or in the Occupy Movement that batters Wall Street’s ‘fortress of capitalism’ and inspires similar mass actions in capitals around the world, speak to that growing democratic, if revolutionary, impulse that begins with germs of discontent and flowers into a vast network or spirit of dissent and hope. Some deride such movements to be fleeting or fickle occurrences, or dismiss them as anarchic, center-less and unsustainable.

But there is authenticity to such human convergence around a deep complaint or a bundle of grievances, or around an idea or a vision of different world. There is something raw, unadulterated, even poetic and sublime, to the drive of vast numbers of people who reclaim space and assert rights, and who hold on a belief that there ought to be a better way of running government or organizing society. In this particular case of the Occupy Movement, we see a people fed up with corporate greed – railing against the nameless, faceless characters entrenched in their posh board rooms, cocooned in luxury, who make decisions involving billions of dollars and all sorts of financial instruments that directly affect the livelihood, credit, and daily lives of the ordinary folk. Or in the case of the Arab Spring, we see a Facebook and Twitter empowered citizenry rising up to reclaim democratic space from the iron grip of their long-staying dictatorial rulers.

We are not unfamiliar with such movements and mass mobilizations – we who introduced ‘people power’ to the world and even in the pre-Internet age set in motion a wave of peaceful struggles to bring down autocratic regimes in many parts of the world. EDSA 1986 represented for us a moment of liberation, not only from a dictatorship, but also from our own sense of fear and limitations. For long, we were made to accept a specious argument, peddled by an autocratic regime, that our freedoms could be traded for economic development, or that we could rely on strongmen instead of on our own capacities.

What the Occupy Movement or the Arab Spring tell us now is that in a world made far more democratic by modern computing (think of Steve Jobs’ iPad or Macbook) – real-time access to information and telecommunications and the instantaneous sharing of data or photos and messages in social networking sites -- ordinary individuals have the power to transform politics and society far more decisively and expansively than ever before. Like a raging wildfire, denizens of cyberspace upload photos and send out text messages thick and fast to mobilize and galvanize mass action. If the example of impassioned youths in Cario’s Tahrir Square earlier this year is anything to go by, the “revolutionary” Internet-driven powers of Facebook and Twitter have now become a defining feature of our times.

The riots in London of late owing to rising discontent over cuts in social spending or the growing protest movement in Greece against austerity measures at the heels of a Euro Debt Crisis are only two examples of this. People from a wide range of sectors bemoan their plight – rising commodity prices, loss of jobs, declining pensions and benefits, decreasing social services – and take their welter of demands and dissatisfaction to the streets, sometimes ending in an eruption of mayhem. Over this layer of discontent and insecurity is the now all-encompassing risk spread of climate change impacts and environmental damage – typhoons, floods, droughts that affect all, even so-called stable and economically-robust countries like Japan that continues to reel from the tsunami and nuclear fallout this year. The average person knows all too well that we live in a world of flux, where great insecurities mesh with grand possibilities.

Still and all, what we do in the aftermath of successful uprisings is, of course, a different story. Bringing down dictatorships is one thing, laden with the romance of revolution and non-violent upheavals, but it is altogether a different challenge when upon victory we fail to cobble disparate interests and begin a process of building or rebuilding institutions. It is one thing to articulate grievance or manifest aspiration in greater numbers, it is another to translate protest or dissent into policy reform or law – or an alternative vision altogether.

Into a vacuum of leadership in a post-revolutionary phase enter ill-organized, amorphous or even extremist groups, effectively undermining the potential for a stable, open and free new order. We watch with great hope as countries in the throes of such change – like post-Mubarak Egypt or in the more complex and bloody post-Gadhafi Libya – rebuild from the morass of tyranny. Such is the double-edged challenge of our times. How the creative, power-diffusing mass actions are ultimately transposed to the kind of stable democracies and fairer economies we all seek and deserve.

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