An isolated event is easy to dismiss as a one-off aberration. But when something happens again and again and again, all and sundry are forced to sit up and take notice. The Occupy Wall Street protests, first confined to the financial district they considered to be hub of corporate greed and the genesis of the current economic crisis enveloping the world, have now spread to a better part of the world.
Seems the zeitgeist is that of disaffectation as most of the countries in the world have seen some form of peaceful or violent protests which have seen the traditionally apathetic middle classes come out to the streets: the Arab Spring, the Anna Hazare movement, the indignados in Europe, the London riots and now the Occupy movement. The people of the world are not happy and they have risen against the oligarchy of the elites that are the movers and shakers of the current system.
The people out on the streets are those falling through the cracks appearing in the neo-liberal capitalist system. This system has integrated the world into a global village which has ironically facilitated the weaving of this sort-of-global ire and frustration against a system that seems to be flailing. In a post-ideological world, these people have come out not for a lofty ideology but for their fair share of the pie. The protesters are neither the subaltern politically speaking nor the wretched of the earth economically speaking. But they are nonetheless sick of the growing inequality and bearing the disproportionate burden those bracketed in the top ‘one percent’ have unloaded on them. Their faith in the system, both economic and political, seems shaken. The instant-gratification generation that communicates in 140 character snippets is not willing to slog it out till the next elections or the till the time the global economy hits the next boom. They want their change now.
All said and done, these movements remain still amorphous and acephalous. The protesters aren’t revolutionary subjects in the traditional sense of the word because they do not have a clearly defined political agenda or a clearly delineated vanguard. But they are revolutionary insofar as helping to refocus policy debates and alerting the powers that be that the exploitative status quo will have to change. Whether they will respond remains to be seen. But the times, they are a’changin indeed.
