From Arab Spring to global revolution

[xchrom]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/feb/05/arab-spring-global-revolution


A protester confronts riot police in Athens, September 2012. Photograph: Orestis Panagiotou/EPA

Two years on from the fall of Hosni Mubarak, the new Egyptian president is from the Muslim Brotherhood; on the streets of Cairo, the same kind of people who died in droves in 2011 are still getting killed. On the streets of Athens, the neo-Nazi party Golden Dawn is staging anti-migrant pogroms. In Russia, Pussy Riot are in jail and the leaders of the democracy movement facing criminal indictments. The war in Syria is killing 200 people a day. It's an easy step from all this to the conclusion that 2011, the year it all kicked off, was a flash in the pan. But wrong. Something real and important was unleashed in 2011, and it has not yet gone away. I am confident enough now to call it a revolution. Some of its processes conform to the templates laid down in the revolutionary wave that swept Europe in 1848, but many do not: above all, the relationship between the physical and the mental, the political and the cultural, seem inverted.


There is a change in consciousness, the intuition that something big is possible; that a great change in the world's priorities is within people's grasp. The impervious nature of official politics – its inability to swerve even slightly towards the critique of capitalism intuitively felt by millions of people – has deepened the sense of alienation and mistrust.

But the changes in ideas, behaviour and expectations are running far ahead of changes in the physical world. There is greater space for democratic movements in the Arab world, but they are constantly menaced. "The Protester" may have made it on to the cover of Time – but not a single protest has yet achieved its aim.

If we take 1848–51 as a template, the crucial moments of reaction lie ahead: coups, crackdowns, intelligence-led disruption of the activists and hackers. But there is still one powerful factor militating against a return to stability of the kind achieved after 1848: the economy. Even if the Eurozone remains stabilised, and America avoids a political crisis over its budget, the developed world faces years of Japan-style stagnation.

[tama]

1. Fascism

arises from fear, prejudice, paranoia; from attachment to false sense of security in the past. What is new in this new global consciousness and revolution is that we have much better comprehension of sociopsychology of fascism and authoritarian hierarchies than in 30's.

Although you can – as the anarchist slogan says – "live despite capitalism", you can't live "despite" fascism, genocidal racism, extreme sexual counter-revolution and war. As the gears of mainstream politics and economic crisis clash and grind above their heads, I would expect this realisation to be the guiding factor in where the movements that began in 2011 turn next.

Courage!

[lunatica]

2. And the brutal crackdowns don't seem to be stopping anything

I think modern communication technology is a valid weapon on the side of the "The Protesters". The authorities can't stop it the way they used to and if you can't keep the people ignorant, then you have no real power over them.

[Berlum]

3. ...as the gears grind...

"Although you can – as the anarchist slogan says – "live despite capitalism", you can't live "despite" fascism, genocidal racism, extreme sexual counter-revolution and war.

"As the gears of mainstream politics and economic crisis clash and grind above their heads, I would expect this realisation to be the guiding factor in where the movements that began in 2011 turn next.