2011 Sets Revolutionary Base Camp;
Assault on Summit Begins This Year
By Steve Clark
Cheer it or fear it, a global revolution is now in the making.
Staring a bleak and desperate future in the face, the world’s coming-of-age generation launched a broad social rebellion in 2011, occupying public spaces and demanding fundamental reconstruction of social, economic and political power all over the world.
Because this rebellion is driven by necessity – by the harsh, despairing realities of life for most young adults – and because the world’s financial elite and heads of state cannot stem the crisis, our world’s youth are bound to step up their efforts in 2012. They will:
- Broaden the Occupy Movement;
- Direct struggle against the banking and corporate elite and their operations;
- Clarify political demands and install progressive politicians in states where elections allow; and, ultimately,
- Force the banking system to collect a fee on all commercial transactions for the full employment of youth and others in vital, community-based, globally-coordinated problem-solving.
In this, they will have the support of their Gen X next elders and the progressive wing of elder Boomers and will be praised by future generations for their bravery and perseverance when the world needed it most. Most immediately, they will look after their own essential need to survive in a corporate-dominated world threatened with cataclysmic collapse.
When the banks and the corporations are compelled by popular pressure to disgorge a revenue stream from commercial transactions, the revolution will be in full fruition, with only the details to work out of how to popularly manage this new, revolutionary, global problem-solving endeavor.
Of course, those details area no small matter, but the movement that comes together to impose social accountability on the global banking system will certainly be capable of fulfilling its more strategic destiny as well. No doubt, the movement will empower civil society and the global grassroots. It will enshrine public service, ensure social security and embrace sustainability.
The fact that this outcome can now be so readily visualized is powerful testimony to the fast, accelerating pace of this revolution. Conditions are rapidly ripening. Articulation of the demand is ever-sharper. Take a moment to view this powerful spot, The Banker, from Britain.
As even this spot shows, however, the main danger is the thoughtless assumption that genuine social and ecological problem-solving must or can be handled by the same bloated, corrupt, stagnant system of corporate-dominated nation-states that runs the world today. While nation-states and national treasuries need to be compelled to collaborate in the new problem-solving, the work must be popularly-managed, led not by states themselves, but by a new, global, social and political network in which any interested person can participate. Just as the social media now enable resistance and rebellion, they will someday – sooner rather than later – enable popular direction of the world’s problem-solving capacity as well.
Unfortunately, however, corporate forces and professional politicians, who abhor the notion of popular control, are currently well-positioned to influence events to retain exclusive nation-state authority over the revenue stream. Nevertheless, while it now seems possible that the initial adoption of a commercial transaction fee may merely channel revenues to bail out the banking system (again), the necessity of a genuine, full-employment, problem-solving alternative will only compel the further development and power of the present global revolution.
2011 has set the stage. Judging by the past year’s rapid developments, 2012 promises startling revolutionary advance.
You can help. First step, master the simple intricacies of Facebook networking and info sharing. Second, promote establishment of a commercial transaction fee (robin hood tax) and, most importantly, popular administration of this revenue stream. Third, get ready for struggle and prepare for success. Our future is rapidly coming into view.
