The tide turned in 2011, as the world – and America – turned from disoriented passivity to targeted aggression in the revolutionary crisis that now grips humanity.
Ignited by a street vendor in Tunisia and now barreling around the world in a stunning wave, people are standing up for our future. What’s more, in the process they are creating and refining powerful new ways to forge popular consensus and focus their actions.
A revolution is unfolding before our very eyes. It is only tangentially targeted at government. Rather – and much more powerfully – it directly targets finance capital and the military industrial complex.
This week’s episode in popular power and people’s management came in the Komen-Planned Parenthood affair. Social conservatives and their Republican political allies over-reached (again!) and brought on an onslaught of spontaneous, aggressive counter attack from the social mainstream. In a few short days, the people bottled up the anti-abortion agenda and defended the human right of women’s health while, at the same time, applying a new bar of ethical standard to NGO management (i.e., mission, not politics, must drive the program).
These battles are tempering a new generation of grassroots activists worldwide. Networked around and through civil society and community action programs, these (mostly young) highly-educated, globally aware leaders are using social media to rally and network the broader masses to their positive, demanding, problem-solving agenda. In the process, they are tackling every political and corporate obstacle in their way. And the pace is picking up.
How fast does a global revolution move? What forms does it assume?
Currently, we are three and one-half years into the revolutionary crisis (marked as beginning in September 2008, when the bursting housing bubble threatened to topple all the big, global banks). Everyone’s stability (worldwide and through all classes and cultures) is highly jeopardized, and more shocks – European financial collapse, Israeli attack on Iran? – lie ahead. The people are beginning to form conclusions about the financial and corporate roots of the problem. While they beat back rightwing overreach, they also search for ways in which they can unite in a proactive cause.
I suspect this global movement will be much different than movements and organizations of the past. Neither top down nor bottom up, it will be a vast network of on-going, flexible and fluid decision-making rooted in the concepts that each individual’s perspective is worthy and every interested person may directly participate. The world’s developing social media will be the enabling vehicle. Inevitably, in the long run, the power and influence of nation states will wane, but the revolution is not in their overthrow but, rather, in the creation of new, revolutionary means of participatory, global, social and ecological problem-solving that transcends these corporate-dominated regimes, enforcing their restraint and collaboration.
This is the revolution now in motion. It is destined to take a share of global, corporate commerce – a Robin Hood Tax – to finance a full-employment problem-solving agenda worldwide, led by civil society and implemented at the global grassroots.
If you’re onboard with this, let’s build a global-local consciousness network and push it through.
Steve Clark
