http://www.csmonitor.com/2009/0730/p09s01-coop.html
A look at mass protests during the past 500 years reveals surprising clues.
By Immanuel Ness
from the July 30, 2009
Brooklyn, N.Y. - For the first time in generations, people are
challenging the view that a free-market order the system that
dominates the globe today is the destiny of all nations. The free
market's uncanny ability to enrich the elite, coupled with its
inability to soften the sharp experiences of staggering poverty, has
pushed inequality to the breaking point.
As a result, we live at an important historical juncture one where
alternatives to the world's neoliberal capitalism could emerge. Thus,
it is a particularly apt time to examine revolutionary movements that
have periodically challenged dominant state and imperial power
structures over the past 500 years.
Following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, which laid the
foundation for liberal democratic elections and the expansion of the
free-market system throughout the world, revolution and protest
seemed to lose some of their potency.
Leading historians believed that a new age had appeared in which
revolutionary movements would no longer challenge the status quo.
Defenders of the contemporary system were suspicious of nearly all
forms of popular expression and contestation for power outside the
electoral arena. But remarkably, this entire discourse sidestepped
the major impulses of human emancipation of the past 500 years
equality, democracy, and social rights.
Proponents of neoliberalism are indifferent to this history and
dismiss the notion that "another world is possible" that could
alleviate grinding misery and poverty around the world. But in
opposition to the contemporary individualistic system of capitalism,
evidence of a new global movement dedicated to social justice and
human rights has sprung from the ashes of the past. Just in the past
decade, we have witnessed the expansion of worker insurgencies,
peasant and indigenous uprisings, ecological protests, and democracy
movements.
Historians frequently view revolutions as extraordinary and
unanticipated interruptions of state social regulation of everyday life.
This isn't the case.
In my work as editor of a new encyclopedia of revolution and protest,
I've reviewed 500 years' worth of revolutionary actions. And the
surprising pattern I've found is the regularity of volatile and
explosive conflicts, commonly revealed as waves of protest from
within civil society to confront persistent inequality and
oppression. While historians cannot forecast the time and place of
revolutions, the past has a sustained, if disjointed, record of
popular resistance to injustice.
History shows that revolutions must have political movement and a
socially compelling goal, with strategic and charismatic leadership
that inspires majorities to challenge a perception of fundamental
injustice and inequality. A necessary feature is the development of a
political ideology rooted in a narrative that legitimates mass
collective action, which is indispensable to forcing dominant groups
to address social grievances or to overturning those dominant
groups altogether.
Unresponsive rulers risk possible overthrow of their governments. For
example, the vision and struggle of a multiracial South Africa was a
guiding principle that put an end to the entrenched white-dominated
apartheid system.
A second essential element is what Italian philosopher Antonio Negri
calls constituent power, the expression of the popular will for
democracy a common theme in nearly all revolutions through what
he calls the multitude.
Mr. Negri counterpoises the concepts of constituent power and
constituted power to demonstrate the oppositional forces in society.
Thus, following the American Revolution, the ruling elite created a
second Constitution establishing a national government with fewer
democratic safeguards.
In response to challenges from popular movements, modern states have
concentrated power in constitutions and centralized authority
structures to suppress mass demands for democracy and equality. Few
democratic revolutionary movements have gained popular power as new
states almost always consolidate control, often resorting to
repression of the masses that initially brought them to power. Still,
virtually all revolutions during the past 500 years have created
enduring consequences that, in evolving form, remain forces for
justice to this day.
Revolutionary movements must recognize the durability and
overwhelming inertia of state power. They must acknowledge that they
are highly unlikely to seize power from unjust regimes, even when
their objectives have moral force and are deeply popular among the
masses. And yet, history is full of exceptions to this rule, so we
must conclude that while revolutionary transformation is improbable,
it is always a possibility.
At a lecture to Young Socialists in Zurich just one month before the
February 1917 Revolution, Vladimir Lenin said: "We of the older
generation may not live to see the decisive battles of this coming
revolution." Less than a year later, Lenin and the Bolsheviks gained
power over the Soviet state with the initial support of workers,
peasants, and most of the military.
In the last century, the opponents of the failed bureaucratic statism
in the Soviet sphere and free-market capitalism in the West have
struggled to find a discourse of resistance. While democratic
opponents defeated Soviet Russia in the early 1990s, opponents of
free-market capitalism have yet to gain traction, in part due to the
general consensus among global rulers in defense of neoliberalism. As
such, revolutionary movements have had to redefine themselves outside
territorial borders as powerful tools of the global collective to
petition for human rights and social justice for all.
People are inherently cautious and take extraordinary action only
when they have little to lose and something to gain. The current
economic crisis has pushed more people into poverty and despair than
at any time since the early 20th century, to the point where
alternatives to the current system can be considered.
Today, throughout the world, peasants, workers, indigenous peoples,
and students are galvanized into movements that are challenging state
power rooted in global norms of neoliberalism. New movements have
gained greater traction with the legitimacy and strength of a global
collective behind them, rather than as isolated protests. The
oppressed are framing new narratives of liberation to contest power
on a state and international level: whether peasants in Latin America
or India struggling for land reform; indigenous peoples mobilizing
resistance for official recognition of their rights; or workers and
students throughout the world waging unauthorized strikes and
sit-ins, and taking to the streets in support of democracy and equality.
--
Immanuel Ness is a professor of political science at Brooklyn
College, City University of New York, and editor of "The
International Encyclopedia of Revolution and Protest: 1500 to the Present."
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