The Occupy Wall Street movement seems to me the single most important development in the American political landscape in decades. Now, as it spreads beyond US borders, across the Atlantic to Occupy the London Stock Exchange, perhaps it is the single most important development in the Western political landscape since May 1968.
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For a few years, the established global economic framework has been accruing new, unacceptable victims. The effects of foreign capital (and its political/military backing) on developing countries has been a matter of course for many decades, but these victims are acceptable so long as they don’t manage to get uppity and take control of their own governments.
The new victims – whose suffering as yet pales in comparison to global examples – are the American middle class who suddenly find themselves experiencing the very real consequences of forces most don’t fully understand. When they look around, dazed, they see the distribution of wealth in the US in a new light. The absurd inequality that was for so long bearable, even comfortable, now appears the height of injustice.
Of course, it was always unjust, though for the height of injustice the Wall Street Occupiers will have to look further afield – south of the border, in South-east Asian sweatshops, in Iraq and Afghanistan. But for now, what the American protesters may lack (relatively) in victimisation, they more than make up for in influence. 100 child workers in an Indonesian sweatshop or depleted-uranium victims in Iraq can barely dream of the kind of influence with which a single one of these newly class-conscious Americans possesses simply by being born American.
That’s what makes this movement significant, and what fills my heart with hope when I see it spreading to other Western countries. Westerners, en masse, are realising they’ve been playing a mugs’ game for years and they are beginning to suspect that they have the power to change the game.
Some people, some very few people, are getting very worried.
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