The new face of revolution
Perhaps you can hear it from where you’re sitting now: that low, distant rumble, growing clearer and closer as you focus on it. Perhaps you can see the storm clouds on the horizon. Out there, change is coming.
This is not empty rhetoric. All over the world, there is a revolution brewing. It’s not a revolution in the sense that the twentieth century has taught us to understand the word: not a massing of red flags this time, not a determination to seize the state, not a gathering of Peoples’ Parties with blueprints for a new Utopia. This is something that is harder to explain at first sight, but no less significant.
It’s clear why it is happening: the world is more unequal than at any time in history. A planet in which 20 percent of us are rolling in 86 percent of the wealth, while the very systems of life itself come under increasing strain from mass over-consumption, is not a civilization built to last. The uprising against it began years ago, and it’s gathering in speed.
What used to be called, inaccurately, the ‘anti-globalization’ movement has become a worldwide web of people and groupings dedicated to reclaiming the power that the cult of the market has stolen from them.
Who are they? They are Mexican Zapatistas, still battling after a decade to reclaim their community rights from the corporate stitch-up of nafta. They are the South African poor in the townships fighting water privatization. They are landless people all over Latin America, struggling to redefine their position in a corporate farming world.
