By Adbusters
“… one thing is becoming crystal clear: the corpo-capitalist doomsday machine has never been so vulnerable, so weak, so ripe for the picking.”
Hey all you wild spirits out there,
What can we make of the beating heart of Gezi Park, the blood soaked Taksim concrete, the barricades of Beşiktaş, the flurry of insurrections popping up everywhere … in Chile, Mexico, Bulgaria and Brazil?
One thing: people in droves are waking up to the fact that the ideology of capitalism is bunk, that it’s a fundamentally broken and irreparable system that does not deliver on any of its promises … and the dream of a coordinated worldwide uprising, a reboot of the capitalist imagination – a Global Spring – is morphing into reality before our eyes.
A major tactical breakthrough occurred last June in the searing Brazilian heat. For the first time since the youth of Athens exploded ten years ago, an active feedback loop developed between a government and the street. The crowds, the masses, the multitudes, the people, spoke … and for the first time a sitting President responded with ears instead of grapeshot.
Imagine if President Obama had actually dropped by Zuccotti Park two years ago to greet the protesters face to face. Where would America be today? Yet this is exactly what the protesters in São Paulo, Rio and Belo Horizonte pulled off by getting President Dilma Rousseff to talk to them and listen to her heart over the glitching, cold brain of the national coffers and megacorporations.
This new tactic bodes well for the future. Instead of just projecting anger and being met with force, as we’ve largely done in the past, we nurture effective communication loops with the authorities, the bureaucracies, the presidents, the prime ministers, the militaries, the spy centers, the media. We construct a dynamic cultural and policy-making loop of ongoing, permanent, street-fueled transformation….
The other tactic we noticed working on the streets of Istanbul and São Paulo is that protesters are finally not just targeting sites and symbols of government power, but corporate shops, signs, logos and ATMs. This heralds a strategic awakening among protesters about what really drives our current global system – that it’s not so much the governments, but the transnational megacorporations with their private armies of lawyers and lobbyists that actually call the policy shots and get governments to dance to their tune.
The lesson for the future is obvious: redirect your rage!
As the second anniversary of Occupy approaches, one thing is becoming crystal clear: the corpo-capitalist doomsday machine has never been so vulnerable, so weak, so ripe for the picking.
Dare to dance without knowing the next step … and then begin to move, spontaneously to the beat, with others….
for the wild,
Adbusters