Occupy the Future!

Those who confuse the Arab Spring with the Occupation movement are making a big mistake.

The Arab Spring is a collection of revolts against dictators and totalitarian regimes that have been exploiting and abusing their citizens for many decades. As I write this, the people of Tunisia are voting for their first time. Ever.

The so-called American Fall is a very different thing. It is not the continuance of the same kind of revolutions we've seen in the Arab Spring. It's a different kind of movement. It's not a revolution. It's bigger: it's the brewing of many revolutions to come.

For a long time, the majority of people on this planet have been living in poverty. The vast majority of the people on this planet are in the lower economic class. They have been for a long time. They're use to being exploited. They're used to being bullied by multi-national corporations, and they used to the devastation caused by economic hitmen. In short, they're used to being plundered.

The Occupations are the beginnings of the coming middle class revolution. It is not the revolution. It's only in the past decade that the elite became so desperate that they really started plundering the middle class. Now that the middle class are being stolen from, they're starting to get annoyed. We (in the West) are not ready to go to war. Most of us still have too much to lose. A small minority might be ready, but not the majority. Certainly not the 99%. Not even the 9%.

But that number is growing. The flaws in the system that created the economic crash of 2008 haven't been fixed. Indeed, things have just gotten worse. The risks have simply been transferred from financial institutions to sovereign states. And the financial institutions have merged together to create gigantic monoliths - not only are they Too Big to Fail, companies like Morgan Stanley are now Too Big to Save. They can't be saved. Next time they collapse, major Western economies will crash with them. And we're not talking Greece or Iceland. We're talking Germany, Canada and/or the US.


The Occupy movement isn't going to utterly destroy the system, but it is the brewing of larger changes to come. And it is important. The Occupy movement is massive. According to the Guardian, the movement has had around 1.7 million participants worldwide. It's proudly boasting the involvement of people in 83 countries and 1500 cities. The tent city in Toronto has over-doubled in size in a week, and the protest at City Hall we saw yesterday was bigger than the week before.

Furthermore, the Occupation is a much-needed creative breeding ground. Like-minded people are coming together, networking, debating, and coming up with new ideas. It's a long time since Toronto has seen daily protest marches, and the number of NGO's and other social-advocacy groups getting involved is growing. They're also reviving some of the ideas from previous social revolutions. The Suffragettes. The Civil Rights movement. I suspect we are going to be seeing some big successes, resulting in some amazing changes.

However, very few of us want to collapse into either anarchy or primitivism. We value society. But not only that, there's great fear about the results that would come if society did collapse. And that fear is well grounded. Freedom is a double-edged sword. When there's too much freedom, the strong are free to prey on the weak. Sovereign States are meant to protect us from those kinds of predators (Ignatieff may not be a good politician, but he is a good political commentator). And given the abundance of multinational, predatory corporations, we need protection. Governments should be protecting us against this kind of self-bankruptcy, because individuals simply can't compete with (or keep up with) the economic attacks of the financial sector. It is the job of government to protects us from that, and yet most sovereign states have failed to do so. There's safety in numbers. But only if the numbers are aware of the attacks, and so able to defend against them.

Timing the Revolution

A big question I've been confronted with recently has been the timing of the coming collapses that we can expect. There's so many ways our current civilisation will collapse. Environmental degradation and massive climate change will be the biggest of these, and will result in the death of billions of people, drastically reducing human population from 9bn+ down to around 2bn or less. It will also result in the permanent extinction (extinction is always permanent) of over 75% of the species on the planet. Climate change scientists predict this will take place in 40-90 years, although to-date many effects of climate change have been occurring faster than the most pessimistic predictions

Fresh-water shortages will be felt more and more. There's already been conflicts in some parts of the world over water, and water has caused many previous civilizations to become extinct. The effects of this will simply increase with time. In Canada, we'll feel the effects of this once the US march across the border and take our water from us. I suspect that won't happen for another 20+ years.

Another major source of collapse will be oil shortage. Western society is built on cheap oil. The suburbs exist because of it. Our agri-business-based food production rely on it. Transportation depends on it. Given the ex-President of Shell has predicted the gas will be US$5/gallon by the end of 2012, the end of the age of cheap oil could be very close. Once oil is that expensive, a lot of our society will crumble. Mega-cities won't be able to cope with, among other things, the pressures of suburb migration. Plastic will largely stop being produced. Rail- and water-based transit will come back as the main way to travel. We'll need a lot of farmers, quickly - yet farming takes years to learn.

Edit: My math was wrong. $5/gallon is not that bad. I was thinking it was saying $5/litre. $5/litre would have massive society consequences.

However, people have also been predicting the end of cheap oil since the 1970's. We may still have 20-30 years left of it. Furthermore, we'll likely subsidize oil before it's $5/litre - i.e. we'll permanently lose societal capital (to the 1%) to pay for it. Many addicts bankrupt themselves to get another hit. This is an example of something the Occupation could stop.

But one of the other effects of expensive oil is the transfer of capital from the consumers to the drillers. This will exacerbate the economic crisis. The suburbs are so addicted to oil that they will keep paying for it as long as they can - meaning until they lose their homes (foreclosure takes 1-2 years), and until they're increasingly struggling to buy food (again, another 1-2 harvests). At that point, the Occupation will gain major support from the suburbs. But that will be too late to save many victims.

However, I have recently been around a lot of people who are expecting imminent collapse and revolution. I know that this biases my view. I also know there are a lot of people out there who are dedicated to keeping the current system going. More than 1%. Maybe as many as 20% of people in Western societies. These are people who own their house, and people who feel they are still increasing their capital (they just need to feel it to support the status quo). And those might be enough to keep the system going for longer. What do you think? How long do you give it? Is the Mayan calendar a correct (if self-fulfilling) prophecy?

Or am I just hoping for a non-existent apocalypse?

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