15-O: A day of global indignation

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The day of Oct. 15 (15-O) was the first coordinated global response to the crisis and saw the emergence of a new international movement. With the revolutions of North Africa as the initial impetus, through an effect of emulation and imitation, the protest reached the periphery of Europe. The Mediterranean world has thus stood at the epicenter of this new wave of social opposition, at a time where we enter a second phase of the crisis, which has as its focal point the crisis in the euro zone.

Gradually, the rebellion of the indignant has been taking a real international dimension, beyond ac­ tions of sympathy and solidarity. First there was the Greek protest movement, prior to the Spanish and the revolts of the Arab world, which integrated the sym­ bolism and the methods of 15 M [the movement of occupations of plazas in Spanish cities, which began May 15] and inserted its logic in the emerging inter­ national dynamics. Later, there has undoubtedly been 8 SOCIALIST ACTION NOVEMBER 2011 the start of the protest in United States, still at an early stage, the most important variable for the time being, whose fate will be crucial to the overall development of the movement.

Oct. 15, 2011, was the most important global protest since the big day of global mobilization on Feb. 15, 2003, against the war in Iraq. Of much more modest dimensions, it nonetheless expresses a deeper social dynamic than the historic event against the war which was simultaneously the peak and the end of the up­ ward phase of the international cycle of anti-globaliza­ tion process that exploded in November 1999 during the Summit of World Trade Organization (WTO) in Seattle, and that had been gestating since the January 1994 Zapatista uprising.

“The world has two superpowers: the United States and world public opinion” wrote The New York Times after Feb. 15. Since then, however, the international coordination of protests has languished and instru­ ments launched by the anti-globalization movement like the World Social Forum have lost strength, cen­ trality, and practical usefulness. The current context is very different from that in which the anti-globalization movement emerged at the end of the previous century. This cycle occurs in a systemic crisis of historic dimen­ sions and therefore the depth of the social movement in course and its social roots is undoubtedly greater. The vitality of Oct. 15 in the Spanish state again sur­ prised both domestic and foreign opinion, thus refut­ ing some impressionistic analyses on the crisis in the 15-M movement that had proliferated in recent weeks. We are not dealing with an episodic phenomenon or a temporary one, but the beginning of a new wave of op­ position that expresses a deep groundswell that will not evaporate.

The very nature of global capitalism and the magni­ tude of the contemporary crisis impel the internation­ alization of social protest. The slogan “United for glob­ al change” expresses well this new “internationalism of indignation” that emanates from 15-O, whose chal­ lenge is to trigger a global movement to bring about another way out of the current civilizational crisis.

In contrast to the period of anti-globalization, the interrelationship between the different spatial levels (continued on page 11, in “Alabama passes harsh law restricting immigrant rights”)

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Montreal MP Thomas Mulcair, a former Quebec Lib­