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Abstract
I argue that 2011 witnessed a series of challenges to neoliberalism on a global scale perhaps not seen since the political upheavals of 1968, and that media spectacle provided the form of a series of global insurgences from the North African Arab Uprisings to the Occupy movements. Crises of neoliberalism also generated movements in Italy, Spain, Greece and other European movements that utilised strategies of the Arab Uprisings and provided global media spectacles of popular struggle and insurrection. In fall 2011, Occupy Wall Street adapted these tactics to symbolically attack the citadel of neoliberalism and the Occupy movement provided a democratic response to crises of capitalism and neoliberalism that have resulted in global economic crisis since 2008. The Occupy Wall Street movement in turn generated Occupy movements throughout the world under the slogan of Occupy Everywhere!
Notes
1. This text is adapted from Kellner (Citation2012) and revised and updated to take account of events that happened after the book’s publication.
2. My earlier analyses of globalization, continued here, include Kellner (Citation2002) and Best and Kellner (Citation2001).
3. After initially using the discourse of ‘revolution’ to describe the overthrow of dictatorships in Tunisia and Egypt, Al-Jazeera and other global networks then used terms like ‘Libya’s Uprising’, ‘Egypt’s New Era’, and ‘Tunisia in Transition’, as well as terms like ‘The Arab Spring’, ‘The Arab Awakening’, or ‘The Arab Uprising’ to describe the events engaged in this chapter. Curiously, Wikipedia located its pages on the events under the rubric of ‘Tunisian revolution’, ‘2011 Egyptian revolution’, and ‘2011 Libyan Civil War’. By ‘revolution’, I follow Herbert Marcuse’s concept of revolution as a rupture with and overthrow of the previous social order that develops new forms of economy, politics, culture and social relations, involving a decisive rupture with the previous regime and an entirely different society with non-oppressive social relations and a new economy, polity, social institutions, culture, and subjectivities. On Marcuse’s concept of revolution, see Kellner (Citation1984) and Kellner and Pierce (Citation2013).
4. To be sure, there were organized opposition movements to the Soviet regimes within the Eastern Central Europe Soviet bloc countries and within the Soviet Union itself for decades. These oppositional movements had long been producing critiques of the regime, sometimes clandestinely circulated, and had organized opposition to the Soviet system. On the other hand, certainly the cascading collapse of one communist regime after another, seen throughout Europe and the communist bloc on television, and discussed on radio, newspapers, and other media, helped to mobilize massive crowds that led to the overthrow of the communist regimes. For first person witness of these events, see the narrative and concise analysis by Ash (Citation1993), republished with a new Afterword in 1999. Among other themes, Ash describes the role of the media in making images of the oppositional movements visible to various publics and the struggle for media access of the oppositional movements. In a key summary judgment, Ash wrote: ‘In Europe at the end of the twentieth century all revolutions are telerevolutions’ (p. 94). On the Prague Velvet Revolution, Ash wrote: ‘television is now clearly opening up to report the revolution’, signaling that Václav Havel and the oppositional movement had won the revolution (p. 101).
5. Fukujama (Citation1992) famously argued that the collapse of Soviet Communism by the 1990s marked the triumph of the Western ideas of freedom and democracy, and thus the end of major political conflicts; With the 9/11 terror attacks on the US and the resulting era of Terror War, Fukujama’s ideas were widely discredited (see Kellner, Citation2003). To some extent, though, the ideas of freedom and democracy are indeed part of the struggle in the North African Arab Uprisings, which revealed that many more enemies of a free society had to be eliminated before one could seriously argue that we had entered the realm of freedom dreamed of by liberals and by Karl Marx.
6. On the new media ecology that the Internet and other new technologies have produced, see Poster (Citation1995) and Kahn and Kellner (Citation2008).
7. The Occupy movements present other examples of leaderless movements, perhaps a defining feature of the Uprisings of 2011 in the Time of the Spectacle when anyone can participate and create their own parts in the spectacle and movement that they choose; see the discussion below.
8. On Marcuse’s concept of revolution, see the sources in Note 3.
9. A timeline and a background for ‘The 99 Percent Solution’ is provided in Mother Jones, 8 January/February 2012.
10. As it has come to own all major political stories of 2011, the Guardian was initially the place to go for Occupy Wall Street in the global media, with a Live Blog documenting news and actions related to the movementand a webpage collecting their key stories with links to other stories at http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/occupy-wall-street (Retrieved from October 3, 2011). As the Occupy movement came to London, the Guardian focused special attention on their local occupation that involved dramatic clashes with the City of London and Church of England when occupiers set up a camp outside the venerable St. Paul’s Cathedral; church debates over how to deal with the occupation led high-ranking officials to resign.
11. For some examples of specific actions undertaken by Occupy movements, see “Organize and Occupy!” (2011) and by Blumenkranz, Gessen, and Greif (Citation2011).
12. By mid-October, there were over 1.2 million followers of the Occupy Wall Street movement on Facebook and hundreds of pages all over the world; during the global protests on 15–16 October, the overall volume of Twitter doubled, as an analysis from Trendrr indicated; see http://blog.trendrr.com/2011/10/21/trendrr-occupy-wall-street-press-recap/ (Retrieved from October 22, 2011).
13. On Guy Debord and the Situationist International, see Douglas Kellner, Media Spectacle and Insurrection, 2011.
14. See the Occupy Wall Street website at http://occupywallst.org/ (Retrieved from January 3, 2012) and Livestream at http://www.livestream.com/occupywallstnyc (Retrieved from January 3, 2012).
15. There is a variety of online petitions against SOFA including the ACLU’s ‘Sign the Pledge: I Stand With the ACLU in Fighting SOPA’ at https://secure.aclu.org/site/SPageServer?pagename=sem_sopa&s_subsrc=SEM_Google_Search-SOPA_SOPA_sopa%20bill_p_10385864662 (Retrieved from February 9, 2012) and Broadband for America’s ‘Hands off the Internet’ at http://www.broadbandforamerica.com/handsofftheinternet?gclid=COqHzpuska4CFQN8hwod0GBVew (Retrieved from February 9, 2012).
16. There are multiple websites devoted to blocking the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline such as the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC)’s site ‘Stopping the Keystone XL Pipeline’ at http://www.nrdc.org/energy/keystone-pipeline/?gclid=CMX6o7Gtka4CFQVahwodkAwofQ (Retrieved from January 9, 2012).
17. There are many Recall Scott Walker sites such as ‘United Wisconsin to Recall Walker’ at http://www.unitedwisconsin.com/onedaylonger (Retrieved from February 8, 2012). On Tuesday 5 June 2012, voters in Wisconsin choose to keep Walker on as governor after a bitter recall and re-election process.