The day after the women’s march TV pundits were asking questions like: How can the women’s march be made into a movement? Duh. It IS part of a movement, one which has been visible since at least 2010.
Dec. 7, 2010, Wikileaks released a group of cables, and this release included cables about the extreme wealth of the Ben Ali ruling family in Tunisia. Dec. 17, a young man in Tunisia self-immolated. He died Jan. 4. Ten days later Ben Ali and his family fled to Saudi Arabia. While this was not a “revolution” in the sense of a different class taking power, it also was not nothing. It was followed by the Egyptian uprising, which was the first uprising coordinated by social media. Luddites want to deny the significance of this. The “Arab spring” went on until mid 2012. Feb. 14-June 16, 2011, the capitol in Madison, Wisconsin was occupied. Sept. 2011 Occupy Wall Street broke out. It was like a string of dominoes from the Wikileaks release to Occupy.
In 2013, Black Lives Matter burst into the open with the use of the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter on social media, after the acquittal of George Zimmerman in the shooting death of Trayvon Martin. The fight continued with demonstrations following the 2014 deaths of Michael Brown (which resulted in the Ferguson uprising) and Eric Garner in New York City. The disappearance-murder of 43 Mexican students in 2014 in Ayotzinapa, Mexico called forth similar protests.
Then came Bernie’s campaign, designed to corral people within the Democratic Party, and which was partly effective in the Nov. 2016 elections. On Jan. 21, 2017, millions of women marched all over the world. Not limited to being a “women’s” march, it included not only men but also LGBTQ and every section of US society interested in political liberty and equality.
All of this is part of a worldwide upsurge. It IS a movement, and it won’t/can’t go away.
Dialectics teaches us to look at what’s arising. A new movement is arising, and it needs the ideas in Marxist Glossary 3.0, and discussion of these ideas has burst out everywhere. These ideas help us build on the past and keep us from repeating the same old errors. Glossary is a book to guide action and develop intellectual capacity.
It is undeniable that social media will be important in galvanizing all this, as it did with all the events referred to above. We don’t know what’s coming next, but this movement has no choice but to grow and develop.
Robin Yeamans, May, 2017
