[RTI INDIA] From Paris Commune to Occupy Wall Street- camaraderie lives on, with a difference though

From Paris Commune to Occupy Wall Street camaraderie lives on with a difference though 

 

The Occupy Wall Street campaign has already survived, nay, forged through two and half months of tumult and turmoil since it announced its humble but ambitious beginning in Zuccotti Park (renamed since as Liberty Park) of New York City on 17th September 2011; Humble, because only about 1000 persons, an unrecognizable miniscule by any reckoning, had gathered there to trumpet its epoch-making arrival; ambitious because, going by their incredible credo 'We are 99%' they claimed to speak on behalf of a massive multitude of 308, 672000 out of 311,800000 the total US population.  However, the stark irony of a microscopic minority speaking in the name of an overwhelming majority started thinning away from the next day on, as the numbers of protestors kept on multiplying not only in New York but in every city small or big all over USA. Not only that; like a prairie fire, the Occupy message spread all over in real time, meeting reception, reciprocation and reinforcement from the enthused people in scores of countries across the globe. The profound dynamicity with which the movement surges forward and the sheer impossibility of tracking the new connections it forges each passing day stamp it with the rare distinction of being both unprecedented and most indomitable one in the entire recorded history of mankind. It seems the common run of people everywhere irrespective of the nature of their respective polities, have veered round to seeing themselves as belonging to 99% and their respective regimes as indigenous miniatures of prototypal Wall Street, which need to be occupied away from a cunning band of rapacious usurpers constituting only 1% of the total populace. Another uniquely welcome, but unintended fall-out that ensued from the campaign trail is the shaping of a new bond of fraternity among diverse segments of world public cutting across every parochial construct, be it around caste or color, race or religion, ethnicity or nationality. The only great divide that emerges more and more cutely and ever into the wide open, after being thrown off from its age-old, secure but shadowy ideological cocoon, and that too under the irresistible force of circumstances beyond anybody's control, is the one that distinguishes 99% as the pro-changers from the 1% as no-changers vis-à-vis the still 'respectable' status quo that obstinately refuses to get blown off by the gushy winds of all-out change.  

Like every genuine people's revolution that messages both denial of the old order and its reconstruction along new lines, Occupy presents a uniquely intertwined blend of the two, worth replicating by the crusaders for justice elsewhere across the globe. And that is also Occupy's magical quintessence, on account of which it grows up from strength to strength, not in terms of head-count only, but in a far more important sense of moral grit of its countless participants and supporters. At the moment they certainly seek to 're-occupy' the vast space illegitimately 'occupied' by the 1% at the expense of the 99%, but as revealed from their free-for-all discourses and cooperative actions, they do also seek to do away with the very category of 'occupation' altogether. To be precise, they do as they ought to, declare unto themselves and to the world public at large that they would rebuild their would-be society of 100% with such novel, advanced genius of social engineering that never, ever a shrewd 1% would be escalated atop to 'occupy' all the prime treasures of republic riding on the back of 99% and that too with facilitation, both open and disguised, by the sacrosanct State armed with its operational maxim, the Rule of Law so called.

As a matter of fact, the Occupy has also shown its potential to lay down the foundational principles of the new society that ought to replace the existing one. The first such principle is embodied in the very praxis of 'General Assembly', which is inscribed thus in the front page of the OWS site itself (http://occupywallst.org), "This #ows movement empowers real people to create real change from the bottom up. We want to see a general assembly in every backyard, on every street corner because we don't need Wall Street and we don't need politicians to build a better society". If allowed a full scale consummation through prolonged practice by the people themselves, this principle of General Assembly would render the people surely but by degrees, the masters of their own destiny in real, proximate sense of the term. That being so, even if a State exists atop, its principal business would be administration of things, not rule over people, and that too in the service of a plutocratic gang such as the one epitomized by Wall Street.

The next, path-breaking principle of social reorganization germane to OWS campaign which has come to the fore and is gaining ground day by day is the never failing wisdom inherent in a cooperative mode of living and working that stands in glaring contrast to the hackneyed laissez faire mantra of everyone for himself. As regards the composition of OWS crowd, Fred Schwacke from Vermont, USA informs, "They come from many different backgrounds. About one-third of them are skilled craftsmen, and a much smaller number are professionals, doctors, educators, lawyers, merchants, and the like. Although we do not know the occupations of all the participants, the majority are students and from the working class. About two-thirds are under 20; few are over 40. Most are locals, but some came from great distances. They have one thing in common, their committed opposition to a government which ignored the needs of the people in favor of the rich and powerful. Regardless of their financial or social origins, they work as a team of self-sacrificing patriots against an oppressive and seemingly all powerful enemy". Strange but true, these Americans who were till the other day so much fastidious about the privacy of day-to-day chores, are found today sharing happily, and in common, not only the scanty provisions of food and shelter, but also the challenging burdens of maintaining hygiene and health care, peace and freedom in Occupy sites and above all advocacy before police, administration and courts in defense of the victimized compatriots. Further, it feels reassuring that as the local administration grows more and more violent and oppressive against the protestors the resolve of the latter to cultivate a collective live-in fraternity grows equally stronger. This is how a new social formation, based upon the 'free association of free individuals' or briefly 'associated humanity' is already germinated within the regimented bounds of a dying society and seeks to wriggle out from its inhospitable confines at the earliest opportunity.

Believe it or not, 140 years back, the short-lived Paris Commune of 1871 was a sparkling harbinger of the new human order that the Occupy Wall Street of 2011 seeks to exemplify and realize today. Hardly a month into its job, the Paris Commune in its Manifesto of 19 April 1871 had unequivocally declared, "Political unity, as Paris wants it, is the voluntary association of all local initiatives, the spontaneous and free concourse of all individual energies in view of a common goal: the well-being, the freedom and the security of all". In parenthesis it be noted that the 1.2 million of Parisians cutting across the barriers of status and vocation did rise in revolt, not to usher in a new social order as such; rather this societal agenda was ancillary to the twin mortal challenges they were confronted with, namely to save the Republic of France from the marauding Prussian armies in the wake of the defeat and capture of the weakling Emperor Napoleon-III and to defend the self-Government of Paris from the clutches of pseudo-republican M.Thiers then head of National Government, who true to his capitulationism, conspired to surrender Paris to the foreign armies and pro-monarchist lobbies. Encircled by mortal foes domestic and foreign, the bold and self-respecting Parisians had stumbled upon the novel idea of reconstituting their polity into a Commune, a free association of free individuals managing their common affairs on equalitarian principles, which alone could draw out the spontaneous best from its every member. In fact, for two months (from 28 March to 28 June 1871) the Commune did work, and worked wonders, before it finally fell to the overpowering, combined military hordes of Thiers and Prussia.   

Among the various factors that caused the fall of Commune, the crucial one, often cited by the later historians, but then unknown to the unsuspecting Communards, was that the Commune instead of taking over the National Bank of France located in Paris itself kept on guarding it zealously and allowed thus their sworn enemies to withdraw as much money from it as they could and employ the same to crush the Commune. It seems, the Occupy Wall Street, going by its monumental nomenclature, is immune to the fetishism inherent to money, the 'universal whore of mankind' in the words of Shakespeare, which had entrapped the Communards into their demise 140 years back. It is evident from the following narrative of an average OWS supporter, "Money is only important in a society when certain resources for survival must be rationed and the people accept money as an exchange medium for the scarce resources. Money is a social convention, an agreement if you will. It is neither a natural resource nor does it represent one. It is not necessary for survival unless we have been conditioned to accept it as such". This is the crux of the enlightenment that informs OWS movement through and through, which the Paris Commune though being the pioneer of 'associated humanity' had given it a miss out of sheer naivety.

(Chitta Behera, 4A Jubilee Tower, Choudhury Bazar, Cuttack-9, Orissa, India, Mobile- 9437577546, Email: chittabehera1@yahoo.co.in, 2^nd December 2011)