Through the movement, the world is witnessing new forms of North-South solidarity and a united fight of 99 percent of the population against a common enemy: the economic model called neoliberalism, run for the benefit of 1 percent, based on “free-market” deregulation/liberalisation, globalisation, and privatisation of public services.

As OWS organisers put it: “Over the last 30 years, the 1 percent have created a global economic system… that attacks our human rights and destroys our environment. Neoliberalism is worldwide: it is the reason you no longer have a job, it is the reason you cannot afford healthcare, education, food, your mortgage repayment of lousing loans. Neoliberalism is your future stolen.”

“Neoliberalism is everywhere, gutting labour standards, living wages, social contracts, and environmental protections. It is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money. It is a system that ravages the Global South and creates global financial crisis—crisis in Spain, in Greece, in the US. It is a system built on greed… It allows the 1 percent to enrich themselves by impoverishing humanity.”

The OWS mobilisation reflects the deep, systemic and pervasive crisis in which capitalist society, indeed capitalist civilisation, finds itself in its heartland or home territory. The crisis has many dimensions: economic, ecological, social, and political. The system is incapable of resolving any of them. Its managers’ knee-jerk responses often end up aggravating the crises.

The economic crisis is manifested most sharply in the global Great Recession and the mountain of debt accumulated in the European Union states, but by no means confined to them. It’s part of a restructuring of the world economy, in which the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, the exclusive club of the industrialised Western nations, is no longer the economy’s main driving force.

The roots of the crisis lie in neoliberalism’s inability to maintain the profitability of capital without becoming super-predatory upon people and natural resources to the point of preventing their reproduction. Unlike in the Golden Age of Capitalism (1945-73), when mass production and mass consumption brought about generalised prosperity and the welfare state in Western Europe—at least partly in response to the challenge posed by the Socialist bloc—capitalism today robs people of decent work and living wages, while turning common property resources like land, air and water into commodities to be sold for a profit.

The solutions being imposed on the troubled EU economies consist of austerity measures and vicious cutbacks in public services, which only add to people’s hardship, while further weakening the state’s ability to spur growth through investment.

Growth, especially balanced growth, demands that more purchasing power is put into the people’s hands and a new version of a Roosevelt-style “New Deal” is launched globally. Capital is loath to do this, and most political leaders too timid even to attempt it.

Another major factor driving OWS is growing economic inequality. In the US, for instance, real wages have fallen for two decades, but the rich have got obscenely richer. The 400 richest Americans have greater combined wealth than the bottom 150 million, and the net worth of the top 1 percent exceeds that of the bottom 90 percent.

The salary differential between executives in securities firms and the rest of the private sector has spurted from 100 percent three decades ago to 550 percent. Their average “compensation” is over $360,000 or 10 times the US per capita GDP

Even more disgracefully, average CEO pay last year rose to 325 multiples of the average worker’s wage. In the Standard and Poor-500 index of top companies, CEO pay last year averaged $10.7 million, up 28 percent over 2009. Corporations are dodging taxes as never before. Twentyfive of the top 100 US corporations last year paid their CEOs more than they paid in federal income taxes.

In India too, the share of wages in organised manufacturing decreased by more than 50 percent between 1980 and 2007. The rate of profit shot up over the same period from an already high 25 percent to almost 45 percent. As for differentials in the incomes of India’s rural poor and rich, the less said the better. Agrarian distress drove 2.4 lakh farmers to suicide between 1995 and 2009. The crisis remains unresolved.

Neoliberal capitalism, based on rampant overconsumption of fossil fuels, is leading to unrelenting destruction of natural resources, loss of biodiversity, and irreversible and catastrophic climate change. At the current levels of greenhouse gas emissions, and the weak voluntary pledges made by various countries to reduce/limit them, the world is set to become warmer by 30 to 40, even 50 Celsius (over preindustrial levels) by the end of this century, if not earlier.

The maximum warming Planet Earth can withstand is 20 C, and according to growing numbers of scientists, only 1.50 C. At 40 C, say scientists, only about one-tenth of the globe’s population will survive. Yet, the world is on course to this epic disaster as the UN climate negotiations repeatedly fail to produce a fair, ambitious and legally binding deal.

The global social crisis consists in persistent poverty in the South and the rise of new forms of deprivation in the North. Added to this is destruction of social cohesion, and growing influence of crudely elitist ideologies like Social Darwinism, which hold that only “the fittest”, or the most powerful, should survive.

The rise of Right-wing and xenophobic currents in the North and communal and intolerant ideologies in the South is producing a deeply uncompassionate society which has disdain for the elderly, weak and dispossessed, mocks at humane values, and shamelessly privileges those who have enriched themselves on the backs of the poor. It’s as if the great gains of modernity were wiped out and the world were regressing to a barbaric state when the old and the ill would be left to die in times of distress.

Politically, the world is witnessing severe erosion of people’s participation especially in the “mature” democracies, marginalisation of citizens, a massive crisis of political leadership, and the snatching of decision-making from the public and its concentration in the hands of finance capital.

Under unequal, unbalanced globalisation, where capital enjoys unfettered freedom of movement, but people face huge mobility barriers, sovereign democratic decision-making has been undermined. People and parliaments no longer decide what they should consume or import, how they make their career choices, and whether they can liberate themselves from MacDonald-Disneyland culture.

For instance, the governments of Greece or Spain, tied to the Euro, cannot do what they would have normally done in response to high balance-of-payments deficits: devalue the currency and boost exports. They have to obey the diktat of the International Monetary Fund and cut social spending, thus liquidating the gains made over many decades after great struggles and sacrifices by the working people.

In the US, the situation is grimmer, with the Republicans turning even more Right-wing than before under the impact of the Tea Party campaign, which would like to condemn ordinary people to permanent misery, destitution and lack of opportunity. President Barack Obama, who pledged change for the better, has comprehensively betrayed his promise, and is in no position to take on the Republican challenge ideologically. He’s caving in to it—despite his token tribute to OWS.

We must appreciate OWS’s contribution in highlighting the profound crisis of bourgeois society. The movement is horizontal, inclusive and without a leadership structure. This is both a strength and a weakness. Unlike the radical anti-capitalist mobilisations centred on G-8 and G-20 summits and World Trade Organisation and the IMF-World Bank gatherings since 1999, this movement has a fixed physical target: stock exchanges and big banks in the world’s finance capital nerve-centres.

It also provides expression and agency to non-activists, like students who say: “I am occupying Wall Street because it is my future, my generation’s future, that is at stake…Today, we are fighting back against the dictators of our country—the Wall Street banks—and we are winning.”

However, the movement’s leadership is diffuse and unorganised, and lacks focus. This doesn’t make for continuity, analysis of experience, or development of strategy. But in societies like the US, which have no political-party alternatives worth the name, there’s no substitute for such movements.

In India, we luckily have the Left and other progressive forces. It’s high time they took up issues similar to those raised by OWS, or better still, started their own movement for a life with human dignity, social and economic justice, and collective prosperity for all. (IPA Service)