Photo Credit: Leung Ching Yau Alex via Flickr
By Stanley Aronowitz
September was an eventful month for social protests.
Here at home, an estimated 400,000 marchers filled the streets of New York City to demand urgent action to stem climate change. Global warming is only the tip of the crisis: flooding, severe hurricane activity, droughts and unexpected heat waves have recently afflicted large portions of the planet. The climate march comprised a wide range of groups, including large contingents from the unions, environmental organizations and a surprising array of unaffiliated citizens.
On Monday, September 29 hundreds of members of the Professional Staff Congress, the union of faculty and staff of the City University of New York rallied for a raise on the street facing the main entrance to Baruch College, where the CUNY Board of Directors was meeting. Like other city and state workers, the union’s 23,000 members had not received a raise for four years.
The pro-democracy demonstrations in Hong Kong exemplified a more militant response. In contrast to routine one day events, Occupy Hong Kong signals a new style, like the earlier US Occupy movement and the recent outpouring of community rage in Ferguson, Missouri, where people — most of them black — marched and fought established authorities for days, leaving their workplaces and their fear behind.
Perhaps most unexpected of all, students, teachers and parents in a Denver, Colorado suburb walked out of classes into the streets to protest the right-wing “patriotism” curriculum concocted by a Koch-Funded Board of Education.
Have we entered a new era of civil disobedience, continuous global protests against authoritarian rule? Not only against one-party dictatorships, but within so-called democratic societies dominated by corporate capitalist power that has immobilized the state at best, and completely dominated public life so that the concept of citizenship itself is under siege? And what do we make of the dramatic presence of high school students and their parents who ordinarily bow to school authority, among those fighting the Right? If these events are part of a new era, where do the ordinarily law-abiding unions stand?
Stanley Aronowitz is Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Urban Education at the CUNY Graduate Center.
