The Role of Mass Movement in the World Politics Essay

The Role of Mass Movement in the World Politics - Essay Example The early stages of the War of American Independence appear a notable example of civil disobedience, including mob violence and resistance, which, however, subsequently developed into a full-scale armed conflict (Williams, 1980). Furthermore, the depth of the social crisis in France brought to the French Revolution of 1789 (Breuilly, 1993), which inter alia fully and explicitly demonstrated the potential civil disobedience has for both destruction and creation, as the case might be. A working-class movement in the early 19th-century Britain, named the Luddites, attempted to hold up the â€Å"steady march of capitalism† by destroying and sabotaging the machines that were ousting the workers from their jobs (Richmond, 2012); while the advent of the socialist movement eventually brought the world the 1917 October Revolution, the Cold War, the Vietnam War, the Cuban missile crisis, etc. Despite some differences – in terms of geography, country-specific grievances and demand s, the outcome, and a scale of impact on the world political system – the above-mentioned cases, along with many others as reviewed in the section below, appear to have two common features. First, civil disobedience had been sparked by existing power relations within a particular spatial and temporal configuration, and second, it was aimed at changing those power relations, thus bringing about disruption for state and society’s modus operandi on a massive scale. This paper is intended to review the history of the Occupy Movement in order to establish the actual motives behind its emergence; which, in turn, could provide some answers in regard to the tenability of capitalist and neo-liberal modes of production, the role and success of mass action in bringing about political change at both national and international levels, and, most notably, the feasibility of a fully functioning democracy. Historical Background In more recent times, there are many examples of mass move ments that played more or less an important, if not decisive, role in the development of the respective states and societies. These include the Non-Cooperation Movement inspired and led by Mohandas ‘Mahatma’ Gandhi in the 1920s (Bakshi, 1988; Brown, 2009), The African-American Civil Rights Movement which operated between 1955 and 1968, and later on gave birth to the Black Power movement (McAdam, 2009), Stephen Biko’s Black Consciousness Movement in South Africa (Gerhart, 1978), the Anti-Vietnam War Movement in the United States (DeBenedetti and Chatfield, 1990), also the 1989 velvet and colour revolutions in Eastern Europe (Sorin and Tismaneanu, 2000), and the so-called ‘Orange Revolution’ in Ukraine that followed the 2004 presidential election, etc. (Gee, 2011).