5. Análisis del Ambiente
5.3. Mercado y competencia
5.3.2. Mercado local
Unable to achieve meaningful change through legal political institutions, an increasing number of people have resorted to participating in civil disobedience mass actions such as the 2011/12 Occupy Movement protests (della Porta 2012).
90 As many political analysts note, however, it is important to distinguish between
different forms of populism: while Donald Trump in the US, Marine le Pen in France, and Pauline Hanson in Australia represent right-‐wing populist politicians who advocate socially damaging policies, some left-‐leaning politicians such as Jeremy Corbyn in the UK, Bernie Sanders in the US and the late Venezuelan president, Hugo Cháves, are often similarly derided in the media as ‘populist’ while, in reality, their policies represent progressive ideals (albeit to varying degrees).
91 For detailed discussions outlining conditions leading to SYRIZA’s rise, refer to
Bournous and Karatsioubanis (2015); Spourdalakis (2014); Stavrakakis and
Katsambekis (2014); and Verney (2014). The impasse between the Greek government and its creditors (Inman 2015), which saw the SYRIZA government completely
capitulate to the demands of ‘the Troika’ in July 2015 and split (with the Left Faction forming a separate party, Popular Unity, in August 2015), is a clear demonstration that even relatively ‘radical’ elected governments have negligible power when it comes to implementing progressive policies on behalf of the people they represent if these policies threaten elite interests.
While the relatively long-‐lasting Occupy camps in US and UK public squares and parks were forcibly disbanded in what appeared, at least in the US, to be a co-‐ ordinated action by authorities (Ramsey 2012), protests over a variety of economic, environmental and social issues continue to occur in many parts of the world (Caraus & Parvu 2016; Carothers & Youngs 2015; CIVICUS 2016; Koukouzelis 2016; Ortiz, Burke, Berrada & Cortés 2013; Youngs 2017). The early days of the Trump
administration’s ascension to power in particular heralded a renewal of mass protest activities both in the United States and worldwide (Jamieson 2017).
The first mass action against the Trump administration was the Women’s March on Washington, that aimed to include people from a variety of social groups threatened by its policies by organising under the principle that ‘Women’s Rights are Human Rights and Human Rights are Women’s Rights’ (Women’s March on Washington 2017). Taking place on 21 January 2017, the day after the inauguration of Donald Trump as president of the United States, the Women’s March has been described as an ‘anti-‐Trump protest’ to demonstrate resistance against policies such as Trump’s “…plans to repeal the 2010 Affordable Care Act, which among other things requires health insurers to cover birth control” (Khomami 2017). It included several solidarity marches in other US cities as well as in cities around the world that were organised by “Women’s March Global, the international arm of the Washington arm”
(Khomami 2017) and is estimated to have attracted between 3,200,000 and 5,200,000 participants in the US and between 260,000 and 360,000 participants in other countries (Pressman & Chenoweth cited in Bridges & Tober 2017). Another significant mass civil disobedience action involving thousands of participants occurred at airports across the United States on 29 January 2017 to protest against Trump’s executive order to impose “a freeze on refugee admissions and a ban on travel from seven Muslim-‐majority countries” (Gambino et al. 2017). These protests also spread globally, with one example of a solidarity action being the marches attended by tens of thousands of participants across the UK protesting Prime Minister Theresa May’s state visit invitation to President Trump (Gayle & Slawson 2017). Other notable mass protest actions against President Trump and his
release his tax returns (Stevens 2017), the 22 April 2017 March for Science to counter the Trump administration’s repeal of environmental protection laws and its funding cuts to environmental protection agencies and research projects on crucial issues such as climate change (Milman 2017b), the 29 April 2017 People’s Climate March demanding socially just action on climate change (Fandos 2017), and the 12 August 2017 Charlottesville (Virginia) protest against the rise of US right-‐wing
extremism which is perceived as being fuelled by the Trump administration’s policies (Alpher 2017). At the transnational level, an estimated 200,000 anti-‐capitalist
protesters gathered in force in Hamburg on 7 and 8 July 2017 to protest against the G20 Summit (Oltermann 2017) in an action reminiscent of the 1999 alter-‐
globalization anti-‐WTO protests in Seattle (Price 2016).
Ongoing sporadic protests such as these demonstrate that an increasing number of people belonging to, or supporting, subordinate groups that include large segments of the working class, refugees, migrants, minority groups, students, and people with disabilities, are becoming concerned enough to take action in the form of protests against the negative material and social outcomes that they have to suffer as a result of policies that favour elites (CIVICUS 2016). Few of the protests have resulted in changes that benefit ordinary people; on the contrary, ruling elites respond with thinly-‐veiled disdain for the concerns of their citizens, as they did in the aftermath of the 2003 global anti-‐war demonstrations, in which millions of people participated both in the US and in many cities around the world (Carty 2009; Hil 2008).92 These global anti-‐war demonstrations signalled people’s opposition to the 2003 military invasion of Iraq by the ‘Coalition of the Willing’ – an invasion led by the US Bush administration on the basis of false intelligence reports that Iraq had secret “weapons of mass destruction” (Fawcett 2013; Herring & Robinson 2014-‐15; Western 2005). The 2003 invasion of Iraq is just one of the many conflicts affecting the lives of millions of people around the world as the United States and its allies
92 Estimates of how many people participated in these protests vary: Hil (2008) reports
an estimated total of 10 million people in over 800 cities, while Carty (2009) reports an estimated total of 15 million people in 75 cities. As McPhail and McCarthy (2004) point out, attendance numbers at such mass protest events are often disputed, with
authorities tending to downplay the numbers and organisers and supporters tending to exaggerate them.
attempt to control the development of global capitalism in a way that best suits their economic interests and the US desire to retain its status as the world’s sole global hegemon. The geopolitical instability this engenders results in many needless deaths, much suffering, and immense and long-‐lasting environmental damage.