the complexity of protest

It is easy to underestimate the difficulty, the way we have fallen into assumptions about human nature and the politics of survival, assumptions that go unexamined, and if you challenge them, you are quaint, a bit mad, irrelevant. These assumptions are, for example, that we thrive on competition – that he or she who wins is the best outcome for the rest of us, that cutting back on resources is the best way to increase efficiency, that ethics don't matter in the workings of the market, that Machiavelli got it right, because his philosophy suited the autocratic prince of the city state and somehow it fits well enough with a corporatism that has similar characteristics of institutional greed and perverse achievement. That we are in thrall to a nomadic warrior class of business leaders, committing rape and pillage on a global scale. But this is not the whole story. Other forms of organisation are based more on ideas of community, interdependence, sustainability … There are theories about, that there is a political desire to return to a more relational state, Mark Stears argues this, as if David Cameron was just a little premature in his endorsement of a big society, but I don't find the evidence convincing as yet ... Or the wish to see the Occupy movement as part of a global phenomenon of direct action by citizens empowered by social media technology ... The hardest evidence for this is the increasingly robust suppression of dissident protest by statist agencies, that they must be seriously afraid of something. In the words of social commentator Paul Mason, It’s Kicking Off Everywhere. Today in Ukraine. Where is it next going to kick off, nearer to home?