Middle Class Global Revolutionaries Unite?

The world's middle classes becoming revolutionary and taking on the role of Marx’s proletariat was just one of several futuristic trends for the year 2037 (that also included information chips implanted in the brain and electromagnetic pulse weapons)- envisaged in a report by a team at Britain’s Ministry of Defense released in 2007, and reported by the Guardian in the same year, in a frontpage article ‘Revolution, flashmobs, and brain chips. A grim vision of the future.’

Only four years on and a Global Financial Crisis, and trending global Occupy movement later, the 2007 prediction looks surprisingly prescient.

"The middle classes could become a revolutionary class, taking the role envisaged for the proletariat by Marx," says the report. The thesis is based on "a growing gap" between the middle classes and the superrich on one hand and an urban under-class destabilising social order: "The world's middle classes might unite, using access to knowledge, resources and skills to shape transnational processes in their own class interest". Marxism could also be revived, the report says, because of global inequality. An increased trend towards moral relativism and pragmatic values will encourage people to seek the "sanctuary provided by more rigid belief systems, including religious orthodoxy and doctrinaire political ideologies, such as popularism and Marxism".

With the global peaceful Occupy Movement, powered by hundreds of thousands of the world’s middle class citizens disenfranchised by the system they believed in and that betrayed them, spreading in cities all around the world in the past month, it seems like the future is now, at least in the move to take global action for change.  

What formations will emerge from the Occupy movement remain to emerge and be seen; it seems very unlikely that these will take the form of rigid belief systems, and doctrinaire ideologies as at present the tendency is towards open, fluid social interactions in public spaces. Its very flexibility and spontaneity is a defining feature of this global movement that so far articulates a deep discontent and patient anger at the social injustices of the  “1%” superrich  world’s ruling elite controlling the wealth and resources, whilst the “99%’ are expected to  pay for the corporate greed and shortsightedness that brought on the global financial crisis - through massive cuts to public services and jobs.

Norton-Taylor, Richard (2007). ‘Revolution, flashmobs, and brain chips. A grim vision of the future.’ Guardian, 9/4/2007.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2007/apr/09/frontpagenews.news