terça-feira, 2 de outubro de 2012

Para o filósofo Noam Chomsky, Occupy Wall Street trouxe “solidariedade” aos EUA

Fonte: Opera Mundi


No último dia 17 de setembro, a revista norte-americana independente Mother Jones publicou uma excelente linha do tempo sobre o movimento Occupy Wall Street (OWS), que fazia um ano de existência naquele dia.
No final da linha do tempo, o jornalista Josh Harkinson publicou uma espécie de “por onde andam”, revelando o paradeiro atual de quatro pessoas que ele entrevistou logo no início do movimento e que foram peças importantes na evolução do OWS.
O clima comum entre os quatro entrevistados era de descrença. Descrença com o movimento em si, com os rumos políticos e econômicos dos Estados Unidos e com a real intenção de mudança das pessoas.
Durante um ano de existência, o governo norte-americano não deu trégua aos manifestantes do Occupy, e usou ao máximo a força bruta para coibi-los – e continua usando a mesma força contra os que ainda resistem em Wall Street.
Natural, portanto, que depois de tantas batalhas contra oponente tão incisivo e sem limites, o cansaço tome conta mesmo de quem, um dia, tinha toda a disposição do mundo para mudar o que fosse necessário.
O OWS perdeu força, mas não está morto. E para aqueles que acham que esta sobrevida tende a se tornar vida nenhuma com o passar do tempo, a realidade é bem outra. Não é o caso de se esperar que, graças ao OWS, em algum momento, o 1% que domina economicamente os 99% do mundo resolva ser justo e distribuir a renda igualitariamente. É de outra ordem, mais filosófica (mas com efeitos práticos no futuro), a conquista do OWS e de outros movimentos-irmãos que floresceram em centenas de cidades pelo mundo.
Quem pontua essas conquistas é o filósofo, ativista e professor norte-americano Noam Chomsky. Em entrevista (a partir do minuto 33′) que concedeu à jornalista Amy Goodman, do noticiário independente Democracy Now, Chomsky fez uma das afirmações mais reveladoras sobre a cultura norte-americana (e a afirmação tem ainda mais peso sendo ele um norte-americano): “o Occupy criou, espontaneamente, algo que realmente não existe no país: comunidades de apoio mútuo, cooperação, espaços abertos para discussão”. Solidariedade, no fim das contas.
Uma geração nova que se desenvolve tendo descoberto e vivido a solidariedade na prática tem, sem dúvida, muito mais chances de construir uma sociedade mais bem resolvida em termos de justiça social, igualdade de direitos, respeito aos processos democráticos e outras benesses difíceis de serem vividas em sociedades individualistas.
A outra conquista do Occupy Wall Street, segundo Noam Chomsky, foi mudar a agenda de prioridades de toda a nação, colocando no centro da pauta assuntos como desigualdade social, corrupção, democracia e questões ambientais.
Capa do livro lançado em maio por Noam Chomsky
Livro e entrevista
Em maio desse ano, o filósofo lançou um pequeno livro sobre o movimento, chamado “Occupy – Occupied media panphlet series”. Descobri o livro em Nova York e ainda não tive tempo de lê-lo. Mas esta resenha indica que Chomsky, nessa publicação, sublinha no tema que justifica esse post: a solidariedade vivida no Occupy Wall Street foi sua grande e permanente conquista para a sociedade norte-americana.
A seguir, separei a transcrição (em inglês) do trecho da entrevista de Chomsky a Amy Goodman no ponto exato em que ele fala sobre o Occupy. Vale a pena ler cada linha.
AMY GOODMAN: And yet, it’s under President Obama, or you might say because of President Obama, that the Occupy movement has blossomed in this country. Talk about the significance of Occupy.
NOAM CHOMSKY: Well, the Occupy movement is—it was a big surprise. You know, if anybody asked me a year ago, “Is this possible?” I would have said, “It’s crazy. Don’t even try.” But it lit a spark, took off. There are now Occupy movements in thousands of American cities, spread overseas. I was in Australia recently, went to the Occupy movement in Sydney, in Melbourne. There’s one in Hong Kong. You know, everywhere. And there are parallel movements in Europe.
It’s the first—and it’s very significant, I think. Already in—it’s only been around for a couple of months, so, you know, you can’t talk about huge achievements. But there are two kinds of the achievements which I think are—have already had an effect that probably is permanent, but anyway significant. One is, they just changed the national discourse. So, issues that had been, you know, marginalized—they’re familiar, but you didn’t talk about them—like inequality, shredding of the democratic process, you know, financial corruption, environmental issues, all these things, they became—they moved to the center of discussion. In fact, you can even see it from the imagery that’s used. You read about the 99 percent and the 1 percent in the considerable press of the business press. That’s just changed the way lots of people are looking at things. In fact, the polls show that concern over inequality among the general public rose pretty sharply after the Occupy movement started, very probably as a consequence. And there are other policy issues that came to the fore, which are significant.
The other aspect, which in my estimation may be more significant, is that the Occupy movement spontaneously created something that doesn’t really exist in the country: communities of mutual support, cooperation, open spaces for discussion. They just developed a health system, a library, a common kitchen—just people doing things and helping each other. That’s very much missing. There is a massive propaganda—it’s been going on for a century, but picking up enormously—that you really shouldn’t care about anyone else, you should just care about yourself. You pay attention to yourself; we don’t want anything else. You take a look at the attitudes among young people, that’s—it’s polled, it’s studied. It’s remarkably high. So, there was just a study that came out from the Harvard Public Policy Institute, found that—pretty scary results, I thought. Less than—this is kids 18 to 24, you know, college students, basically. Less than half of them think that the government has a responsibility to deal with things like healthcare or food, and so on. When they say the government doesn’t have a responsibility, that’s kind of an interesting concept. If people thought they were living in a democracy, they would say—they would ask the question whether it’s a public responsibility. But again, the propaganda system is designed to make you feel that the government is some alien force, and it’s against you. You know, you want to keep it away from your affairs.
In a democratic society, it would be quite different. Like, you can see it on April 15th. And a good measure of the extent to which a democratic system is functioning is how people feel about taxes. If you had a functioning democratic society, April 15th would be a day of celebration. It’s the day on which we get together and fund the policies that we’ve decided on and that we’ve gotten our representatives to approve of. It’s not what it is here. It’s a day of mourning, because this alien force is coming to steal things from you. Well, that’s the kind of thing that the Occupy movement began to break. It said, “Yeah, we’re in it together.” That’s what the old labor movement used to be. I mean, I can remember, as a kid in the ’30s, when the situation was objectively much worse. But then, my family was mostly unemployed working-class here in New York. But there was a sense of hopefulness, largely because of labor organizing, which not only provided benefits to the people involved, but also made them part of something in which we can work together. The term “solidarity” wasn’t just a vacuous term. And to rebuild that kind of thing, even if it’s in small pieces of the society, can become very important, can change the conception of how a society ought to function.