Keep an eye on occupy Wall/Bay Street, the counter-revolution might just be getting underway. Yes, the counter-revolution — because neo-liberalism was a transformative, and, yes, revolutionary movement asserting and codifying (free trade agreements) the interests of transnational corporations and finance capital in priority over all other human, societal and ecological goals and imperatives.

While student protesters in the ’60s chanted “smash the state,” the business students must have been eavesdropping and thought that might not be a bad idea.

It is useful to understand the massive fraud perpetuated by the banks and investment companies as tantamount to class warfare, declared by finance capital on everyone else, even including the industrial capitalists. And when this raid on the national treasury elicited little more than a whimper of protest, the uber-rich exploited the fears and anxieties of the victims of global capital (most Tea Partiers) and exhorted them to rail against the very institutions that might save them.

So now, three years later, the masses are finally stirring — finding their feet and voices. Had it not been for the false hope the Obama presidency inspired, this probably would have happened much sooner. But the challenge now is to build on the current protests, and to find an agenda, a list of demands, a program, a manifesto that will stop and then reverse what still appears to be the inexorable onslaught of corporate globalization.

In many ways the answer is inglorious, because it simply means regaining the ground lost since the Reagan-Thatcher-Mulroney neo-liberal revolution — rebuilding the regulatory capacity of government, re-establishing public sector services — health care, education, public transit, and creating new ones — universal child care. But this time there is a clear a mission to put social and economic development on an ecologically sustainable path (e.g. carbon taxes, public transit, local food systems).

The modalities for achieving these tasks will vary but inevitably include tax reform, democratic reform, stripping corporations of constitutionally protected rights — for as one placard on wall street read the other day, “I’ll believe that a corporation is a person, when Texas executes one.”

Steven Shrybman is a lawyer with Sack Goldblatt Mitchell LLP. His work focuses on international trade and public interest litigation, including issues concerning the environment, health care, human and labour rights, the protection of public services, natural resources policy, and intellectual property rights.