This wave
of global protest is being led by the children of the financial crash
“What has
intensified this urgency is the backdrop of looming ecological catastrophe.
Even where protests are not explicitly about environmental concerns, the
prospect of planetary catastrophe in our lifetimes raises the stakes for all
political action.”
From Hong
Kong to South America to London, young people have had enough of economic,
social and ecological collapse
Jack
Shenker
Tue 29 Oct
2019 06.00 GMTLast modified on Tue 29 Oct 2019 07.31 GMT
“I’m 22 years old, and this is my last
letter,” the young man begins. Most of his face is masked with black fabric;
only his eyes, tired and steely, are visible below a messy fringe. “I’m worried
that I will die and won’t see you any more,” he continues, his hands trembling.
“But I can’t not take to the streets.”
The
nameless demonstrator – one of many in Hong Kong who have been writing to their
loved ones before heading out to confront rising police violence in the city –
was filmed by the New York Times last week in an anonymous stairwell. But he
could be almost anywhere, and not only because the walls behind him are white
and characterless, left blank to protect his identity.
From east
Asia to Latin America, northern Europe to the Middle East, there are young
people gathering in stairwells, back alleys and basements whose faces display a
similar blend of exhilaration and exhaustion. “The disaster of ‘chaos in Hong
Kong’ has already hit the western world,” the former Chinese diplomat Wang Zhen
declared in an official Communist party paper, following reports that
protesters in Catalonia were being inspired by their counterparts in Hong Kong.
“We can expect that other countries and cities may be struck by this deluge.”
The problem for governments is there is no
longer a centre ground to snap back to, and their opponents know it
Wang is
right about the deluge. In the same week that those seeking independence from
Spain occupied Barcelona airport and brought motorways to a standstill,
Extinction Rebellion activists seized major bridges and squares across London,
prompting nearly 2,000 arrests. Both mobilisations adopted tactics from Hong
Kong, including fluid targets – inspired by Bruce Lee’s famous “be water“
mantra – and a repertoire of hand signals to outwit security forces.
Meanwhile
Lebanon has been convulsed by its largest demonstrations in two decades, dozens
have been killed during anti-government marches in Iraq, and in Egypt a blanket
ban on dissent by President Abdel Fatah al-Sisi’s brutal dictatorship failed to
prevent sporadic anti-regime protests breaking out across the country late last
month. In the Americas, where Wang once served as a Chinese government envoy,
Ecuador, Chile and Haiti are all experiencing citizen uprisings that are
virtually unprecedented in recent history, ushering vast numbers of people into
the streets – as well as soldiers tasked with containing them.
Each of
these upheavals has its own spark – a hike in transport fares in Santiago, or a
proposed tax on users of messaging apps like WhatsApp in Beirut – and each
involves different patterns of governance and resistance. The class composition
of the indigenous demonstrators in Ecuador can’t be compared with most of those
marching against the imprisonment of separatist leaders in Catalonia; nor is
the state’s prohibition of protest in London on a par with the repression in
Hong Kong, where officers shot live ammunition into a teenager’s chest.
And yet
it’s clear that we are witnessing the biggest surge in global protest activity
since the early 2010s, when a “movement of the squares” saw mass rallies in
capital cities across the Arab world, followed by Occupy demonstrations in the
global north. Historically speaking, the past decade has seen more protests
than at any time since the 1960s. Despite their disparate grievances, some
common threads do bind today’s rebellions together. Tracing them may help
clarify the nature of our present political volatility.
One obvious
link is also the most superficial: the role played by social media, which has
been widely noted in the press. While it’s true that digital technologies have
enabled more agile and horizontal forms of organising, the ubiquity of these
tools in 2019 tells us almost nothing about what is driving people to take to
the streets in the first place. Indeed, in many states, social media is now an
instrument of state repression as much as it is a tool of revolt.
The most
significant connection is generational. The majority of those protesting now
are the children of the financial crisis – a generation that has come of age
during the strange and febrile years after the collapse of a broken economic
and political orthodoxy, and before its replacement has emerged.
One direct
impact of the crash has been a rapid diminishment of opportunity for millions
of young people in rich countries – who now regard precarious work and rising
inequality as the norm. At the same time, the aftermath of the crash has
cracked the entrenched structures that had evolved to detach citizens from
active participation in politics – be that through authoritarian systems or via
an institutional consensus on the inevitability of market logic and
technocratic management. Amid widespread economic and social failure, it has
become harder than ever for elites to justify power, even on their own terms.
All this
has produced a generation charged with hopelessness and hope. Afflicted by what
the anthropologist David Graeber calls “despair fatigue”, protesters are
putting their bodies on the line because it feels as if they have no other
choice – and because those who rule over them have rarely seemed more
vulnerable. Most have spent their lives under the maxim “there is no
alternative” – and now circumstances have forced them to widen their political
imaginations in search of something new. As one poster proclaims in Chile:
“It’s not about 30 pesos, it’s about 30 years.”
Facing them
down are states determined to put citizens back in their box and reseal the
borders of political participation. The problem for governments is that there
is no longer an established centre ground to snap back to, and their opponents
know it – which is why so many of those involved in the current mobilisations
will not settle for token concessions from the authorities.
“We need a
whole new system, from scratch,” declared one demonstrator in Lebanon. The
crackdown on Catalan separatists by the Spanish government has brought back
dark memories of the state’s dirty war in the Basque country in the 1980s and
the Franco era that preceded it; troops are marching through city centres in
Chile for the first time since Pinochet.
In China,
Xi Jinping has claimed that any attempt to divide the nation will result in
“bodies smashed and bones ground to powder”. In many places, grassroots victory
– and radical political transformation – feels to many like the only possible
resolution, lending clashes an “all or nothing” antagonism and urgency that is
hard to roll back.
What has
intensified this urgency is the backdrop of looming ecological catastrophe.
Even where protests are not explicitly about environmental concerns, the
prospect of planetary catastrophe in our lifetimes raises the stakes for all
political action. “The kids who are walking out of school have a hugely radical
understanding of the way that politics works, and they recognise that our
democratic processes and structures as they stand are designed to uphold the
status quo,” Jake Woodier, one of the organisers behind the UK climate strike
movement, told me this year. “They know that they will be worse off than their
parents, know that they’ll never own a home, and know that on current trends
they could live to see the end of humanity. So for them, for us, politics is
not a game, it’s reality, and that’s reflected in the way we organise –
relentlessly, radically, as if our lives depend on it.”
The
Cambridge political scientist Helen Thompson once argued: “The post-2008 world
is, in some fundamental sense, a world waiting for its reckoning.” That
reckoning is beginning to unfold globally. They may come from different
backgrounds and fight for different causes, but the kids being handcuffed,
building barricades, and fighting their way through teargas in 2019 all entered
adulthood after the end of the end of history. They know that we are living
through one of what the American historian Robert Darnton has called “moments
of suspended disbelief”: those rare, fragile conjunctures in which anything
seems conceivable, and – far from being immutable – the old rules are ready to
be rewritten. As long as it feels like their lives depend on winning, the
deluge will continue.
• Jack
Shenker is a writer based in London and Cairo. His latest book is Now We Have
Your Attention
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