At the end of a decade of street protests, with the current moment at its liveliest, what links them together?
It’s all kicking off, as Paul Mason once wrote… The BBC report above draws on their correspondents in South America, the Middle East and South East Asian. The three reasons they give for the rise in street protest are: Inequality, Corruption and Political Freedom.
Below,, Gary Younge writes about a decade of street protest:
In March 2011, I asked a class at an unemployed training centre in Madrid who would be prepared to emigrate to find a job. They all raised their hands. Youth unemployment in Spain stood at 43% – higher than both Egypt and Tunisia. Everyone in the room said most of their friends were unemployed. One in five of those under the age of 30 in Spain were still looking for their first job. Almost every young person I spoke to believed their lives would be harder than their parents’.
“This is the least hopeful and best educated generation in Spain,” Ignacio Escolar, then 35 and author of the country’s most popular political blog, told me. “And it’s like a national defeat that they have to travel abroad to find work.”
Why, I asked him, had they not taken to the streets? “It’s like there is oil on the streets,” he said. “All it needs is a small spark and it could blow.”
The last decade has been a combustible one. Across the globe, millions of protesters have marched, sat down, sat in, camped out, occupied, filled jail cells, rioted, looted, chanted, petitioned, lobbied and hashtagged.
These protests have toppled despots and overthrown governments, transformed geopolitics, led to the death or transformation of old political parties, and the birth and ascendancy of new ones.
These demonstrations were largely led by progressives, liberals and leftists, often supporting the demands of the poor, the young, students, workers, minorities, the indigenous, women, trade unionists and migrants.
In most cases, however, they cleared more space for the left than it could hold, either electorally or politically. Caffeinated through social media, these movements had a tendency to burn brightly only to fade, making space for whatever came next.
They involved mostly the same people, shifting from one protest to the next – campaigning first about war, then inequality, then racism, then sexism – which lent the culture of protest an itinerant quality.
The right was on the march, too. From Africa to South America, people mobilised against migrants, wealth redistribution and alleged corruption. Although at times equally chaotic, and less impressive in terms of numbers or strategy, the right has proved itself capable of building a more permanent presence.
Fascism has reasserted itself as a mainstream ideology in Europe; in the US, neo-Nazis have marched by torchlight and killed in daylight; in Bolivia they staged a coup.
It is in the nature of protests that, for the most part, they highlight problems they are not equipped to resolve. This decade was no different. We have witnessed some of the largest and most widespread leftwing protests in history, and we end the decade with the most rightwing governments in living memory.
These contradictions are most evident in the US, which saw four of the five biggest demonstrations in its history in the second half of the decade – prompted primarily by the election of its most reactionary president.