Why It's Still Kicking Off Everywhere (9 page)

After police shot alleged gang member Mark Duggan, on 6 August 2011, riots erupted in thirty English towns and cities. Despite the relatively small-scale participation in the uprisings, they were concentrated and devastating, leading to widespread looting and arson. In the first two days, in most places, police lost control of the streets. In some areas, where the rioting overlapped with ethnic tension between black youths and Asian or Turkish small businessmen, the latter formed protection squads, which found themselves also in tension with law enforcement.

It became clear the rioters across Britain had organized through social media; above all the Blackberry instant messaging service.

Though occasionally led by organized crime, and often by the disorganized petty criminals who form the youth gang fraternity, the overwhelming social characteristic of those arrested was poverty. The events, whose precise significance is still being disputed by criminolo-gists and social theorists, formed a coda to the British winter of discontent.

Because—from Millbank to the summer riots—the scale of British discontent looks small beside the Arab Spring, it's been possible to ignore its significance. But it was significant, both sociologically and politically. Not only did it demonstrate the almost total disconnect between official politics and large sections of young people; it was also the moment that protest methods once known to a committed few were adopted by the uncommitted mass. But it also showed how, in developed societies, organized labour is still capable of channelling and overwhelming the more chaotic, spontaneous protests.

And it was an advance preview of the problem which youthful, socially networked, horizontalist movements would have everywhere once things got serious: the absence of strategy, the absence of a line of communication through which to speak to the union-organized workers. The limits, in short, of ‘propaganda of the deed'.

Despite all this, what was obvious by late 2010 is that we were dealing with something new: something produced by bigger changes in society. But what?

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So, Why Did It Kick Off? The Social Roots of the New Unrest

If the Arab Spring had happened in isolation, it might have been categorized as a belated aftershock of 1989; if the student unrest had been part of the normal cycle of youth revolt, it could have been quickly forgotten. But as the momentum gathered, from Iran to Santa Cruz, to London, Athens and Cairo, the events carried too much that was new in them to ignore.

The media began a frantic search for parallels. Nigel Inkster, former director of operations for Britain's Secret Intelligence Service, told me: ‘It's a revolutionary wave, like 1848.' Others found analogies with 1968 or the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. In late January 2011 I sat with veteran reporters in the newsroom of a major TV network and discussed whether this was Egypt's 1905 or its 1917.

As I will argue, there are strong parallels—above all with 1848, and with the wave of discontent that preceded 1914. But there is something in the air that defies historical parallels: something new to do with technology, behaviour and popular culture. As well as a flowering of collective action in defence of democracy, and a resurgence of the struggles of the poor and oppressed, what's going on is also about the expanded power of the individual.

For the first time in decades, people are using methods of protest that do not seem archaic or at odds with the modern contemporary world; the protesters seem more in tune with modernity than the methods of their rulers. Sociologist Keith Kahn-Harris calls what we're seeing the ‘movement without a name':

A trend, a direction, an idea-virus, a meme, a source of energy that can be traced through a large number of spaces and projects. It is also a way of thinking and acting: an agility, an adaptability, a refusal to accept the world as it is, a refusal to get stuck into fixed patterns of thought.
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Why is it happening now? Ultimately, the explanation lies in three big social changes: in the demographics of revolt, in technology and in human behaviour itself. And without ignoring the specifics of Europe, North Africa or the global south, I will attempt here to summarize (as in the original ‘Twenty Reasons' blog) what is common to these situations.

The graduate with no future

At the centre of all the protest movements is a new sociological type: the graduate with no future.

In North Africa there is a demographic bulge of young people, including graduates and students, who are unable to get a decent job—or indeed any job. By 2011 there was 20 per cent youth unemployment across the region, where two-thirds of the population is under the age of thirty. In Libya, despite high GDP growth, youth unemployment stood at 30 per cent.

But youth unemployment is not a factor confined to North Africa. In Spain, in 2011 youth unemployment was running at 46 per cent, a figure partially ameliorated by the tendency for young Spaniards to live off their extended families. In Britain, on the eve of the student riots of 2010, youth unemployment stood at 20 per cent.

The financial crisis of 2008—which would bankrupt states as well as banks—created a generation of twenty-somethings whose projected life-arc had switched, quite suddenly, from an upward curve to a downward one. The promise was: ‘Get a degree, get a job in the corporate system and eventually you'll achieve a better living standard than your parents.' This abruptly turned into: ‘Tough, you'll be poorer than your parents.'

All across the developed world, the generation that leaves university in the 2010s will have to work longer because the guarantee of a comfortable income in retirement can no longer be met, either by private investment or the welfare state. Their disposable income will fall, because the financialization of public services demands a clutch of new debt repayments that eat into salaries: student loan repayments will be higher, private health insurance costs will rise, pension top-up payments will be demanded. They will face higher interest rates on home loans for decades, due to the financial crash. They will be burdened with the social costs of looking after the ageing baby boomers, plus the economic costs of energy depletion and climate change.

For the older generation it's easy to misunderstand the word ‘student' or ‘graduate': to my contemporaries, at college in the 1980s, it meant somebody engaged in a liberal, academic education, often with hours of free time to dream, protest, play in a rock band or do research. Today's undergraduates have been tested every month of their lives, from kindergarten to high school. They are the measured inputs and outputs of a commercialized global higher education market worth $1.2 trillion a year—excluding the USA. Their free time is minimal: precarious part-time jobs are essential to their existence, so that they are a key part of the modern workforce. Plus they have become a vital asset for the financial system. In 2006, Citigroup alone made $220 million clear profit from its student loan book.
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When in 2010 I attended Warwick University's prestigious Economics Conference, it was populated by young men and women dressed in box-fresh versions of ‘business attire'—hypersexual retakes on the cocktail dress, Mormon-sharp suits, neutral ties—worn amid the routine squalor of a university campus. They were trying to live the dream—but a glance at their Facebook pages told you it was just for show. This was the lifestyle they'd been sold.

These students were aspiring to be the ‘ideal workers' of the global age. The sociologist Richard Sennett describes how, starting in high-tech industries, a particular type of employee has become valued by corporations: ‘Only a certain kind of human being can prosper in unstable, fragmentary social conditions … a self oriented to the short term, focused on potential ability [rather than actual skill], willing to abandon past experience.'
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For employers, Sennett writes, the ideal product of school and university is a person with weak institutional loyalty, low levels of informal trust and high levels of anxiety about their own competence, leading to a constant willingness to reinvent themselves in a changing labour market. To survive in this world of zero loyalty, people need high self-reliance, which comes with a considerable sense of individual entitlement and little aptitude for permanent bonding. Flexibility being more important than knowledge, they are valued for the ability to discard acquired skills and learn new ones.

However, Sennett observes, such workers also need ‘a thick network of social contacts': their ideal habitat is the global city, at whose bars, coffee shops, Apple stores, dance clubs and speed-dating events they can meet lots of equally rootless people.

The revolts of 2010–11 have shown, quite simply, what this work-force looks like when it becomes collectively disillusioned, when it realizes that the whole offer of self-betterment has been withdrawn. In revolts sparked or led by educated youth—whether in Cairo or Madrid—a number of common traits can be observed.

First, that the quintessential venue for unrest is the global city, a megatropolis in which reside the three tribes of discontent—the youth, the slum-dwellers and the working class. The estates, the gated communities, the informal meeting spaces, the dead spaces between tower blocks just big enough to be blocked by a burning car, the pheromone- laden nightclubs—all combine to form a theatrical backdrop for the kind of revolts we've seen.

Second, members of this generation of ‘graduates with no future' recognize one another as part of an international sub-class, with behaviours and aspirations that easily cross borders.

I saw the Egyptian revolutionary socialist Gigi Ibrahim (@GSquare86), an iconic figure in the 25 January revolution, speak to London students a few weeks after Mubarak fell. There was no noticeable difference between her clothes, language and culture and theirs. She didn't mind that the meeting was small, that people came and went at random, depending on their other social commitments; she was not put off by their texting and tweeting during her speech.

The boom years of globalization created a mass, transnational culture of being young and educated; now there is a mass transnational culture of disillusionment. And it transmits easily. When activists like Ibrahim began to appear on TV in vox pops from Tahrir Square, youth all over the world—above all in America, where the ‘image' of the Arab world has been about Islam, terrorism and the veil—simply said to themselves: ‘Heck, that kid is just like me.'

Soon the activists were making physical links across borders. I had interviewed British student protester Simon Hardy during the wave of college occupations in London and had seen him carrying a red flag emblazoned with the word ‘Revolution' on the 9 December demo; I was astonished to find him tweeting from Tahrir Square on 2 February. He reported:

We're quite near the front line where the pro-Mubarak forces are throwing sticks and stones at us. Around us people are breaking up paving stones with metal sticks to get ammunition. This is wrapped in carpet and taken to the front line to defend the square against the pro-Mubarak militias. Everyone here comes up to us as we walk past. They say how much they love freedom and hate Mubarak.
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In the twentieth century, revolutionaries would ride hanging from the undersides of railway carriages to make cross-border links like this. Today, information technology and cheap air travel makes them routine; shared global culture makes the message easy to convey.

But there is a third social impact of the ‘graduate with no future': the sheer size of the student population means that it is a transmitter of unrest to a much wider section of the population than before. This applies both in the developed world and in the global south. Since 2000, the global participation rate in higher education has grown from 19 per cent to 26 per cent; in Europe and North America, a staggering 70 per cent now complete post-secondary education.
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In Britain, the Blair government's policy of getting half of all school-leavers into higher education meant that, when it broke out, student discontent would penetrate into hundreds of thousands of family homes. While the middle-class student activists of 1968 thought of themselves as external ‘detonators' of the working class, the students of 2010 were thoroughly embedded both in the workforce and in low-income communities.

At the same time, in the developed world at least, the ‘graduates with no future' often live in close proximity to the urban poor. Many dwell in the hidden modern slum—a.k.a. the ‘student house'—where every room contains a bed, or in flats rented in the terraced streets and inner-city neighbourhoods where the unemployed and the ethnic minorities live. Once the housing and jobs markets collapsed, the student house became the young accountant house, the young lawyer, teacher and other struggling professional's house.

At the dance clubs students frequent there's always some urban poor youth: this is true even in smart American college towns. But in the mega-cities of youth culture—London, Paris, Los Angeles, New York—the cultural proximity is more organic. And in no-hope towns where the college is the only modern thing in the landscape, everyone rubs shoulders in the laundromat, the fast-food joint, the cramped carriages of late-night trains.

In North Africa, though many of the college students who led the revolutions were drawn from the elite, you find this same blurring of the edges between the educated youth and the poor.

The story of Mohamed Bouazizi, the street trader whose self-immolation on the morning of 17 January 2011 sparked the revolution in Tunisia, illustrates this well. He can't get a job because, in a corrupt dictatorship, he lacks the right connections. He's a street vendor earning $140 a month, but he's using the money to put his sister through college.
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The 2008 uprising in Mahalla, Egypt, saw this same overlap of worker, student and urban poor. Although a strike initially caused the rising, when the strike was banned the revolt was led by the urban poor: jobless youths, street traders and women. As the blogger and activist Hossam el-Hamalawy told me: