Thursday, July 21, 2011

“Is it a Revolt? No Sire, It’s a Revolution”

A press clipping freshly received from your French correspondent NKN shows the dramatic picture of a former Greek right wing minister in shock after a rocky encounter with the crowd during a protest (see below). Angry constituents went after him while shouting “thief! thief!”. (He ended-up being evacuated by his bodyguards, and is ok)

Whilst Greek riots are not making international headlines anymore, popular anger is not going away. Moreover, popular exasperation against the established order of things seems to be spreading across all sorts of channels and means of expression. Seemingly unrelated events such as the Greek riots, the protests against pension reform in France or the rebellion of anonymous hackers trying to bring institutional sites down in the wikileaks saga, all contribute to reinforce the palpable climate of rebellion against ‘a system’.

Are we just witnessing a revolt or a true revolution?

[ ... ]

The cliché of The Perfect Storm really comes to mind if you add up the headlines gleaned from around the world.@Dr_Tad wrote about this in a recent post on the ‘left flank’:
“There is a confluence of moments:
- Mass movements against austerity rapidly emerging in Europe
- The collapse of the American Empire’s legitimacy through quagmires in Afghanistan and Iraq”
- We now also have unrest online with the WikiLeaks saga and the attempts of anonymous hackers to bring corporate and institutional websites down.

“Despite a prolonged period of defeats and quiescence for the subaltern classes, there is a palpable sense of systemic crisis, the very crisis that neoliberal victories were supposed to reverse.”

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