(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
There are mass protests all the time. In June violent student protests forced Sheikh Hasina to resign as Prime Minister in Bangladesh. At the same time, tens of thousands took to the streets in Kenya in protest against new taxes, the city hall in Nairobi was set on fire and the parliament was stormed. And in New Caledonia, protests against electoral reforms that would reduce native influence in favor of settled French flared up again during the fall of 2024, with car burnings and looting. And students at universities and educational institutions in the United States and many other places continue their mobilization against the Israeli state's genocide in Gaza.
There have been so many mass protests around the world in the past 15 years that one becomes completely breathless if one tries to name the most important: from the Arab revolts of 2011 to the feminist uprising in Iran in 2022 and the many actions against infrastructure projects, agro-industry, air traffic and other climate-damaging activities. (See also the article on destitution on page 21).
Previously existing class affiliations and feelings of solidarity have been replaced by uncertain and ephemeral identities of all kinds, virtually all mediated by the commodity form.
On every continent, we have seen people take to the streets and speak out. As the authors of a report titled The Age of Mass Protests: Understanding an Escalating Global Trend (2020) from the American think tank, Center for Strategic & International Studies, writes that «we are living in a time of global mass protests that are historically unprecedented in terms of frequency, scope and size».
According to the report's authors, the number of protests has increased significantly from 2009 to 2019 in all regions of the world. More and more reject what the Italian writer Giorgio Cesarano called "the organic composition of late capitalism", where it is only possible to survive through wage labor and money. After five decades of declining growth in the world economy and the generalization of precarious and informal work, more and more people are taking to the streets. To say that capital is on the edge of the grave is undoubtedly premature, but more and more people seem ready to protest against increasingly poor living conditions, growing inequality, racial-colonial violence and an accelerating biocrisis.
«A new May 68»
If the period from the 1980s to the first decade of the new century was characterized by a striking absence of conflict and mass protest in the so-called first world, which Denmark are part of, and regular, but rarely successful food riots and protests in the second and third world, we now live in a globalized world where mass protests take place virtually everywhere. The many protests take the form of demonstrations, occupations or riots and has on several occasions in the past fifteen years developed into actual uprisings or revolts, such as in North Africa and the Middle East in 2011, Ukraine in 2014 and Sudan in 2019. It is as if a generalization of misery, depression, climate anxiety and state terror takes place, so that young people in both the south and the north stare despairingly into a world in disintegration. That is why so many of them take to the streets.
Since January 2011, we have had demonstrations, occupations, riots and revolts. As Vincent Bevins writes in If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution (2023), a veritable explosion took place in the earlier 2010s in the number of mass protests and, in retrospect, these appear, as already mentioned, as a fragmented global anti-systemic movement. The protests have been so extensive that both 2011 and 2019 have been named "a new May 68", and in 2011 Time Magazine named the protester person of the year. In the summer of 2020, the venerable old-bourgeois magazine The Economist not only explained to its readers that "political protests have become more widespread and frequent", but also warned that "the rising trend of global unrest is likely to continue".
«The Movement of Rejection»
Whenever protesters fight with the police, as in Paris in 2019 or in Chile the same year, or when protesters take a place and hold it, as in Tahrir Square in Cairo in 2011 or in Taksim Square in 2013 in Istanbul or on the Maidan- place in Ukraine in the same year, a new subject is produced, what we can call the "movement of rejection", where the separations of late capitalism are momentarily abolished in a common rejection. The fragmented universe of the spectacular commodity economy, where any previously existing class affiliations and feelings of solidarity have been replaced by uncertain and ephemeral identities of all kinds, virtually all mediated by the commodity form, is suddenly blown to bits and pieces, and in its place another opens up the world in the old.
All the identities and organizations that maintain the late capitalist social structure are giving way to something completely different, which does not have its starting point in pre-existing ideas and experiences about class, race, gender or nation.
The new mass protests must not only be understood as an antithesis to the ineffectiveness of institutional representation or a consequence of the economic inequality that plagues most countries in the world, but also as a radical challenge to a handed down language of political action. This is a language rooted in notions of political democracy, civil society and social movements as developed in Western Europe and elsewhere within the framework of the post-war Fordist wage-productivity compromise, with its negotiations of income, purchasing power and partisan interests within the nation-state. Rather, the movement of rejection takes place beyond the political parties of national democracy and the struggle for votes, beyond the trade unions' mediation of the class struggle and out of sight of the endless array of spokesmen, commentators and experts. The rebellion of our time takes place beyond any kind of representational logic and classical organization. Therefore, it cannot be integrated. The anonymous rebellion is coming.
"A Future Community"
It is a political act that is neither class struggle nor the establishment of an opposition to those in power, but takes the form of a violent rage against reality. In that sense, it is as much an anthropological as a political showdown that we see taking shape in the many protests, it is an attempt to untangle ourselves from all the handed down notions of how the social context we call a society and a nation-state, is organized. It seems to be clear to more and more that it is not possible to deal with the many crises that just keep developing – the climate crisis is the obvious example of this – within the framework of the political institutions we have today.
They are neither a class, nor a nation, nor a people
With Giorgio Agamben, we can call what arose in the streets of the United States in 2020, in France and Chile in 2019, and in many other places, "a coming community". It is a remarkable community, characterized neither by any belonging nor the absence of belonging, but belonging nonetheless. The rejection does not create a political community. There is no positive identity that the many on the street unite around, they are neither a class, a nation nor a people. The starting point of this community is each time, in Paris as in Santiago and in Minneapolis, the rejection of the state organization. That is why we can say it is the movement of rejection, we can see the contours of it in all the protests. It is a movement that rejects the state and the economy it facilitates and sustains with its police, laws and regulations.
This is a reworked extract from Mikkel Bolt's new book The movement of rejection, which is a 'positive' analysis of the many protest movements after 2011.
