Global Civil War by William I. Robinson

Author:William I. Robinson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: PM Press

THE GLOBAL REVOLT I: SPRING AND BEYOND

In the months prior to the pandemic (and subsequent to Samir Amin’s lamentation over the absence of a “people’s spring”), a “global spring” broke out all around the world.7 However, the 2019 spring was but a peak moment in popular insurgencies that spread in the wake of the 2008 Great Recession; a veritable tsunami of mass rebellion not seen since at least 1968. Social movements mounted sustained fightbacks against austerity, endemic corruption, authoritarianism and dictatorship, police violence, inequality, unemployment, corporate abuse, environmental degradation, and so on. The uprising had a truly global character. In Bangkok, a million people from the Red Shirts movement—so-named because the participants in the movement wear red shirts—took to the streets on March 14, 2010, against a state controlled by the military, the monarchy, and the moneyed elite. The Arab spring of 2011 set the Middle East and North Africa afire, resulting, among other things, in the overthrow of Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak in early 2011, in the face of an unremitting national insurrection. The Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement that rallied under the now famous banner “We Are the 99 Percent!” started with the occupation of Zuccotti Park across the street from the New York Stock Exchange in September 2011 and spread to most major cities across the United States, before being violently suppressed in 2012. In Spain, in 2011, the Indignado (the indignant or the enraged) movement carried out similar occupations of public spaces and held no less than twenty-one thousand protests around the country against austerity and corruption, culminating in a march through Madrid on October 15 by half a million indignados.8 The mass movements in Spain and Greece led to the creation of new left parties, Podemos and SYRIZA, respectively, which burst onto the political scene and contested power.

The Financial Times captured the mood in 2011 in a widely cited article penned by its lead commentator calling it “the year of global indignation”:

Is there such a thing as a global mood? It certainly feels like it. I cannot remember a time when so many different countries, all over the world, were gripped by some form of street protest or popular revolt. 2011 is turning into the year of global indignation. … popular revolt [is] breaking out across the globe. Europe has experienced political riots in Athens, sit-ins in Madrid and looting in London. In India, thousands of demonstrators turned out across the country to support Anna Hazare, a social activist and hunger striker, who has panicked the Indian government into agreeing to new anti-corruption measures. China has seen public demonstrations and online protests sparked by a factory accident and a high-speed train crash. In Chile, the past two months have seen huge marches by students and trade unions demanding higher social spending. In Israel, the main boulevards of Tel Aviv have been occupied by ordinary people protesting against the cost of living.9

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