Essay on Revolution of 21st Century
Answers
Since the outbreak of the capitalist crisis in 2008, there have been two major international cycles of class struggle. We are now going through the second cycle. Its opening bell was sounded by the eruption of the Yellow Vests in France in late 2018.
Since the outbreak of the capitalist crisis in 2008, there have been two major international cycles of class struggle. In the first cycle in the “West” (to use the term as developed by Antonio Gramsci in his Prison Notebooks), we saw essentially peaceful revolts like the Indignados Movement in Spain, also known as the 15-M Movement (for May 15, 2011). That was followed by the wave of demonstrations in Istanbul’s Gezi Park, in Turkey, beginning in late May 2013, and massive demonstrations in several Brazilian cities in June 2013. Major crises such as in Greece in 2010 led to sharper class-struggle processes. The more “Eastern” scenarios of the “Arab Spring” that confronted dictatorships took on a much more violent form, as in Egypt in 2011, where the Tahrir Square movement ended up marking the beginning of a revolutionary process that was put down with blood and fire.
We are now going through a second cycle. Its opening bell was sounded by the eruption of the Yellow Vests in France in late 2018. Unlike the Indignados, they began in the context of a higher and more violent level of class struggle, and were met with repression that had not been seen for a long time within the imperialist democracies. This added important contingents from the lowest and most precarious layers of the working class, especially from the suburbs,[1] to the sectors that had been the protagonists of the previous cycle of class struggle. They targeted Macron’s government, demanding its ouster, and even had elements of self-organization such as the “Assemblies of the Assemblies” (which, however, never fully developed).
We also see higher levels of confrontation in the second Catalan uprising that is ongoing, and in the protests that are taking place in Hong Kong. Meanwhile, uprisings in Algeria and Sudan have reactivated the “Arab Spring.” In war-torn Iraq, there have been massive protests against unemployment and the high cost of living—repression has left a trail of dead bodies. Crowds in Lebanon are mobilizing against the government. In Latin America, the revolutionary days that Chile has experienced, and Ecuador beforehand on a smaller scale, are part of a cycle of class struggle that includes Puerto Rico, Honduras, and Haiti, with more acute confrontations with the armed forces and more repression in the streets.