The powerless are rising, and rulers should take note

From Paris to Jakarta, Tunisia to Chile, street revolts are growing in opposition to entrenched elites, corruption and big-tech power. It is time that leaders world-wide paid attention. John Keane reports.

Rebellions everywhere.

Huge crowds of angry citizens on the streets and towns of France. Organised Jantar Mantar-style public protests not only in India but in countries otherwise as different as Chile, Belgium, Tunisia, Spain, Portugal, Serbia, Albania, Indonesia and Italy.

Witty placards. Online satire. Loud voices and spirited chants. Street fighting. Shattered glass. Tear gas, water cannon, flash bang grenades, gunshots, truncheons. Talk of the end of an era. Speculation about new beginnings. Everywhere a sense that enough is enough, that things are ruinously out of joint, and that to avoid future catastrophes big political changes must urgently happen.

Making sense of these simultaneous uprisings of disaffected citizens is an urgent task, but things aren’t helped by the bitter categorisation struggles and confused answers given by commentators to the key questions: Do these protests share qualities in common and what do they tell us about the turbulent times through which our world is passing?

Some breaking news journalists, hunting for followers, short circuit discussion by underscoring the frenzy, hooliganism, arson and wanton damage to property. There’s some lawless violence, it’s true, but anarchic disorder isn’t the main feature of these protests.

If anything, the opposite holds: what’s impressive is the savvy self-restraint of the protests in the face of brutal military-style policing.

Other observers meanwhile employ the buzz phrase Gen Z to say these are uprisings of the young, revolts triggered by the anxieties of an emerging generation which lives in dread of the future.

Young people are often at the forefront of these uprisings, but everywhere their social support base runs much wider. That’s why still other interpreters categorize the protests as revolts against the greed and corruption of neo-liberalism.

What these protests have in common, it’s said, is working class opposition to rising inflation, unaffordable housing, and cuts to education and health care that favor a tax-dodging ruling class which doesn’t care a fig about democracy or the wellbeing and dignity of citizens.

An age of powerlessness

There are grains of truth in each interpretation, but what they fail to see is that these social outbursts (estallidos sociales is the phrase used by Chileans) are everywhere revolts of the powerless.

We’re living in an age of powerlessness in which many millions of people living in many countries, democracies included, feel that they have zero control over the key institutions and policies which shape their lives.

In a world troubled by cascading fears of unending wars, genocide, climate catastrophes, demagoguery, corrupt government, worsening social inequality, and big-tech surveillance, surveys tell us that they are convinced that power is concentrated in the hands of the few and that powerlessness is the lot of the many.

Powerlessness of course comes in a variety of graded forms marked by different disabling effects. But it’s always an awful curse on people’s lives.

When individuals and groups experience powerlessness, they feel the heavy weight of an ungenerous world bearing down on them. They have stories to tell, they do their best to resist in various ways, but they feel shut out. They suffer. Things fall apart. Powerlessness destroys people’s very sense of belonging in a world they find remote, hostile and merciless.

What’s remarkable is the way these rebellions display the flipside of powerlessness. People sense the potential power of the powerless.

Aided by social media networking, organizing skills and street-level energy, there’s the conviction that power shouldn’t be thought of as ‘up there’ and impenetrable, that Davids can turn tables on Goliaths, that weakness can be turned into strength.

The powerless have within themselves the capacity to grasp the truth that life is not lived – that only living creatures who design to live their lives constitute life. In suffering, they can find comfort, in hardship resilience, in silence words of resistance, in despair hopes for a better life.

In this way, the rebels with a cause expose the scandalous secret of powerlessness. They show that the powerful always depend on the downtrodden.

So long as rulers want to rule, even when in extreme circumstances they try to exterminate the powerless, the powerful require the cooperation of their victims, their willingness, however blind, to follow instructions, to believe they’re fated to be the victims of the superior.

The sweet secret is revealed when the powerless refuse to cooperate with the powerful. At that moment, the power of the powerful comes to be seen for what it is: contingent, refutable and defeatable. Convinced that the personal is political, the powerless get off bended knees and straighten their spines.

Refusing to play the power games of the powerful, they prove that power, the capacity to get others to do what otherwise they would not do, is not the exclusive monopoly of the powerful.

What kind of revolution?

These worldwide outbursts of the powerless pose new political questions. Are they mere examples of what the Belgian thinker Anton Jäger has sarcastically called ‘hyper-politics’, sporadic viral outrages that leave everything unchanged?

Perhaps instead political miracles are coming our way when elected governments will be forced to side with these rebellions by crafting radically new policies that solve difficult structural problems, such as housing unaffordability, climate change, systemic corruption, unregulated big-tech giants and ugly maldistribution of wealth?

Or perhaps we’re witnessing the opening stages of yet more old-fashioned revolutions – those lightning-speed irruptions that gripped France (1798), Mexico (1910), Russia (1917) and Iran (1979) when the powerless rose violently in unison to crush the masters of their injustice but destroyed power-sharing democracy?

Much more likely is that these rebellions are symptoms of another, less familiar type of revolution with a different rhythm: slow-motion, long-term democratic revolutions in which periods of calm are punctuated by angry outbursts of indignant citizens reaching for the emergency brake because they’re fed up with their powerlessness.

We can’t know the future of these stop-start, tortoise-and-hare refusals of top-down, arbitrary power. Just one thing seems certain: thanks to these rebellions of the powerless, our world has been reminded that the downtrodden can spring surprises on the powerful, catch them with their pants down, and bring more democratic honesty, decency and love of justice into the lives of people disgusted by their exclusion from the unfinished democratic revolution.

This column first appeared on Pearls and Irritations and is republished by Global Catholic with permission.