In North Africa, though many of the college students who led the revolutions were drawn from the elite, you find this same blurring of the edges between the educated youth and the poor.
The story of Mohamed Bouazizi, the street trader whose self-immolation on the morning of 17 January 2011 sparked the revolution in Tunisia, illustrates this well. He can’t get a job because, in a corrupt dictatorship, he lacks the right connections. He’s a street vendor earning $140 a month, but he’s using the money to put his sister through college.6
The 2008 uprising in Mahalla, Egypt, saw this same overlap of worker, student and urban poor. Although a strike initially caused the rising, when the strike was banned the revolt was led by the urban poor: jobless youths, street traders and women. As the blogger and activist Hossam el-Hamalawy told me:
In the poor neighbourhoods of Egypt you will usually find one son unemployed, another working in a factory, another at university. The issues of poverty and repression overlap; in each poor neighbourhood the police station is basically a torture centre.
The organized labour movement itself is wedged between the discontented middle class and the urban poor. In the developed world, organized labour has been weakened by anti-union legislation and is in numerical decline; in the developing world, labour organization is increasing, but the size of the formal workforce can be, as in Egypt, small compared to the other plebeian classes. For all these reasons, we’ve seen, in a variety of locations, a growing tendency for workers to take action outside the workplace and against targets that are not their direct employers.
Indeed, in the developed world the whole concept of ‘working class’ has come to describe two distinct sets of people. There is the skilled workforce, which is no longer dominated by blue-collar male workers with manufacturing skills, but by a different demographic: more ethnically diverse, more clerical and admin, sometimes predominantly female. And then there are those that in British popular culture have come to be labelled ‘chavs’ (much like those President Obama inadvisedly called ‘rednecks’): the lowest-skilled, poorest-educated white workers, whose lifestyle has been dissolved by globalization and inward migration. This second group is often prey to right-wing ideologies dressed up with ‘class’ rhetoric, which repulse the more educated salariat. Among such workers, levels of resentment were already high, even during the boom of the mid-2000s.
Though it differs from country to country, this division within the developed-world workforce—which is largely a function of someone’s exposure or otherwise to modern, globalized work—poses a strategic problem for the left. It makes it hard for social-democratic and left-liberal parties to create a unified narrative or programme around ‘class’ or ‘class interest’. And it poses an acute challenge for any resistance movement trying to base itself on a common ‘working-class’ culture.
In Egypt and Tunisia—where the organized workforce still maintained elements of a ‘pre-globalized’ lifestyle such as state-owned factories, or communist traditions in the case of Tunisia—the problems were posed differently. Here the organized workforce is small in relation to other classes: socially powerful, but culturally distinct both from the urban poor and from the frappé-sipping graduates in the city-centre cafés.
Both the urban poor and the organized working class have—as we will see—crucial parts to play in shaping the course of the global unrest. But it was to the ‘graduates without a future’ that it fell to kick things off. From the rich world to the poor world, it is educated young people whose life chances and illusions are now being shattered. Though their general conditions are still better than those of slum-dwellers and some workers, they have experienced far greater disappointment.
This new sociology of revolt calls to mind conditions prior to the Paris Commune of 1871: a large and radicalized intelligentsia, a slum-dwelling class finding its voice through popular culture, and a weakened proletariat, still wedded to the organizations and traditions of twenty years before. This has major implications for the kind of revolution people make, once they take to the streets. And it makes the social order of the modern city highly fragile under economic stress.
The Athens uprising of December 2008 was a case study in how the three parts of the plebeian mass interact. A group of participants wrote that the rioters
ranged from high school students and university students to young, mostly precarious, workers from sectors like education, construction, tourism and entertainment, transport and even media. [Older workers] were a minority … very sympathetic towards the burning down of banks and state buildings, but were mostly passive.7
The French historian Hippolyte Taine understood the essential danger of this social mix. When it comes to revolution, he warned, forget the poor and worry about poor lawyers:
Now, as formerly, students live in garrets, bohemians in lodgings, physicians without patients and lawyers without clients in lonely offices … so many Brissots, Marats, Dantons, Robespierres, and St Justs in embryo. Only for lack of air and sunshine they never come to maturity.8
Taine put his finger on what, in 1789, had turned the normal rebelliousness of impoverished graduates into a force that would reshape the world. He saw that the ‘worm-eaten barriers [had] cracked all at once’. Technology, social change, institutional decay had unleashed something bigger than teenage angst.
If this sounds like an eighteenth-century version of the ‘death of deference’ complaint, well, it was. A deep social crisis was under way, then as now. But with one big difference: today, in every garret there is a laptop.
The Jacobin with a laptop
There has been high prominence given to technology and social media in explanations of the global unrest—and for good reason. Social media and new technology were crucial in shaping the revolutions of 2011, just as they shaped industry, finance and mass culture in the preceding decade. What’s important is not that the Egyptian youth used Facebook, or that the British students used Twitter and the Greek rioters organized via Indymedia, but what they used these media for—and what such technology does to hierarchies, ideas and actions.
Here, the crucial concept is the network—whose impact on politics has been a long time coming. The network’s basic law was explained by Bell Telephone boss Theodore Vail as early as 1908: the more people who use the network, the more useful it becomes to each user. This is known as the ‘network effect’: what it describes is the creation, out of two people’s interaction, of a ‘third thing’ which comes for free. Because network theory originated in the boardroom, this ‘third thing’ has tended to be identified in terms of economic value. But, in recent years, it has become clear it can provide much more than that.
There’s another difference: when it was first theorized by Vail’s technologists, the ‘network effect’ seemed like a by-product, a happy accident. Today we are conscious users and promoters of the network effect. Everyone who uses information technology understands that they are—whether at work, on Facebook, on eBay or in a multiplayer game—a ‘node’ on a network: not a foot-soldier, not a bystander, not a leader, but a multitasking version of all three.
Vail’s customers probably had no idea that, by buying and using telephones, they were enhancing the technology’s value for others and creating spin-off effects for Bell’s other businesses (what are now termed ‘network externalities’). Nowadays, many of us have a very clear understanding of all this. The result is that, in the past ten years, the ‘network effect’ has blasted its way out of corporate economics and into sociology.
The most obvious impact has been on the media and ideology. Long before people started using Twitter to foment social unrest, mainstream journalists noticed—to their dismay—that the size of one’s public persona or pay cheque carried no guarantee of popularity online. People’s status rises and falls with the reliability and truthfulness of what they contribute. This is a classic network effect—but it is not measurable as profit and loss.
If you look at the full suite of information tools that were employed to spread the revolutions of