Hannah’s Reviews > Why It's Still Kicking Off Everywhere: The New Global Revolutions > Status Update

Things ‘kicked off because what Marx called the ‘poetry of the future’ broke through the prose, and the structures of the present.

In general, women have been able to organize to combat such instances of outright sexism. But the wider problem remains: if a movement has no demands, then how does it articulate what women’s liberation consists of? How does it fit the issues raised by women’s long-term and strategic oppression into the immediate social issues of the day?

Without some massive and cathartic turnaround, the generation in their twenties, across much of the Western world, will never accumulate savings at the level their parents did; they will never accumulate pension rights at a level that could realistically support them in retirement. What they are accumulating is resentment.

Two months before his election, Vladimir Putin had crowed to the West about its problem with the Occupy movement, who were ‘not just a bunch of outcasts but hundreds of thousands’. Now he had that problem too.

If it fails, a whole generation of Greek young people will be left, like Weill’s protagonists in The Silver Lake, with a choice between love and nothing. Or to put it another way, they will be left with a choice between the politics of solidarity and what the director of The Silver Lake observed: a gruesome trend towards inhumanity.

‘We came expecting … riots; instead we found ourselves looking at what happens when the riots die away and the horrified inertia sets in.’

These were the men who tried and failed to use a mixture of economic austerity, authoritarianism and what we might now call ‘technocratic’ rule to avoid an outright fascist takeover. They thought the Nazis were malleable tools in the continued rule of the old elite, and they played to the gallery of Nazi populism on race and nation.

When you see the Utopia flats, draped with banners announcing ‘no homes without people, no people without homes’, you see what happens when official politics abandons people. Very ordinary, indeed anti-political people have begun to turn to Spain’s radical youth for help. They in turn have found a purpose, here and elsewhere, outside mainstream politics, which they despise.

To those who dream that as capitalism develops it will eradicate slums, Cameron Sinclair says dream on: You can’t fight something that has a stronger model than yourself. It’s never going to happen again. The fact of it is that if you tried to do it in some of these informal settlements they could take out the city. They could march on the central business district and it’s game over.

However briefly, and however hampered by its avoidance of the issue of Palestine, Israel experienced the same kind of protest as those in Madrid or Wall Street, led by the same type of people. Three months before #jl4, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu said: ‘The world is shaking, but there are no tremors or protests in Israel.’ Not anymore.