Mass Uprisings in Our Times

Ever since the Soviet bloc's collapse, 35 years down the line, we are still forced to deal with this ‘blank in the crowded text’ of contemporary politics -- an empty place where the Left once stood but which revealed itself to be too stultified to show any sign of any movement.

By Aditya Nigam

Throughout the second half of the twentieth century, student uprisings or revolts have played a very important role in transforming the way we think about many things. We can think of the long series from the 1968 students’ revolts in Europe and the USA, which were harbingers of the New Left, to Tiananmen Square in June 1989, which was generative in its own way of China's New Left.

However, the movements of the internet age, starting with the Arab Springs (or even the earlier 'colour revolutions' in the former Soviet bloc) represent another kind of mass movements, largely initiated by students and youth. These have emerged from horizontal communications, often across ideological barriers, enabled by the internet.

They also belong to the moment of the collapse of the utopian Left imagination and are, hence, focused not on larger change but on issues like corruption (which is seen as the hinge between corporate take-over of democracies and the politicians seen to enable this take-over). They aren't movements for any bigger change but want to assert their freedom and the desire to live lives in a freer and more equal, democratic setup.

The question of poverty and inequality comes up repeatedly in these movements in different ways -- though often articulated through the term 'corruption'.

The uprisings in Bangladesh and Nepal have not been very different in this respect. 

Nevertheless, there is a problem with such movements, which, being largely leaderless and post-ideological, routinely shun the question of power. However, they cannot be held responsible for not wanting to 'take power' by such means. This is where the field becomes open for the forces of status quo or 'restoration' to intervene and take power -- or worse, open the possibility of even more Right-wing neo-fascist forces to step in.

Instead of blaming the protests (which often rapidly turn into uprisings), should we not, on the contrary, look for the ‘absent cause’ of the present ‘irresistible’ rise of the neo-fascist right?

Ever since the Soviet bloc's collapse, 35 years down the line, we are still forced to deal with this ‘blank in the crowded text’ of contemporary politics -- an empty place where the Left once stood but which revealed itself to be too stultified to show any sign of any movement.

The ‘empty place’ opened up by the collapse of a certain imagination of the Left, or socialist politics, does not obliterate the need for a new kind of Left politics. But, unfortunately, that is nowhere on the horizon -- except in some faltering but important efforts made in Latin America.

The Asian Left imagination is still stuck in some post-Comintern trauma, unable to think for itself. However, if one looks at the boldness with which the New Latin American Left has taken the indigenous people's interests and cosmovisions as its primary source of strength, the Asian Left seem utterly impoverished. Nepal's Maoists illustrate this as strikingly as all shades of the parliamentary Left in India. This Left is no longer considered to be such and no one wants to take their advice before coming out in such massive protest movements. 

This is still an unresolved question, but one thing seems clear: such revolts across the globe (Africa has been another flashpoint lately), is a revolt against a particular way of doing politics and conducting the business of the bureaucratic all-pervasive State that first came into being in Europe, and was then transplanted by postcolonial elites in their own countries.

Capitalism and corporate control is central to it certainly, but that only aggravates this mode of doing politics, namely, the increasing dispossession of ordinary people, and the subjection of their daily lives to the ‘diktat state’ and political elites.

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Professor Aditya Nigam is a political theorist, formerly with the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS), Delhi. Long associated with the Left movement, he has had an abiding interest in social and political movements and theoretical and philosophical questions related to social transformation. His recent work has been concerned with the decolonization of social and political theory. Nigam is one of the founder-members of the political blog, Kafila.online where he writes on contemporary issues.

He is the author of The Insurrection of Little Selves: The Crisis of Secular Nationalism in India (2006), Power and Contestation: India Since 1989, with Nivedita Menon (2007), After Utopia: Modernity, Socialism and the Postcolony (2010), and Desire Named Development (2011), Decolonizing Theory: Thinking Across Traditions (2020), Aasman aur Bhi Hain (in Hindi, Setu Prakashan, Delhi), Border-Marxisms and Historical Materialism: Untimely Encounters (2023), Protyashar Ishtehar: Degrowth o Poonjibader Porer Jeebon (in Bengali, Gronthik, Dhaka, forthcoming).