Why It's Still Kicking Off Everywhere by Paul Mason Read Free Book Online Page B

group of activists at UC Santa Cruz. Entitled Communiqué from an Absent Future, it became required reading among student radicals everywhere. It perfectly captures the impact of ‘capitalist realism’ on the youth of the 2000s: ‘Safety … and comfort have been our watchwords. We slide through the flesh world without being touched or moved. We shepherd our emptiness from place to place.’ But now the postmodernist dreamtime was at an end:
    â€˜Work hard, play hard’ has been the over-eager motto of a generation in training for … what?—drawing hearts in cappuccino foam, or plugging names and numbers into databases. The gleaming techno-future of American capitalism was long ago packed up and sold to China for a few more years of borrowed junk. A university diploma is now worth no more than a share in General Motors. 24
    And General Motors, by this point, had gone bust. As the stimulus packages ran out, and the first waves of post-Lehman austerity began to hit public-sector pay and pension rights in 2010, those in power comforted themselves with one thought: that postmodern society had eradicated solidarity. The young would never go out onto the streets to fight for the rights of the old, established workforce; the feral youth of the inner cities would never combine with the educated elite. There might even be an ‘age war’ between the baby boomers and the iPod generation. There would be strife, but it would never be coherent.
    On 19 October 2010, the Paris bureau of Associated Press issued the following newswire: ‘Masked youths clad in black torched cars, smashed storefronts and threw up roadblocks Tuesday, clashing with riot police across France as protests over raising the retirement age to 62 took a radical turn.’
    The age of capitalist realism was over. Things would now kick off in the most unlikely places, and involve people nobody ever expected to resist.

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    â€˜Trust Is Explosive’: Britain’s Youth Rebel Against Austerity
    London. She walks into Soho’s Bar Italia looking like a postmodern Sally Bowles: black top, black skirt, black tights; bobbed black hair. Black cowl modelled on an outfit worn by Lady Gaga. Outsize black sunglasses. Blue glitter beneath the eyes. She says,
    I was at a dinner party the night before the occupation and they said to me if you don’t come with us you will have to stay in the flat on your own and you won’t like it. You can tweet as much as you want. They kind of tricked me because we were on this march, and I was tweeting, and then suddenly we were in a room and that was the occupation.
    This was on ‘Day X’, 24 November 2010, and the venue was University College London: just the kind of place a privately educated, Lib-Dem-voting twenty-one-year-old might go to get an English degree, in between drinking large amounts of gin and attending Paris Fashion Week:
    The people who sat down at the media table turned out to be a working group: I knew most of them on Twitter but had never met them in person before. I think they recognized me from my Twitter picture because it’s, er, quite distinctive. Then, once we started tweeting, we got loads of messages of support and I started replying with this hashtag: #solidarity. I had no idea of, like, its historical meaning. I just thought: that’s a great word.
    Had she heard of the Polish trade union Solidarity? Shakes her head. Nothing at all: only three weeks later somebody told her. Had she heard of the song ‘Solidarity Forever’? Ditto, but she can sing it now.
    I had no politics. I still don’t subscribe to any. I’d probably say I was quite far left now—although I am not radical. I don’t read newspapers. I bought the Guardian once because there was a picture of me. I read blog posts. The books I read, apart from coursework, are mainly chick-lit.
    Guy Debord? Toni Negri? Any of the books traditionally found strewn on the